Left Field Read online

  “She probably just has her makeup and stuff in there.”

  “Yeah.”

  The key fit. I rolled open the center, shallow drawer, feeling it to be abnormally heavy. Smack in the center, instead of a box of staples or a clump of ballpoint pens, or even a collection of the latest lip colors from the shops at Somerset, lay a square of corkboard, upon which rested a large, black semiautomatic handgun.

  “Fuck,” I breathed.

  Lou exhaled heavily. “Can you tell if it’s loaded?”

  I’d learned a few things about guns by then, though I still didn’t own one. I drew a pair of disposable vinyl gloves from my pocket and put them on, then picked up the gun carefully, pointing the muzzle away from us. Lou sprang back.

  “If you keep your finger off the trigger, it can’t go off,” I reassured her. “Here’s the safety. It’s on. This is a Smith & Wesson, their M&P series. This looks like a cop gun. Forty caliber.”

  “How do you know?”

  I pointed to the engraved markings. “It says it right here: 40. There’s a magazine in it, and it feels like it’s loaded. I’m gonna see.” I pushed the release and the magazine dropped into my hand, heavy with cartridges. Hollow-nosed, copper-jacketed stingers, they gleamed with their lethal, perfectly machined beauty.

  “Holy everloving cats,” said Lou. “Are those bullets?”

  I shucked open the slide. “One in the chamber. This puppy’s ready for action.” I closed the slide and pushed the magazine home.

  “Why the heck would she have it?”

  “Good question.” I replaced the gun on its pad and closed and locked the drawer. I put the key back in Clark Johnson’s drawer then returned to where Lou was collecting printouts. “Maybe somebody’s been threatening her,” I said. “That’d be one reason to have a gun. I wonder if she carries too.”

  We heard the outer-office doorknob rattle. We froze. It rattled again, insistently. Then someone knocked. I looked at my watch; it was a quarter after four. “Let’s just wait,” I whispered.

  “I don’t like how this feels,” grumbled Lou, her voice raspier than ever.

  “Yeah, well, me neither, but—”

  Whoever it was knocked again, louder, urgently. The knocking turned into pounding.

  “That’s gonna attract attention if they keep it up,” I said.

  “OK, I’ll handle it,” Lou said.

  We both went up front. I grabbed my helmet and put it on, flipped the face shield down, picked up my spraying unit, and busied myself spraying a light mist of water around the baseboards, my back to the door. Lou opened it.

  I heard her say, “Nobody’s here. We’re spraying for bugs.”

  A male voice said something like, “Do you know where Shirlene Cord is?” I didn’t hear it clearly.

  “No idea, pal. What’s your business here?”

  He must have said, “None of yours,” because after a second, Lou shut the door and locked it.

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No. Nice-looking older gentleman, glasses.”

  “Black guy?”

  “White guy. He had a bag, like a mini EMT bag.”

  “Really? Was he wearing a uniform?”

  “No, and no city ID either. But I think he usually wears some kind of clip-on ID badge.”

  “How come?”

  “There was a chewed-up spot on his shirt over his left breast pocket.”

  “Wow, Lou, I’m impressed. Dress shirt?”

  “Yeah, like a business shirt. Blue. He was upset.”

  “Yeah?”

  “His face was red, and he looked agitated. Like he had some really pressing business, and now he can’t do it. Maybe he was hopped up, come to think of it.”

  We got back to work, and my heart rate went down from hammering madly to just pounding anxiously. Lou hit some print commands, and I harvested the pages as they spewed out. I found where they kept their printer paper, pulled out the feed tray on Shirlene’s printer, and replaced the same amount we’d used. Lou said, “Good thinking.”

  I took a minute to tally up the DeMedHo employees: there were 133, all full-time, and their two-week salaries ranged roughly between $3,000 and $5,000. I’d have to do a little more math at home. Something seemed weird about the employees’ home addresses, but I didn’t trouble myself to focus on that right now.

  “OK, now how do we look into the relationship between DeMedHo and the Happy Van?”

