Life's Work (7 page)

Continuing this ... inquisition will only cause him trouble, and will ultimately undermine any chance we may have of securing a fair settlement of the issue."

"And how will it do that?"

Kaplan shook his head and sighed. "I thought you were an adult, Harry," he said long-sufferingly. "I thought we didn't have to play this kind of game. But since you insist, let me put it to you bluntly. How would you like to have your life picked over by a stranger? A stranger who is working for a man who does not have your best interests at heart? We all have things in our pasts that we're not particularly proud of, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that Bill Parks is any different. He's a troubled man who's had many problems, some of which he's just now beginning to resolve. But those problems are nobody's business but his own. He has a right to privacy, even if it's merely the privacy to contemplate his own follies. Whether you realize it or not, you are violating that right. And I am asking you again, on Bill's behalf, to let us settle this dispute in our own way."

"Mr. Kaplan," I said, getting to my feet, "you can make my job much easier by simply telling Parks to get in touch with the Cougars. As far as I'm concerned, that will close the case. Until then, I'm obligated to keep looking for him."

"Obligated?" Kaplan said with outrage. "What about your obligation to your fellow man? Your obligation to be fair? Does that go by the way simply because you took money to do someone else's dirty work?"

"I agreed to do a job," I said. "I intend to do it."

I turned to go. Kaplan came out from behind the desk. He was a hair over six feet tall, but all those muscles made him look enormous.

"I've asked you politely," he said in a very tough voice. "Stay out of Bill's life." The glasses had slipped down his nose, and he pinned them to his forehead with a forefinger. "Bill works for the Cougars. They don't own him."

"And you don't own me," I said.

He took a deep breath, and his stomach rumbled. "You're upsetting my stomach," he said. "You're making me angry. Don't make me angry, Mr. Stoner. Believe me, you won't like it."

"I'll have to take that chance," I said, and walked out the door.
 
 

I wasn't in a particularly good mood as I drove back to town. I didn't like being threatened by a dyspeptic bully, and more than that, I didn't like what the bully had said. Kaplan was the second person in two days who had told me that I was being used by the Cougars as a weapon against Parks. Of course, Otto had been drunk and angry when he made his accusation. And Walt wasn't exactly a disinterested party. He stood to benefit directly from the renegotiation of Parks's contract. But the two stories were enough alike to make me feel vaguely uneasy about Petrie's motives -and about my own. I'd taken the case because I hadn't liked what Parks had done to those four girls. I still didn't like that. But they weren't the reason I'd been hired. I'd been hired, I reminded myself, to find the son-of-a-bitch. And if Petrie saw it differently, we'd have to have a little renegotiation of our own.

And yet even as I was telling myself that Parks's past sins were his own business, I couldn't help wondering which one of them had Kaplan so worked up. The three assault arrests and the Candy Kane trial weren't secrets to Cougar management. Kaplan had to know that, seeing that he seemed to know everything else about the Cougars. Which meant that something else was bothering him -something he was afraid I'd uncover in the course of the investigation. Since drug scandals were rife that summer, I wondered if Bill had run afoul of the same DEA sting that had netted Monroe, Calhoun, and Greene. If he had, the Feds hadn't gone public with it yet. But that would be a career-buster, all right -something that could really throw a wrench into contract negotiations.

As soon as I got back to the apartment, I called Hugh Petrie at his office in the Stadium. The girl from his answering service said that he was gone for the day, but that she would relay my message. About ten minutes later, Petrie himself called back.

"What's the problem, Harry?" he said.

"I need to meet with you about Parks."

"Fine," he said. "Come in on Monday morning."

"It can't wait until Monday morning," I said.

Petrie sighed. "Okay. If it's that urgent, you better come out here. I can spare a half hour this evening. No more." He gave me an address in Indian Hill and rang off.
 
