Authors: Howard Owen
But he fills me in as best he can. Cindy, who has a knack for going from stranger to old friend in about two seconds flat, is in the kitchen, cleaning. Whitestone doesn’t seem to mind.
He’s kind of a classic example of the curse of the athlete’s son. (OK, let’s be PC and say athlete’s child, but, I’m telling you, it really falls on the sons. Just the way it is.) He’s built like his dad, or probably was before he started putting on a couple of pounds a year. He was, I found out on Google, a pretty good college baseball player at Florida State. He even had a year in Rookie League before giving up professional baseball for the exciting world of pharmaceutical sales.
But there was some little thing missing. Maybe he didn’t quite have the reflexes his dad did. Or he was just a quarter step slower or didn’t have a naturally perfect swing. Or maybe he had it a little bit easier growing up than Lucky Whitestone did. Maybe he didn’t spend quite as much time outdoors in the summer, because who needs that crap when you have air conditioning?
At any rate, it really ought to be against the law for professional athletes to name their kids “Junior.” I’m thinking Randall Whitestone Jr. has had to answer a whole shitload of questions in his life along the lines of, “How come you aren’t a big-leaguer, like your daddy?”
“I was eighteen,” he says. “It changed everything. I mean, he wasn’t anybody’s nominee for father of the year, but he was here. He didn’t beat us. Well, maybe once or twice, but we deserved it. He taught me what he knew, even if I wasn’t ever going to be as good as him.”
Lucky Whitestone had gone out hunting that October day.
“The guys he hunted with, they were real careful. I don’t think any of them ever would have mistook a man for a deer. They said they didn’t, and I believe ’em. But the cops, they never found anything else. Might’ve been some asshole a quarter-mile away, maybe didn’t even know what he’d done ’til he read it in the paper the next day. And those woods were full of shotgun shells.”
Nobody ever came forward.
“It just kind of leaves a hole.”
He says his father’s old hunting buddies are still around, most of them.
“Some of ’em would come by, take me to football games and such, for a while, but it just, you know, got kind of awkward.”
I ask him if he has kids. He says he has a girl, sixteen, and a boy, fourteen, both living with their mother most of the time.
“Is the boy going to be a baseball player?”
“Yeah,” Whitestone says. “He’s pretty good. Maybe it skips a generation.”
I note that the fact that he played any pro baseball at all put him ahead of all the rest of us who topped out at Little League.
He grimaces.
“Well,” he says, “it isn’t quite up to what was expected around here.”
Randall brings in a scrapbook, showing me the highlights of his father’s baseball life, along with a few photos that were taken after he retired.
He shows me a ball autographed by all the Indians in 1975, Lucky’s last year. There’s a picture of young Randall posing with Frank Robinson, their player-manager that year.
“There’s not really a whole lot I can tell you,” he says. “He liked to hunt and fish and drink. He wasn’t much for telling war stories.”
I ask him if Lucky ever mentioned any of his old teammates on the Richmond Vees.
“To tell you the truth,” he says, “I didn’t even know he played in Richmond. I only knew him as a big leaguer, and by the time I was in preschool, his days were just about over.”
We talk for a while longer, and then I collect Cindy, who’s just about salvaged the place.
“She can stay,” Randall Whitestone says. “I like her.”
“Me, too,” I tell him.
My other tasks for the day are taking Ms. Cindy Peroni out for a meal we don’t have to eat in the rental car and making a call to Folsom, California, to one Brenda Haas.
I let Cindy pick a restaurant. She says her brother, the bon vivant airline pilot who’s always flying to exotic places like Tallahassee, recommends a place called A La Provence. He probably recommended it because he didn’t have to pick up the tab.
OK. It was a good meal. I had the grouper; she had the duck breast. I made her grimace when I ordered the onion “soupe” and asked the waitress if it was French. And we did have the best crème brûlée I’ve had in my admittedly short experience with desserts that have little umbrellas over their names. And the wine, while it cost multiple times what I can get the same bottle for at Kroger’s, was more than passable.
We get back to the Marriott Courtyard by nine, making it six Pacific time, when I’ve told Brenda Haas, via e-mail, that I’d call her. Roy Haas’s widow, who probably is in her early seventies by now, answers on the third ring.
