Parker Field (27 page)

Larue met him at the trailhead and led him down the side path, where he says he beat his brains out with a large rock.

“Oh, it was a mess. I had the foresight to leave a shovel nearby earlier, and it took hours to give Mr. Larue an improper burial. I suppose some day a bear or a coyote will dig up his bones, if they haven’t already.”

With Paul “Boney” Bonesteel, it was just a matter of finding the right time. By this point, Rand had moved to New Jersey and opened a shop in the lower end of Manhattan. He had tracked Bonesteel and knew he was, unlike most of his former teammates, pretty good at making a buck with something other than a bat and a glove. He followed Bonesteel from the city to his large suburban home on Long Island several times over a period of three years before he finally found the right circumstances: an empty platform, an oncoming train.

“I’m surprised someone on the train didn’t see me walking away just as Mr. Bonesteel was merging with the Long Island Rail Road.”

The deaths of Jack Velasquez three years later and Jackson “The Ripper” Rittenbacker five years after that were simply a matter of managing to insinuate himself onto first a boat off the coast of Florida and then one on Lake Michigan. It involved a fair amount of traveling but, as Rand points out, folks in his business travel a lot.

“People are so willing to come to the aid of a distressed sailor,” Rand says. “And the Atlantic Ocean and our Great Lakes are very large and convenient places for dumping trash.”

The fact that Velasquez was found floating in several pieces didn’t really surprise anyone. As Rand and many others knew, Jack Velasquez consorted with people who could turn murder into a creative art form. And everyone assumed that Rittenbacker just fell out of his boat and drowned.

“And then came my only failure so far, although I suppose I can only get half credit for your friend.”

He traveled to North Carolina several times and became familiar with the too-predictable patterns of Buck McRae.

“He came out of that bar at the same time every night. I only had to drive up perhaps half an hour beforehand, and there was usually no one else in the lot.

“I thought I had killed him, but a moving target on a dark night was too much for me.”

Rather than try again to kill the old right fielder, Rand moved on. He spent a couple of years in northern California, where he did a thriving business selling colonial antiques that seemed older on the West Coast than they had back east. He was there, though, for Roy Haas.

“This was my finest hour,” he says. “If the list had been complete, I would have retired after that one.”

Among the many wealthy and sometimes eccentric individuals Rand came in contact with as a major-league antiques dealer was a man living in King George County on Virginia’s Northern Neck, near the Potomac. He few from San Francisco to Washington because the man, whom he had met before, said he had something no one else in the world had. He wouldn’t tell Rand what it was. Rand was intrigued.

“He was old-school CIA, and he wanted to sell me some artifacts that had come into his hands. They were fairly worthless, many of them tied to John Wilkes Booth and his cohorts, for whom Mr. Cheatham had an unpleasant and unnatural affection. I was not impressed.”

But then he told Rand that he had something that might be more rare than any of the furniture in his hilltop home with views of two rivers.

“He started telling me about a particularly wicked assassination the CIA had pulled off, involving a sort of dart gun that implanted a frozen poison into the bloodstream. The murder implement literally melts.

“And then, he got a strange gleam in his eye, and he told me he had one, and that he knew how to produce the poison and use it.”

Rand smiles.

“Maybe he saw me as a kindred spirit, or maybe it was because he was old. He was starting to lose his memory, and he had, I think, alienated himself from the rest of his family. Whatever the reason, he traded this blatantly illegal instrument to me, only knowing that there was someone I wanted dead, and he showed me how to create the frozen poison bullet. It hurt me, Mr. Black, to part with $75,000 in cold, hard cash, but this was too good to pass up.”

Rand originally had something more mundane planned for Roy Haas, but a gun that fired a poison dart that melted? He couldn’t turn it down. Four years after he failed to kill Buck McRae, it was good-bye, Roy Haas.

“He was on his knees, trying to install a piece of carpet, when I found my chance. I explained who I was and why I was there to kill him. I’m not sure he understood my mission. He pretended to not even remember Frannie. After I shot him, I duct-taped his mouth to keep him from making too much noise until the poison took effect.”

Rand says he stuck around the Sacramento area for a couple of days and even drove by the apartment where Roy Haas died.

“And then I moved to Richmond.”

He got to know Les Hacker’s habits. Rand was getting careless by this point, I guess, and arrogant. Nut jobs like Rand, the kind who believe they’re smarter than everyone else and will never be caught, get that way. He said that, when he realized Les showed up in Monroe Park most days, he managed to buy a unit overlooking the park. Wasn’t that damn hard, the way prices plummeted after the housing market sank like a stone.

“It was just too delicious. I could dispatch this one right from my living room window.”

He says it like it’s a goddamn game. I would give my 401(k) to get my hands around his well-tanned neck for a few seconds. I have no doubt that Finlay Rand stopped thinking of people as people a long time ago.

He says the little scorecards he sent in the mail every time to each of the present or future deceased or their next of kin were just part of the game.

“I wondered if any of them or their loved ones would figure it out, but no one ever did. People constantly disappoint me.” Rand looks down at his watch.

“I feel a sense of regret that there is one player left, Mr. Black, but time is running out. And maybe my misstep was a sign. Maybe the gods just did not want Buck McRae just yet. I hope, though, that poor Frannie will be satisfied with what I have accomplished.”

He turns to look at me.