 

It took me about twenty minutes to drive out to Indian Hill and another fifteen minutes to find Petrie's home, which was hidden away in a maple grove at the end of a winding, tree-shaded lane. I'd half figured Petrie for one of the flashy white Colonials along the Camargo drag the kind with the two-mower lawn and the flagpole set in concrete and the carriage house as big as a four-family apartment in Reading. But the bungalow at the end of the shady lane was a carriage house, and a relatively small one, at that. It had been spruced up with white trim, red siding, and Pennsylvania Dutch shutters on the upperstory windows, but it was still recognizably a barn -loafshaped, mansard-roofed. In fact, between the siding and the shutters, it looked like a child's painted lunch box. There was a car parked in a gravel lot to the left of the house -a puke green Toyota Tercel with muddy tires. Without advancing any genetic theorems of my own, I'd expected something more patrician from a man like Petrie. But he'd fooled me again -first with the office and now with the house and the car.

I parked my heap behind the Toyota, got out into the afternoon sun, and followed a gravel path around a lateblooming magnolia to the front door. The magnolia had perfumed the whole yard, as if someone had spilled cologne in the grass. I waded through the stink, stepped onto a slate stoop, and knocked at a Dutch door. After a time, the top half swung open and Petrie appeared, clad in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and khaki shorts. His bald head was gleaming with perspiration, and he was breathing hard through his mouth.

"I've been working out," he said. "C'mon in."

He opened the bottom half of the door and waved me through it into a small tiled kitchen as neat and modest as the outside of the house. A cellar door was stopped open on the left-hand wall. Petrie started for it.

"We might as well go downstairs," he said. "I can finish my workout and you can give me the scoop."

I followed him down a wooden staircase into the cellar. The basement had been converted into a full-scale gym. There was springy green Astroturf on the floor, a wet bar on the short wall, and on each of the long walls rows of Nautilus machines -spare black skeletal structures of heavy steel and chain, like oddly twisted jungle gyms or the cabs of heavy lifters.

Petrie watched me as I took it all in, with a look that mingled pride and embarrassment, as if I'd caught him in an excess that he couldn't quite justify but wasn't prepared to give up. I had the feeling that I'd gotten a peek at his diary. And apparently, so did he.

"I like to keep in shape," he said, by way of apology, I supposed.

"Hey, I'm impressed," I said.

Petrie walked up to a pair of parallel bars protruding from one of the Nautilus machines and began to do dips -his feet tucked behind him, his legs bent, his arms doing all the work of raising and lowering his body. "So," he said, "what's so important?"

"I'm getting some mixed signals about Bill Parks," I said.

"Mixed how?"

"Some people seem to think that you guys hired me to finish his career."

"Which people?"

"Walt Kaplan, for one."

Petrie stopped exercising and lowered himself to the floor. He stood there for a moment, his arms resting on the parallel bars, his red face pouring sweat. It took me a moment to realize that he was angry. So angry that he couldn't find his voice.

"Who gave you the authority to talk to Walt Kaplan?" he finally said with barely controlled fury.

"Nobody." \
Petrie gave me an astonished look. "He's the enemy, for chrissake!"

"To me, he was a lead."

"I don't know about you, Stoner," Petrie said, tugging at the skin on top of his head as if there were still hair there to be pulled out. "Why do you think we hired you? Who the hell's side are you on?"

"I thought you hired me to find Bill Parks as quickly as I could."

"That did not mean you were to negotiate with his fucking agent!"

"I didn't do any negotiating, Hugh. He called me up, and I went to see him."

"How the hell did he know you were on the case!" Petrie almost shouted. He took a deep breath. "Don't answer that. I don't think I want to know."

"Kaplan claims that Parks left camp over the contract dispute. That you know that, and that you hired me to pressure Bill into signing."

"Pressure him how?" Petrie said.

"Presumably by employing me to dig into his past, possibly into a drug problem, and then by using what I get on him to bring him back to the bargaining table." I stared at him. "Is that your strategy, Hugh?"

