Parker Field (16 page)

We step outside for a couple of minutes to let some of the others carry on one-sided conversations with Les. Jumpin’ Jimmy seems capable of holding up his end of the conversation for hours.

“I don’t know if he’s going to make it,” Peggy says. “You know, I even prayed, for whatever good that’ll do.”

It can’t hurt, I tell her.

“I told whoever’s up there that I promise I’ll take care of Les, no matter what shape he’s in. I just want him back.”

I give her a hug. She’s snuffling against my shirt. I assure her that Les is going to get better. The hope of the hopeless is better than no hope at all.

I manage to have a few words with Jimmy. As quickly and simply as I can, I tell him about what I found out in Florida and Alabama. When I tell him about the scorecards, he’s about as speechless as Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon ever gets.

When I start to go back inside, Jimmy grabs my sleeve.

“So, you think maybe that asshole, excuse my French, they got locked up has been killing ballplayers?”

I tell Jimmy that I doubt it, that whoever did it, if one person did, has been doing a lot of traveling, and he’s been at it for, by my count, twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years ago, Raymond Gatewood would have been about six years old.

I warn Jimmy that this all could just be a string of coincidences, but when he asks me if it was a coincidence that everybody was getting those scorecards, I didn’t have an answer for him.

“But why?” Jimmy says. And I don’t have an answer for that one, either.

We stay a couple of hours. I drop Cindy off at her house, thanking her again for all she’s done for me, including saving me from my second DUI in less than two years.

“You got lucky when you found me,” she says. “Maybe I got lucky, too. Don’t screw it up, Willie.”

B
ACK
AT
the Prestwould, I have a message to call Finlay Rand. That can wait, though.

There are two more calls on my list. I’ve already tried Rabbit Larue’s daughter once, and no one answered. And I want to talk to Paul Bonesteel’s brother, the closest relative I could find.

Still no answer at the daughter’s house, but Anthony Bonesteel himself, residing in Babylon, Long Island, answers on the third ring.

It takes me awhile to get across to him what I’m trying to do. From the information I got online, Paul Bonesteel’s older brother is eighty-four or eighty-five years old, and his hearing’s not so great.

Being a lifelong Yankees’ fan, he finds the story of how the Richmond farm team had to be called the Vees amusing.

“You guys,” he says, and I can hear a kind of creaky, old man’s laugh. “You never got over losing the war, did you?”

I concede that this might be the case, at least with some of my fellow citizens.

Once I get him started, though, he’s willing, even eager, to talk about his brother.

“Paulie, he was like a god. He always made straight As in school, was always the best at whatever sport he played. I told him he should oughta stick to football, but he said he’d last longer in baseball. Hah!”

Paul Bonesteel, “Boney” to his teammates but not to any of his family back home, was just about done in 1964, his fourth year in Triple A with nothing but a cup of September call-up coffee with the big team to show for it.

“But he was smart. He got his degree while he was playin’ ball, and then he went to work on Wall Street, and he made a killing.”

Paul Bonesteel’s wife, I learn, moved back to her hometown, Atlanta. Their kids, already grown when Paul died, live in the Atlanta area, too. He gives me her address and phone number.

“Tell her to call me once in a while.”

I ask Anthony about the way his brother died.

He’s quiet for a few seconds. I hear him clearing his throat. “He didn’t fall on no damn train tracks,” he says. “He had the best balance of anybody I ever seen. And they said he was maybe drunk. Paulie never got drunk. He could drink like a champ, and he might should of slowed down. He’d put on some weight. But nobody never, ever saw Paulie Bonesteel drunk.”

I wait for it.

“He was pushed. That’s all there was to it. The cops didn’t want to hear that. Too damn much trouble, I guess. But he didn’t fall, and I can tell you, sure as shit, he didn’t jump. Paulie and Barbara were together almost thirty years, raised two kids. They were like lovebirds.”

I ask him who would do such a thing.

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. Some maniac. Some kid fucked up on drugs. I hope he’s rotting in hell, whoever he is.”

Anthony Bonesteel talks awhile more about his brother, filling me in on his childhood and the knee injury that kept him from being a big leaguer.

“The year they brought him up in September, it was 1962. They’d already clinched the pennant and was going to play the Giants in the World Series. We all went to the stadium, must have been twenty of us, aunts and uncles, Mom and Pop were still alive then, cousins. And Paulie got to pinch hit in the seventh inning, and he got a single, a frozen rope to right field. But he was already too old, and he was damaged goods, with that knee.”

I ask Anthony if he’d ever heard his sister-in-law, or Paul himself, say anything about getting some kind of postcard with numbers on it. He says he’s never heard of such a thing, and asks me why the hell I asked such a stupid-ass question. I don’t see much point in telling him about the scorekeeper, at least not right now.

I
TRY
the number in Dawson, Georgia, again. This time, a somewhat frazzled-sounding woman answers.

“Crystal Scoggins?”

“Yeah. Who is this?”

I try to explain. Although Rabbit Larue’s daughter seems to have no hearing issues, I have trouble getting my idea across to her.

“Is this going to cost me anything?” she asks, “ ’cause if it is, you can hang the hell up right now. Jackson Lee! Get off that coffee table!”

I assure her that I’m not trying to get money from her, and also assure her that she won’t be getting any from me. She seems to accept this break-even proposition.

She explains that she’s looking after her grandchildren and has to stop occasionally to yell at them and threaten them with various forms of corporal punishment.