“When I say time is running out, I’m not just referring to my Biblical three-score and ten. My doctor tells me I have pancreatic cancer. It’s particularly effective, and my life already is drifting into the land of diminishing returns. Time to take control.”

He pulls out the pistol.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I’ll give you a fair chance.” He fishes a penny out of his pants pocket.

“Heads, I use this first bullet on myself, and you get to write the most amazing story of what I imagine is a mediocre and star-crossed career. Tails, you go first, and whoever finds us here hopefully discovers the tape recorder I’ve been using for the last hour.”

He holds it up and smiles.

“Either way, the world finds out what I did for Frannie. The world finds out that evil is not always allowed to run rampant, with no consequences.”

He places the penny on his thumb and flips it. I see it glint in the dim light. He catches it and turns my way. He shows me the coin. I guess I’m not going to win that Pulitzer.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Black. It looks as if you go first.”

Chapter Twenty    

M
y only hope seems to be that Custalow will come looking for me before Finlay Rand pulls the trigger. If I could get this damn gag off, I think I could scream loud enough to penetrate even the brick walls of the Prestwould. Fat chance of that, though.

Rand, like he could read my mind, says, “Well, it’s only a matter of time until that big oaf you live with comes looking for you.”

Then he seems to have an inspiration.

“I know,” he says, “we’ll do it at that baseball stadium. What a nice way to tie everything up all nice and tidy, don’t you think? Plus, I hate to mess up the apartment. The cleaning lady would be so upset.”

He actually giggles. He sounds like this is some kind of damn caper, something we’ll laugh about later. But, since Finlay Rand is holding a loaded gun and death delayed could be death denied, I nod my head.

“That’s the boy,” he says.

He blindfolds me and ties something around my ankles so I can’t run, then jerks me out of the chair and leads me down the hall. With me shackled, it takes awhile. I can tell that we’ve gone past the front door. When he turns left into what my nose tells me is the kitchen, I know where we’re going: the service elevator.

It can take us all the way down to the basement, without anyone hearing or seeing us. I hear it creak and wheeze its way toward us. Rand pushes me inside. I stumble and fall.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Black,” I hear him say as he helps me up, “but we must hurry.”

No need to apologize, I want to say. You’re only going to kill me. Being a psychopath is never having to say you’re sorry.

I think I can hear the other main elevator as we descend, no doubt Custalow coming, too late, to my rescue. Oh, well. It’s the effort that counts.

On a weekday, someone might have been down here. Custalow perhaps, checking on the boiler. But it’s Sunday, and Rand leads me, unchallenged and one halting foot at a time, up the steep steps. I can see daylight through the blindfold. Then, we’re on level ground, the alley behind the Prestwould.

“The car’s only a few feet away, Mr. Black,” he says, poking me in the ribs with the instrument of my demise as we stumble along. I remember that Rand’s Lexus is, damn the luck, just across the alley from the building.

Maybe, I think, Abe will break into Rand’s unit and, eventually, look out the window and see what’s becoming of me. But you can’t see the alley from Rand’s unit, and “eventually” probably would be too late anyhow.

Then, I’m in the car, pushed down in the back seat.

It takes all of five minutes, way too fast, before I feel us turning into what must be The Diamond’s parking lot.

“Ah,” I hear my captor say, “that’ll do.” He parks, yanks me out of the car and leads me, stumbling, through what seems like a small opening. I have to turn sideways to get through. We take a few more steps and then stop.

“
Et voilà
!” I hear Rand say as he rips off the blindfold.

We are in foul territory down the right field line, not far from the bullpen. It isn’t, all things considered, a bad place to die.

“So it all ends where it began,” Rand says. “Right where those animals played their stupid games. Frannie probably walked right where we’re walking.”

I see him pull the pistol out of the pocket of the $800 jacket he’s chosen to spatter with our blood.

Then I see my salvation, walking on tiptoes, carrying what appears to be a thirty-three-ounce Louisville Slugger.

Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon’s world is pretty much confined to The Diamond, as it once was to Parker Field. He doesn’t really have much of a life away from the ballpark. He never married, and doesn’t seem to have a lot of hobbies.

At his age, he should be working shorter hours. I know the Flying Squirrels wouldn’t mind if he cut back a little. They probably sit around and wonder how they can get rid of the old goat without pissing off the whole city. Jimmy’s become kind of a mascot. You might offend fewer people by pulling down Robert E. Lee’s statue than by deep-sixing the baseball team’s oldest and most faithful minion.

I owe much to Jumpin’ Jimmy’s devotion to baseball.

“Willie,” he says, “is this the one?”

I nod like a bobblehead doll as Rand turns and fires one shot just as Jumpin’ Jimmy catches him on the chin with a home-run swing.

Jimmy saw us from the time the car rolled up, it turns out. No math major, Jimmy still was able to put two and two together, and I’m glad I told him as much as I had earlier about Finlay Rand’s vendetta against the 1964 Richmond Vees.

He likes to carry a bat with him as he makes the rounds, like a baseball nut’s walking cane. He said he just likes the feel of it in his hand. This day, he has chosen a Chris Davis model, which he proceeds to use with great enthusiasm on Finlay Rand. His first swing leveled Rand, whose pistol went flying.

“Is this the asshole that shot Les?” he asks me. I nod. Maybe I shouldn’t have, because that’s Jimmy’s signal to begin batting practice.