Rough Trade (17 page)

At first I couldn’t say anything. It took all my energy and concentration to force myself to breathe. Coming as it did so soon upon waking, my sense of internal disorder was so profound that for a fleeting moment I found myself wondering whether I also needed to tell my heart to beat.

I forced myself to read the entire article, whose main thrust appeared to be that Jeff Rendell, without even waiting until his father was decently in the ground, was determined to move the team to L.A. in order to not only enrich himself, but also enjoy the glamorous California lifestyle at the expense of the loyal Milwaukee fans. This was incendiary stuff designed to sell a ton of newspapers. That much of it was untrue seemed practically beside the point.

There was absolutely no mention of the team’s financial predicament, only the lurid retelling of Jeff’s acrimonious battles with his father and his disagreements with Bennato about how the team was to be run. While Chrissy was outraged by the unfairness of the portrayal of her husband’s motives, what troubled me was not what the paper had gotten wrong, but what it had gotten right.

What I found most terrifying were the details—the exact number of luxury boxes that were in the plans for the new Los Angeles stadium and the exact dollar amount that had been offered to help move the team. Whoever had fed the information to the paper had had access to the term sheet that Jack McWhorter had distributed last Sunday morning in Beau Rendell’s dining room.

“Has Jeff seen this yet?” I asked.

“No, he’s still asleep. I gave him another one of those sleeping pills last night. I didn’t have the heart to wake him.”

“Let him sleep for now,” I said. I needed time to think. From somewhere in the house I could hear the telephone ringing. “Don’t get that,” I instructed. “It’s probably a reporter.”

“That’s who woke me up this morning. Somebody called. That’s why I went out to get the paper.”

That made me think of something. “I wonder why no one from the paper called Jeff for confirmation before they ran the story,” I mused out loud. “You’d think they would have if only to be able to run a denial or ‘no comment.’ It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe they tried. Ever since Beau died we’ve gotten so many calls from reporters, we’ve been taking the phone off the hook.”

“Either that or you’re being deliberately sandbagged.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe whoever leaked the story didn’t want you to know that it was being written.”

“Who would want that?”

“Maybe the cops.”

“How would the cops have found out about the L.A. offer?”

“Maybe somebody fed them the term sheet.”

“Beau may have had a copy in his office. Maybe the police found it after he died.”

“No. Beau didn’t have a sheet. He tore his up at the meeting on Sunday morning. Jack handed out four numbered copies. I still have mine. Assuming that Jeff still has his, that leaves Harald Feiss.”

It has been said that there is a shorthand to every crisis, a rhythm to the swells and troughs of catastrophe that, if you are adept enough, can be anticipated and ridden like the surf. John Guttman, the partner I’d been assigned to when I first went to work at Callahan Ross, went a step further and contended that it could be mapped out in code. Like Morse, he favored a binary representation with
B
for big problems and
s
for small. According to Guttman, most crises fell into a BssssBssssBssssBBssss pattern. Even in Avco, the IPO from hell, there were more ss than
Bs.
But from the morning of the funeral the buzz on the Monarchs was BBBBB!

While Chrissy got dressed and fed the baby, I got on the phone and started waking people up. Poor Sherman, who’d spent most of the night researching case law on sex discrimination, had fallen asleep at his desk. Cheryl, grouchy at having been rousted from her bed at this hour, was nonetheless grateful for the warning. By the time she arrived at the office, everyone from CNN on down would be clamoring for a piece of me. I felt guilty about leaving her on the hot seat, but I had my own problems. When going to a funeral seems the least stressful part of the coming day, you know you’re in for one hell of a rough ride.

All things considered, Jeff took the news well. I honestly think he had been so bludgeoned by the events of the past few days that he was beyond all feeling. As he sat at the kitchen table looking at the breakfast that Chrissy had cooked for him, but not eating it, I found myself thinking of my roommate Claudia’s patient, the man who’d had his arm amputated while pinned under a truck on Wacker Drive. Looking at Jeff’s bloodless face, I found myself wondering whether the wounds that are not physical may be the ones from which it is most difficult to recover.