Petrie didn't answer the question. "What the hell do you care what Kaplan said? Just find Bill, okay?"

I shook my head. "Not okay. I told you before, if you think that Parks has a drug problem, you go to the league or the DEA. I'm not interested in blindly involving myself in a cocaine case."

"Did Kaplan say that Parks had a nose problem?" Petrie said with curiosity.

"No. But he gave me the impression that Bill's career could be ruined by my investigation. Given the current atmosphere, I assumed that meant drugs."

Petrie eyed me for a moment. "That's probably a safe assumption," he said dryly, and walked over to the bar on the far side of the room. He poured himself a beer out of an open can on the bar and sat down on a wooden stool. "You want something to drink?"

I shook my head.

"I don't know why I should be surprised by this crap anymore," he said.

He seemed genuinely aggrieved, although I had trouble believing that he hadn't speculated in the same way that I had about Parks -and probably about some of his other players too.

He must have guessed what I was thinking, because he drew himself up on the chair and gave me a cold look. "You know, Stoner, I don't owe you an explanation of why we hired you. The team doesn't owe you anything but your salary."

"I don't have to keep working for the team, either," I said.

Petrie laughed. "A cop with principles -there's a change." He took a sip of beer and put the glass down on the bar. "As far as I know at this time, Bill Parks is clean. We have heard rumors about a second grand jury investigation, following up on another DEA sting. Several sealed indictments are to be handed down in the near future. Whether Bill is part of that package I don't know."

"But it wouldn't surprise you," I said.

"Like I said, nothing should, anymore." Petrie turned on the stool so that he was facing me, one foot cocked in the rungs, the other leg stretched to the floor. "Five, six years ago I would've gotten really worked up over this kind of thing. Kicked in a TV set or broken somebody's jaw. Now I just don't care." He cribbed his hands around his knee. "The human race sucks. Let's face it. So fuck them all. I run my business. I make a good profit. I'm fair to the players. I give them a chance to make a lot of money. And when things go wrong, I look for a reasonable solution. But I'll be goddamned if I'm going to beat myself over the head because of somebody else's hard luck, or greed, or stupidity. If it turns out Bill has a drug problem, we'll trade him. Or maybe we'll let him play out his contract and then trade him. You wanted to hear the truth. That's the truth. We'll know in time, won't we?"

"So why bother to look for him?" I said. "Why not let nature take its course and wait for the grand jury to release its findings?"

"Who knows exactly when that's going to happen?" he said. "Besides, given what I now know, I have to presume that he's after more money, that he -or Walt- is planning to take advantage of the fact that we've lost three starters, and is going to try to blackmail us into renegotiating."

I eyed him suspiciously.

"You don't believe me?" he said with a laugh.

"I don't know what to believe," I said.

"Look, you want to know what this contract dispute with Bill is really about?" Petrie said.

"It would ease my mind some, yeah."

"All right," he said. "I'll tell you. Why not? Three years ago, Parks came into my office and told me that he wanted a raise. Now it just so happened that I liked Bill. He's a good football player -you can't take that away from him. When he came up as a rookie eight years ago, he was a late-round pick with nothing but the game on his mind. He signed for peanuts, played hard, and worked his way into a starting spot in two years. Off the field he was a maniac. A lot of them are, including your friend, Otto. But he did his job -kept himself in hard muscular condition the year round, hunkered down in training camp, and never gave less than a hundred percent on the field. He deserved a raise. Not as much as he was hoping for, but a decent chunk. Anyway, we negotiated for a couple of weeks. And then Kaplan got into the picture. Don't ask me how, because I don't know. One week Bill was training with him -the next, Kaplan was his agent. As soon as Kaplan stepped in, the whole process changed. You met the man, so you must know that his whole act is intimidation, physical and intellectual intimidation. He's a strong-arm thug with a shrewd line of patter. And when the patter doesn't work, he's been said to take more drastic measures."