I explain what I’m doing, and she seems a little more on board with it than Randall Whitestone Jr. did.
She and Roy met during his brief stint in college and were “together” on and off for four years. They didn’t get married until after he hurt his knee in spring training in 1965 and saw his big-league career die before it was even born.
“He seemed like he knew he had to grow up then,” Brenda Haas says. “He really started applying himself.”
Roy Haas went to work for a builder and eventually started borrowing money to buy up rentals all around Sacramento. By the time he died, his widow says, he had fourteen different properties.
“He was good at fixing things. He probably saved a million dollars over the years doing his own plumbing work and even some of the electrical stuff. He was still working like a dog, right up to the end, and he’d just turned seventy.
“But, you know,” she says, “I think he was always a ballplayer, in his heart. We’d go to a game now and then, and he’d get this look like some kid standing outside a candy store, with his nose up against the window. After a while, we just didn’t go anymore.”
He’d had a minor heart attack a few years earlier, but he seemed to be in good health, she says, before his sudden demise.
“But you never know. I guess this was the big one.”
The “big one” hit Roy Haas while he was inside one of his rental units, replacing carpet in the bathroom after the last tenant had apparently let the stopped-up toilet overflow instead of calling Haas to get it fixed.
“They found him there, on the floor. He’d been there they figured for a couple of hours at least. Wasn’t any reason to use a defibrillator.”
She says there was nothing suspicious about Roy Haas’s death, no need for any autopsy.
“Roy didn’t have an enemy in the world, other than maybe a few tenants he’d evicted when they wouldn’t pay the rent, and most of them didn’t have enough gumption to kill anybody.”
The Haases didn’t have children. Brenda Haas says, though, that Roy has left her “pretty well fixed.” It has been four years now, and she’s thinking about moving in with her sister down in Orange County, if she can sell all those rental properties.
“I just don’t have the backbone Roy did,” she says. “I hate throwing people out in the street, and sometimes you have to.”
She seems happy to reminisce about his days in baseball. Unlike Lucky Whitestone’s son, she does remember Richmond and 1964.
“I stayed with him for a week that summer,” she says. “That humidity just about killed me. How do you people live with that stuff?”
I ask her if she remembers any of the other players or if Roy stayed in touch with any of them.
“Oh, no,” she says. “I don’t believe Roy ever kept in touch with anybody, after he left baseball.”
“I know it was a long time ago,” I say, taking a stab in the dark, “but do you remember a girl named Frannie Fling, from that summer in Richmond?”
She’s quiet for a few seconds.
“Oh, my gosh,” she says finally. “Yes. I haven’t heard that name since, I guess, 1965. Roy said the players used to joke about her, that she was some kind of groupie. I think I met her one time, so it would have been 1964. She killed herself the next spring, I think. Roy was in Toledo then, trying to rehab his knee, not that it did any good, and he wrote and told me about what happened to her. Frannie Fling. Boy, that’s going back a long way.”
It’s probably not the best time to ask if Roy Haas had his turn at bat with Frannie. Besides, I pretty much know the answer to that one.
I’m just about ready to get off the phone. Cindy has slipped into something more comfortable, which is nothing at all. Duty calls.
But Brenda Haas still wants to talk, and I’ve found that some of my best information over the years has come at the end of interviews, when we’re “just talking.” Guards get let down. You remember things you didn’t remember before, probably because you’re not trying so hard to remember.
“You know,” she says, “I didn’t get any sympathy cards from anybody that knew Roy when he was playing. But I did get the damnedest thing in the mail. I wouldn’t have thought much about it, except for the ones I got before.”
I motion for Cindy to stop doing what she’s doing, so I can concentrate.
“The ones you got before?”
“Let me back up. Three days after Roy died, I got this postcard. There wasn’t anything on it except a bunch of numbers, most of them crossed out. And I remembered Roy getting other ones just like it, now and then, over the years, but maybe with not so many numbers x’ed out. Neither one of us knew what to make of them.”
“Do you remember the numbers?”
“Not after all this time. But let me look. I saved all the cards people sent, and I probably put that in with them. Can you call me back?”