The doorbell rang and I went to answer it, mentally steeling myself for a horde of reporters. Instead, when I opened the door, I found a single messenger in a black government car delivering an envelope. It was addressed to me. I knew immediately what it was. I opened the envelope and scanned the letter. His Honor Robert Deutsch, the mayor of Milwaukee, felt that under the circumstances it would be inadvisable for us to meet at this time. I realized that this was just politics, the first step in what would no doubt end up being a very complicated dance. Still, I couldn’t help but find it disheartening.

Just as I was about to shut the front door, I saw Jack McWhorter pull up in his black Porsche. He stepped out looking handsome and sinister, like a seductive undertaker in a B movie.

“I came straight from the airport,” he said, slamming the car door behind him.

“So I take it you’ve heard,” I said.

“Are you kidding? They have huge posters at the newsstands. From the size of them you’d think we’d just invaded China.”

“People don’t care that much about China,” I pointed out, holding the front door open to let him pass.

“Who the fuck leaked it?” he demanded, giving me the evil eye.

“Why Feiss?”

“Because he wants to build a stadium in the middle of the cornfields of Wauwatosa. You know. If you build it, they will come. He leaks the news that the team may move and then starts waving the plans for his suburban stadium around and suddenly he’s a hero.”

“You realize this makes everything much trickier at my end,” confided Jack. “I’m not sure my people ever anticipated getting involved in a situation where there would be negative publicity before the fact.”

“Then tell them to grow up,” I replied. My entire plan for keeping the team in Milwaukee was based on the credible threat of the Monarchs moving to California. The last thing I wanted was Jack and the Greater Los Angeles Stadium Commission folding on me now. “I want you to set up a meeting for Jeff with your people in L. A.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” I answered. The sooner I managed to get Jeff out of town the better. “I’ll arrange for someone from Callahan Ross’s West Coast office to come in and start hammering out the terms of the deal. It’s put-up-or-shut-up time.”

It was hardly the send-off Beau would have hoped for. Not only was there no young widow to sob prettily at the graveside, but the son he left behind to follow in his footsteps stood in the shadow of a murder indictment. As stunned as we’d been by that morning’s headline, none of us had given much thought to the fact that in addition to the news of Jeff’s apostasy, the paper had also published a map of the route the funeral cortege would take.

From the minute our limousine pulled out of Chrissy and Jeff’s driveway, the streets were lined with people. They were dressed in Monarchs colors, and many held hand-lettered signs bidding farewell to Beau Rendell. The communications directed at Jeff were significantly less pleasant. We passed more than one sign that read
BURY JEFF INSTEAD!
From the underpass near the Art Museum someone had dressed a dummy in a Monarchs uniform and hung it from the bridge so that the funeral procession passed directly beneath its dangling feet. There was a knife stuck into its back and a sign around its neck read
JEFF DID THIS
.

The funeral mass was to be held at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, the seat of the archdiocese of Milwaukee. Like the German settlers who’d erected it, it was a structure more stolid than elegant, stern rather than inspiring. Once the center of a prosperous neighborhood, over the years changing demographics had left it on the fringes of downtown while earnest urban planners had turned an adjacent vacant lot into a small urban park. It was on this swatch of green, aptly named Cathedral Park, that a crowd of several hundred people now milled angrily, ringed by a cordon of mounted police decked out in full riot gear.

I looked out through the smoked glass of the funeral limousine at the church, dark and forbidding under the oppressive ceiling of low clouds that marked the day. Broadcast vans blocked the curb, electrical cables snaking out through their open doors, up the steps and into the vestry of the church. I caught a glimpse of Harald Feiss talking to a leggy woman with network hair, but I couldn’t tell whether they were arguing or getting set up for an interview.

As our car edged closer to the crowd Chrissy shifted nervously in her seat, no doubt saying a prayer of thanks that she’d decided to leave the baby at home with the sitter. Jeff, hidden from view by the limo’s mirrored windows, craned his neck to get a better look at the crowd. I examined his face expecting to see fear and was surprised to find something else burning in the back of Jeff’s eyes, something very much like satisfaction.