  “I’ll leave that to you, Madame Detective.”

  Lou had heard Domenica and Flora call me that, so now she was inflicting it on me. I took her place in Shirlene’s chair and scrolled through the files. Seeing nothing obvious, I ran a master search on the C drive, entering, variously, “Briggs,” “Metro Mobile Medical,” and even “Happy Van.” I found a document listing Metro Mobile Medical, the parent company of the Happy Van, as a provider in the DeMedHo system. Assorted doctors and urgent-care clinics were listed too, and I printed out that information. Found nothing more.

  “Let’s go,” I said, folding the printouts and stashing them down the front of my jumpsuit. “What about the roach you smuggled in and released over there?”

  Lou laughed. “Not our problem.”

  A few minutes later, we emerged from the building and headed for the Crown Vic through the bustle of the Friday-afternoon crowd. I’d found a spot on Congress, around the side of the building. As I loaded my helmet and the sprayer into the trunk, Lou said, “There’s that guy again.” She nodded across the street.

  I looked, but right then a FedEx truck rumbled by and stopped for the light at Shelby. When it moved again, no one was there.

  21

  That evening when I unlocked the door to my flat I sensed something amiss immediately. You know how you get a feeling? I’ve always believed such feelings are based on evidence your senses pick up peripherally, and then it just takes your conscious brain time to catch up.

  The information my peripheral senses were picking up went like this:

  1) Temperature wrong, or maybe the air currents are different.

  2) Dead silence.

  3) A different smell in the apartment? Or the absence of a smell?

  Yes, well, that was it: an absence. Raquel’s crate door stood open. A light trail of cedar shavings led in the direction of the nearest living-room window, the one Mr. McVittie had been working on yesterday. It was open wider than I’d left it this morning.

  I had left Raquel securely in her crate, but it was now unoccupied. I called for her and mounted a search.

  First I scanned the landscape outside the window—no raccoon—then I inspected the crate. Somehow my little pain-in-the-ass pet had figured out how to roll the stone away from the entrance to her tomb. Having gained the requisite strength and dexterity, she must have forced two wires slightly apart and gotten one paw through to the simple latch. A tuft of dark fur clung between the wires and the plastic door, so the effort had cost her something. But I’m sure it was worth it. Hell, who wouldn’t want out, especially smelling that rich summer air?

  I can’t say Raquel and I had bonded all that well, but I instantly became frantic with worry and already guilty about having been responsible somehow. Once I was sure she wasn’t in the apartment, I returned to the window. Although Mr. McVittie’s varnish had been dry that morning, now it was tacky to my finger, and there were little paw prints in it.

  “A second coat,” I said to the silence.

  I went out to the balcony and looked around. She could have reached a branch of the chestnut tree from the railing, if she’d sort of jumped. I glanced at the ground and saw no little raccoon corpse. I looked at the tree. A branch rustled deep within.

  “Raquel!” I called. “Come here, my little captive, you don’t know how to hunt yet. Raquel?”

  No response. I kept it up for a while, but deep down I knew it was useless.

  A quick interview with Mr. McVittie confirmed the scenario of the second coat of varnish. He’d climbed his ladd
er and done just as he had before: opened the window from the outside and done the work, leaving the afternoon sun to do the drying.

  I cut an apple slice and put it on a table just inside the window, but a squirrel came nosing around right away. I tossed the slice to it and lowered the window to a half inch open so the varnish could finish drying. Raquel’s paw prints would be preserved there for eternity.

  “Be well, little one,” I said, as the phone rang.

  It was Jackie. She said, “What’s going on?”

  “Uh…”

  “I know something’s up with you.”

  “Raquel ran away.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Are you upset?”

  “Not really. I mean, a little. I hope she doesn’t get chomped by a dog or something. But this conversation is not why you called, right?”

  “You’re avoiding me.”

  I appreciated her directness, so I returned the courtesy. “Carmen told me she was your first lover.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said. Seems you might have wanted to mention that to me, given everything that’s been going on.”

  “Oh, my God. I…I have to get back to you.”