I ask her if a couple of hours later will be OK, and she says that’ll be fine.
“OK,” I tell Cindy. “As you were.”
Later, I call Peggy on her cell phone to find out how Les is doing. She doesn’t sound too good. I ask her if she’s been home today. She says she hasn’t, but that Awesome Dude has brought her something to eat. Andi’s been by, too, as has Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon and a couple of people from the Hill.
“They’re trying to get him up to do some physical therapy,” she says, “but he doesn’t really want to.”
She holds the phone to Les’s ear so I can tell him to get some physical therapy, dammit, that I’m counting on him. It’s a hell of thing to say, but I have counted on Les. Everybody needs a father figure, even if some of us wait half a lifetime to find one worth keeping.
Peggy says he nodded his head. I tell her to get some sleep. They have a cot there in the room for her, something they just brought in today. What I imagine my poor mother needs right now is some of that medical marijuana that’s becoming legal everywhere except Virginia.
“I told them I needed to be with him,” she says. “I don’t trust them to look after him.”
I argue in vain that they’ve got him pretty much triple-teamed night and day, but I know what she means. I don’t want to think about the unthinkable, but it’s hard not to. A nurse told me one time that, in her experience, people who are slipping away want to do it without anybody watching. It’s the friends and family who want to be there at the end, as if that will make things less painful for us than they naturally should be.
Cindy is beside me. After I hang up, we just lie there, cuddling, for an hour or so, until it’s time to call Brenda Haas again.
“I found it,” she says.
The postcard was, as she thought, among the sympathy cards she got four years ago and put away.
“Don’t know why I saved them,” she says. “I guess I thought I might take them out and look at them. I hadn’t opened that box again until today.”
I ask her exactly what the postcard says.
“It doesn’t say anything. It’s just these numbers. One through nine, like a list down the page. Most of the numbers are crossed out. Just the two and the nine, they’re the only ones not crossed out.”
I ask her about the postmark.
“It’s El Dorado Hills. Local. No return address.”
“And you say you got others, over the years?”
“Roy did. He showed me a couple of them, but neither one of us could figure out what to make of them. Sometimes, it’d be several years, and then he’d come in with the mail one day and say, like, 'Well, we got another postcard from the numbers man.’ ”
I ask her if the others had most of the numbers crossed out, too.
“I’m not sure. It was a long time ago.”
After my second conversation with Brenda Haas, Cindy lays claim to my attention again. One of these days, I tell her, we’re going to have to spend a night together that doesn’t have an alarm clock at the other end.
S
OMETHING WAKES
me up. The clock radio tells me, in numbers several inches high, that it’s 3:17. This normally would be good news. I can get up, take a piss and be back in bed and be asleep again in five minutes. The worst news the digital numbers can give you is that the alarm’s going to go off in ten minutes, because that’s ten minutes you’re never going to get back from the sandman. But 3:17? That’s usually gold.
Tonight, though, something’s bothering me. I didn’t know it was bothering me until I woke up. Maybe it was a dream, or my subconscious, but that postcard somebody sent to Roy Haas has obviously been hiding in the bushes, waiting to jump my ass. Now it has my full attention.
Cindy’s sleeping like a rock, snoring lightly, with her back turned to me. How, I wonder, did I ever in my brainless youth think that forty-five-year-old women were too old to be attractive? I slip out of bed, manage to find my pants, shirt and cigarettes in the dark and slip out the door.
The lobby is empty when I walk through. The clerk, who looks like a college student, is snoozing at the front desk. Outside, it’s so humid that the car windshields are soaked. I follow the concrete walkway, lighting a Camel as I go. I’ve been trying to not smoke around Cindy, because being a smoker these days is right up there with eating raw garlic or not bathing on the how-not-to-get-laid scale. But I always think better when I smoke, and the electric jolt that woke me up requires some Class-A thinking.
By the time I’ve sucked in two cigarettes’ worth of carcinogens and done a couple of laps around the parking lot, I feel pretty sure I’m on to something. Maybe I can even get back to sleep, as long as I don’t wake up the lovely and seemingly tireless Cindy Peroni.