At the sight of the hearse the crowd suddenly heaved and surged like a living organism, pulsing until it had built up sufficient momentum to break through the police line. The officers pulled out their nightsticks, wheeled around, and dug their heels into their horses’ flanks in pursuit. I don’t know which was more terrifying, the screaming mob or the horde of journalists who thundered after them wielding their microphones like clubs.

Sometimes you don’t understand the danger until it has already passed. Events move so fast that their significance can’t be absorbed as they happen. It is only afterwards that you realize what might have been, what has been so narrowly averted.

I saw it all in snapshots: the half-eaten cheeseburger that struck the window and slid down the glass leaving a trail of mustard and a disk of pickle in its wake. The man with the big nose and flapping jowls, his Monarchs cap askew, lunging for the door handle. Then the look of surprise on his face as a cop on horseback grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and yanked him away.

There was yelling and the sounds of scuffle all punctuated by the ominous thunks of objects hitting the car. We sat frozen, helplessly watching the mayhem of which we were the center. In the front seat, our driver sweated and crossed himself, mumbling something under his breath— whether curses or prayers I could not tell.

Chrissy screamed as the windshield suddenly seemed thick with blood. It took a minute before we realized that it was ketchup. The driver, with a giggle of relief, switched on the windshield wipers, which smeared the thick liquid grotesquely across the glass.

Suddenly we heard the sound of impact as something heavy landed on the hood. The Jester, the bandy-legged member of the Monarchs’ court, dove across the hood of the car, his bug eyes staring at us through the pink streaks of ketchup. He banged his hands against the windshield in a fury, shouting out some piece of demented gibberish. But he disappeared almost as quickly as he’d materialized, pulled back by strong hands and leaving us with the memory of his pockmarked face, gap-toothed and filled with monumental rage.

CHAPTER 14

Sirens heralded the arrival of reinforcements, and slowly the tide began to turn. As soon as the threat of getting a ride downtown seemed credible, demonstrators took off on foot and quickly disappeared down alleys and side streets, leaving a trail of broken glass and garbage in their wake. After what seemed like an eternity, a uniformed officer approached our car, signaled the driver to roll down the window, and assured us that it was now safe to make our way into the church.

The archbishop, looking shaken, emerged from behind the heavy egg-splattered doors and greeted us on the wide, stone steps. Taking Jeff by the hand, he led the Rendells into the dark sanctuary of the cathedral. I made my way behind them followed by the first tentative clusters of funeral-goers.

The interior of the cathedral was damp and narrow like the inside of a tomb. Above, from the ribbed vaults of the ceiling, the vestments of dead clergy hung like flags while thousands of votive candles flickered in the gloomy alcoves that punctuated the transept. From somewhere behind us the deep-throated organ throbbed the first mournful strains of requiem, and the air was thick with incense.

I took my place in the hard pew beside Chrissy and Jeff and focused my attention on the casket that had just been brought to rest before us. In life Beau had always made himself the focus, the epicenter of attention. Why was it that in death I seemed to be always losing sight of him? His murder had put into motion a chain of events that seemingly swamped the event itself. Whenever I found myself even beginning to think about what had precipitated it all, something else popped up to divert my attention yet again.

Coach Bennato appeared on the altar to deliver the eulogy—one old man’s farewell to another. I looked around for Harald Feiss and found him seated across the aisle between Gus Wallenberg and a delegation from the mayor’s office. This being an election year, the mayor had no doubt decided that there was nothing to be gained by doing anything linking himself to Jeffrey Rendell, who had, with the publication of six column inches of type, found himself Milwaukee’s number one leper.

Marie Bennato snuffled noisily throughout her husband’s remarks while her daughter did her best to comfort her. Of the hundreds of mourners who had paid their respects, hers were the first tears I saw shed for Beau Rendell. I suspected she cried at funerals as a matter of course.

Bennato’s speech covered the distance between barroom reminiscence and locker room oratory. He told of miraculous victories and bitter defeats, of snowstorms and blown plays, of broken limbs and shattered dreams. He spoke without irony of Beau’s faith in his players, his love for the game, and his devotion to his community. His words were met with silence save for the scratching of the pencils of the reporters at the back of the church, scribbling it all for the afternoon editions.