  “Sure. You guys want to get your stories straight?”

  “No! No, no, no. I don’t even…I mean, I have an idea of why—but—I have to…”

  She sounded like me. “Well, call me whenever,” I said, and hung up.

  Half an hour later I saw her cute little Cooper pull up in front of my flat. She leaped up the porch steps and slammed on the bell.

  I let her in but didn’t ask her to sit. She took my arm. “Lillian, Lillian. Carmen and I were best friends in the fourth grade. One day on the playground, we kissed then poked our fingers with a pin and made a blood-sister oath.”

  “And then?”

  “That was it! We were little girls!”

  “You guys never—”

  “No! I forgot all about it. When I met up with Carmen here on the team, she reminded me of it, and we laughed. I can’t believe she brought that up to you.”

  “I guess she’s desperate.”

  To her credit, Jackie went home then, leaving me room to digest the conversation. I appreciated that.

  Mercedes phoned just as I was spreading on my kitchen table the printouts Lou and I had stolen from Shirlene Cord’s computer. She wanted to talk about the Grinders.

  “You know we might go to the championships. August isn’t far off.”

  “Is that right? I know we’ve been winning, but I haven’t really been keeping track of—”

  “It could happen,” she said firmly. “I hate to put it like this, but do you know anybody else I could get for the team?”

  “As in, somebody better than me? I wish I did! I’ve been begging you to replace me. I’d be glad to quit, which would force you to—”

  “No, don’t quit!” There was a squeak of panic in her voice. “Forget I said anything. I’m sorry. You really do help us…sometimes. Just the other night, after that collision with Maggie, you actually got on base and scored. It’s not like I didn’t notice that.”

  I was actually pretty proud of myself in that game. The Grinders were playing the Lady Rams (sponsored by one of the Dodge dealerships), and I was covering left field as usual. I’d gotten a little better at fielding, rushing every grounder from my position in left field, and at least kept my head in the game enough to know where to throw the ball once I got my hands on it. I learned that our third basewoman, Maggie, was a bit butterfingery, and if I raced in as hard as I could when the ball was hit to her, I could save a play here and there.

  The Lady Rams’ shortstop, a competent athlete who had played in college, came to bat and smacked the highest pop-up I’d ever seen in softball. It rose toward third and looked like it was going to come down in shallow left. Maggie pedaled backward, yelling, “I got it! I got it!”

  I ran in to back her up, but then she yelled, “I don’t got it! I lost it!” so I charged harder, my glove outstretched. I saw the ball coming down. Just as I set myself to catch it, Maggie, who had inexplicably kept backing up, collided with me. Her head struck my upstretched chin, snapping my head back and knocking me to the ground. The ball landed on my stomach and bounced off. Jackie picked it up and tossed it to Risenda at second, then knelt in the scraggly grass beside me. I was dazed, but I felt OK. However, her eyes got wide as she looked into my face. “Medic!” she shouted. The umpire called time.

  I sat up, holding my chin. It was wet, and my hand came away bloody.

  Dr. Briggs hurried in with his medical kit, and the other players gathered around. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” said Maggie.

  “I’m OK,” I said.

  “You certainly are,” said Dr. Briggs, in the calm tone I remembered from so many years ago. He smiled reassuringly and handed me a gauze pad. I pressed it to my chin, and he and Jackie helped me up. I walked with the doctor to the Happy Van, and the game resumed.

  Inside the ambulance-like van, Viv mopped my chin carefully, her breath whistling pleasantly through the little gap between her front teeth. The doctor checked me for concussion by looking into my eyes with his little light and testing my vision. I was OK. Dr. Briggs was sweating, I noticed, even though it was one of the cooler evenings we’d had this summer. They had me lie down on a cot while Briggs cleaned the cut. At one point his fingers fumbled, and he dropped a gauze pad. “Damn,” he mumbled.

  “Hey, Doc, are you OK?” I joked.

  He exhaled and smiled. “Never better.”

  “He just needs a cookie,” said Viv.