Finally, I get her talking about Rabbit.

“Daddy was something,” she says. “Momma said he didn’t ever want to do nothin’ but play baseball. He tried his hand at this and that after he quit playing, but his heart just wasn’t in it. I was just a baby when he quit, and after that I just remember him sitting around the house a lot, and just disappearing for days at a time, whenever the mood struck him.”

He was forty-eight when he took his last trip. Crystal, who was then married to her first husband, was living in a trailer on the edge of Larue’s property. She said neither she nor her mother thought that much about it until Rabbit had been gone for three days.

“He was always back in three days or less,” she says. “When it got up to five, we called the sheriff.”

Rabbit Larue just disappeared. No note, no trace, nothing.

“There was all kinds of rumors,” Crystal says. “Some of the meaner folks said he’d had a girlfriend off somewhere and had left to be with her. Like Momma didn’t feel bad enough as it was. But we never believed that. For sure, he wasn’t no angel, but he never hit us unless we deserved it, and he did the best he could.

“And he wouldn’t of been the first fella to disappear on the AT, won’t be the last.”

It takes me about forty-five minutes to get to what has become the big question.

“You mean, like a regular postcard?” Crystal says. “With little numbers on the back?”

I tell her that’s what I’m talking about.

“Yeah.… Yeah. That’s funny. Momma did get one like that. She might not of remembered it, except she got one just like it, maybe three years later, and then two or three times more over the years, before she died, back in 2007.”

I ask her if any of the numbers were marked through.

“Yeah,” she says. “She’d show ’em to me, and it seems like, thinking back, that there was more numbers crossed through every time.”

Any of those postcards, Crystal assures me, would have been thrown away long ago.

“We just went up in the attic and pitched everything. It was just junk, anyhow, and we ain’t got anywhere to store any of it in the apartment.”

Crystal Scoggins is again distracted by her grandchildren, who seem to be doing something untoward with the cat. I thank her and hang up.

C
USTALOW’S
IN
the living room when I come in from my afternoon telethon.

I tell him what I know.

“And you think all those guys dying and disappearing is connected to Les being shot?”

“What would you think?”

“Well,” he says, “it does seem like somebody had it in for the Vees. But it doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

No, it doesn’t.

I have a couple of High Lifes with Custalow and then make my final call of the day, this one in person.

I have to buzz twice before Finlay Rand answers his door. He thanks me for coming. His manners are as immaculate as his dress pants, starched shirt and silk sports jacket. I imagine Rand wakes up crisp.

He offers me some white wine, troubling himself to tell me exactly what part of the Loire Valley it comes from. He’s using crystal. From sad experience during my conjugal days with Kate, I’ve learned that people don’t like it when you break their crystal, so I move with great caution. I have to admit, though, the wine does not suck.

After a brief but tedious amount of chitchat, Rand gets to the point.

“I think somebody is after me,” he says, taking a small sip and setting his glass down.

“After you?”

“You know, I told you—asked you—not to put my name in the paper. And now, I’ve started getting these calls.”

I wait.

“Whoever it is says he’s a friend of that man, the one who broke into my apartment. He said that if I don’t drop the charges against the man, he’ll make sure something bad happens to me.”

That’s ridiculous, of course. Whatever grievances Finlay Rand might have against Raymond Gatewood pale in comparison to attempted murder, which will move on up to murder if Les doesn’t pull through. And any friend of Gatewood’s would know whose apartment he broke into, with or without verification in the newspaper. A visit to or phone call from Gatewood would do the trick.

I explain this to Rand, who is far from mollified.

I ask him if he’s called the cops about this.

“No,” he says after a brief hesitation. “The man on the phone said I’d better not do that, either.”

I tell Rand that I know Gatewood’s defense attorney, and that I can ask her to have a chat with the accused, perhaps emphasizing that any future threats that can be traced back to him will only make his sorry plight worse. I can also check and see who has visited him at the city lockup.

“Well,” he says, “if you think that would help.”

Despite the fact that you could keep meat in here, Rand is sweating a little. I see the little half-moons on the armpits of that fresh shirt and wonder how many of those he goes through a day.

He clears his throat.

“Do they think, uh, do they think they’ll be able to wrap everything up soon?” he asks.

I tell him I’m not sure. I mention some of the more troublesome aspects of the case against Mr. Gatewood, such as his seeming lack of either the want-to or the wits to do what was done to Les. I don’t mention the fate of the 1964 Richmond Vees starting lineup.

Maybe, I say, he was telling the truth when he claimed somebody left that jacket on a park bench.

“Perhaps so,” Rand says. “But he certainly seems to have some malevolent friends.”

Rand shows me a couple of paintings he’s just bought from an estate sale.

“They were an absolute steal,” he says, and I’ll have to take his word for it. He says they’re abstract. They must be, because I wouldn’t know whether they were upside down or sideways. Kate always said my idea of high art was Dogs Playing Poker, but I can appreciate a velvet Elvis.

I promise to have a quiet chat with the defense attorney. Rand surprises me when he says he imagines the fact that she’s my ex-wife might carry some weight.

“It’s a small town, Mr. Black,” he says to my unasked question. I think I see the hint of a smirk, but maybe it’s just a nervous tic. Well, if Finlay Rand is smart enough to afford the Prestwould and silk jackets, he can’t be as dumb as he seems.

Chapter Twelve