  The cut didn’t hurt much. The Happy Van was surprisingly roomy, even with all the supplies and oxygen bottles and so forth. Two cots could have fit inside it, besides everything else. It smelled a little like a clinic and a little like a garage, as if motor oil had been spilled on the floor, or maybe I was just addled.

  Dr. Briggs told me I didn’t need stitches, but he put on a couple of butterfly bandages to close the cut then added a piece of gauze and tape over that. As he worked he said, “Just like old times, huh? Lillian Byrd taking it on the chin again.”

  “You said it.”

  Viv gave me some wet wipes to clean the rest of the blood off my neck and hands.

  “You guys, thank you so much.”

  They wouldn’t let me pay anything. “I’m in your debt, then.”

  “No, no,” said the doctor. Nurse Viv patted my arm.

  I climbed out of the van and walked over to Mercedes, who said, “You’re up. Can you play?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could be good for intimidation purposes.”

  “Sure.”

  Christy handed me my cap and a bat, and I proceeded to strike out. But next time up I got a walk and stole my way to third. Carmen knocked me in with a bunt, and we won, 9–6.

  After Mercedes and I hung up, I reflected some more on the Grinders’ season and the whole trip of playing women’s softball.

  Most of the teams we played were named after bars—reasonable enough, as most everybody goes out for beers and food after practices and games. We played the Gratiot Tap Room Dudettes, the Blackstone Brewpub Bombers, the Pizza King Queens, and the Millie’s Joint Slammers. Every team had its own personality, though the aesthetics were pretty similar: motley clothing and equipment, pulled together by some loud uniform T-shirt. A few of the color combos were hard to look at—pink and beige, purple and turquoise. The dark-red Grinders shirts with their white script lettering were the best by far. I learned that Mercedes’s girlfriend, Tammy, the designer, had done them.

  As the season had progressed, I noticed something peculiar about Jackie during the games. If the score was tight in the last few innings, she’d start to shiver. Even from my post in the outfield, I saw it. Sometimes she’d throw a little wild, and we’d get in trouble, and our opponents would fill up the bases. Could my latest goddess be a choker? But the thing was, Carmen would trot to the mound and talk quietly to h
er. This drove me insane with jealousy. I’d see Carmen’s face thrusting up into Jackie’s, and Jackie, poor girl, would look and listen earnestly, almost desperately.

  Then Carmen would jog back to the plate, and everybody could see Jackie drop her shoulders and shake out her fingers, and the shivering would stop and she’d start throwing well again. But then the team had to dig ourselves out of the hole she’d gotten us into. Thanks to some quality hitting and fielding, we hung in there and waited for a stroke of luck to help us pull victories out of those games. And wouldn’t you know, we’d get that luck, almost every time, like an opposing runner stumbling and falling on her way to base, or a rain squall that called the game before our lead had totally eroded. Will that good fortune hold for the rest of the season? I wondered, as I pawed my left-field turf, waiting for a ball to come my way.

  I had asked Jackie about Carmen’s pep talks a couple of times, but she evaded answering. She and I continued to hang out, and we continued to make love, and when we did, I tried to be abusive. She wanted it; I felt it every time we went to bed, though she never again explicitly asked me to strike her. I tried to get into it and tried to tell myself I was getting into it. I said mildly critical things and sort of shoved her a little from time to time. But my heart wasn’t in it. Other than that, we had a good thing going. I really appreciated her coming over tonight and explaining the bullshit about Carmen, then leaving me alone.

  I fervently wished Mercedes could find a replacement for me, because the ongoing humiliation I felt at my terrible batting was starting to get on my nerves. I didn’t want to have to keep watching Carmen and Jackie’s little confabs anymore, either.

  Well, no sense dwelling on all that. I turned to the DeMedHo printouts.

  22

  I munched on peanuts and dried figs while I pored over the scores of pages. It didn’t take me long to figure out what had caught my eye about the employees’ addresses: apart from Shirlene herself and one other woman, presumably the receptionist, everyone in the department lived at one of just four addresses, evidently apartment buildings.