The Dead Pull Hitter (6 page)

“I don’t believe this,” Glebe said.

Thorson then threw the hardest pitch I’d ever seen him throw. He completely overpowered Johnson, whose swing missed the ball by a foot. The umpire rung him up emphatically.

“Holy shit,” said Jeff. I concurred.

Right fielder Barry Redmond came to the plate without much enthusiasm and popped up the first pitch. He slammed his bat down in disgust and walked off the field without watching Gardiner catch it to end the half inning.

The game never got easier. It was still scoreless by the bottom of the seventh. Eddie Carter led off. The Red Sox pitcher was Harry Grimes, a crafty old veteran who threw an assortment of junk that looked as if I could hit it, and he made the Titans look like chumps. Carter is what’s known in the game as an aggressive hitter—a player so impatient he swings at everything—and had twice grounded out on bad pitches.

He had obviously decided to wait the pitcher out this time. Grimes started him off with big lazy curveball that missed outside. Carter was twitching with the effort not to swing at it. The next pitch was a strike, followed by two balls. The fifth pitch was what Grimes laughingly referred to as his fastball, motoring right in there at about seventy-five miles an hour.

That was the first of seven pitches Carter fouled off, protecting the plate and waiting for his chance. It was a gutsy performance, and he was rewarded for it. The thirteenth pitch was in the dirt, and Grimes kicked angrily at the rubber as Carter sprinted to first.

Next up was Alex Jones, who was batting .312, but without much power. He was batting left against the right-handed Grimes and bounced the first pitch directly at the second baseman for a routine double play. A groan ran around the ballpark, with a scattering of boos.

David Sloane singled up the middle to keep it alive.

As Tiny Washington walked to the plate, swinging his bat thoughtfully, Greer said, “Bet you five it’s out of here.”

“I never bet against my heart, Moose. You know that.”

I liked Washington’s chances against Grimes. He had doubled to lead off the second inning, but no one could score him. He had struck out since then.

He lined the third pitch into deep right field. I thought it was gone, as did most of the fans, but it hit the fence. Redmond caught it on one bounce for a double. Sloane went to third.

Orca Elliott was the left-handed designated hitter. As he approached the plate, Marty Hogan came out of the first-base dugout to talk to Grimes and Dick Peel, the catcher. It was a brief conversation. When Peel got back behind the plate, he raised four fingers in the air, signalling the intentional walk.

“Playing the percentages,” Glebe grunted. “He wants to pitch to the right-hander.”

Joe Kelsey was on deck, watching carefully as Grimes threw four balls outside the strike zone. Peel almost missed the last one, jumping a foot off the ground.

“I’d love to see Preacher park this one,” I said. “Just so Thorson would have to thank him.”

The din was unbelievable. Toronto fans are notorious for their quietness, but this crowd was something else. I could see normally staid people I knew in the crowd, standing and stamping and clapping, screaming themselves hoarse.

The first pitch was a called strike. The second was inside and high. The third was outside and low. The fourth was a terrible mistake, right where Kelsey wanted it, and he hit a ball that was gone the minute it left his bat, still rising when it went over the left-field fence.

And all the screaming stopped. There was an instant, a heartbeat of silence when he hit it, a great collective gasp, followed immediately by noise that made what had gone before sound like a murmur, while Kelsey circled the bases.

I am a sucker for moments of triumph. I can watch Sunday afternoon bowling and get a lump in my throat when one lout from Des Moines beats another, so I was fairly unglued by Kelsey’s home run. Embarrassed, I bent my head to my blurry keyboard and began to write.

Around me, the Boston writers were trashing Hogan for walking Elliott and the Toronto writers were wondering how Thorson planned to blow this lead. Moose looked at me, then winked.

On the field, Harry Grimes was impassive, The Titans who had mobbed Kelsey when he came off the field sat back down. To show their glee would be an uncalled-for slap in the ego for the Red Sox, but the excitement was obvious. They were chattering among themselves and most of them found reason to move around: to the water cooler for a drink, to the bat rack to check equipment, up the runway for a nervous pee.

Thorson sat almost out of sight in the corner of the dugout, with his jacket on his right arm. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, adjusted his jock and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. When Swain grounded out to the first baseman, he got up, dropped his jacket, grabbed his glove, and ran to the mound, eager to get it over with.

Suddenly there was a shout from the back row of the press box. Sidney, Moose’s assistant, was standing with a telephone held to his ear and a grin all over his face.

“Tommy Cole just hit a three-run homer. It’s 5–3, Cleveland.”

“What inning?” Greer asked.

“Bottom of the eighth.”

“Don’t hang up that phone.”

Six outs to go. Thorson got the first three in a row, on a groundout to short, pop to third, and a strikeout. The crowd, still standing after Kelsey’s home run, cheered every pitch. The celebrations had begun, and they were impatient for the game to end.

They kept cheering when Gloves Gardiner led off with a walk and Owl Wise followed with a single to short right. They booed when Marty Hogan trudged out of the visiting dugout to pull Harry Grimes from the game. He signalled, too late, for his ace reliever, Matt Harata, the Hawaiian left-hander with the ninety-three-mile-an-hour fastball. After eight innings of Grimes’s slow stuff, it would be hard for the hitters to adjust.

Sure enough, Eddie Carter grounded into a double play, but Jones scored Wise from third with a single to left. David Sloane struck out.

And Sidney hung up the phone with a bang.

“It’s over! Indians won!”

“It’s going to get weird out, real soon,” said Jeff.

“Look at the fans!”

As the Titans took the field for the ninth inning, the scoreboard flashed the score from Cleveland. Pandemonium. Security guards and policemen moved to the bottom of each aisle. They were as excited as anyone else, and when the fans shouted at them to get out of the way, they hunkered down, grinning.

Thorson’s job wasn’t easy. He had to face the meat of the Red Sox order, starting with Teddy Amaro, the number-two hitter. He hit a line drive right at Thorson, who made the catch in self-defence.

Young Randy Slaughter topped a grounder to Billy Wise, who flipped it to Tiny Washington. Two out. Bobby Johnson, who didn’t want to be the last out, marched angrily to the plate, pumped up by the booing all around him.

When he hit the first pitch hard and high to left field, Preacher Kelsey fairly danced with joy at the chance to catch the ball. He did it exuberantly, but with both hands, then grabbed it and pumped it in the air as Gardiner and Thorson, who had both frozen to watch the catch, met halfway to the mound in an embrace, soon to be swamped by the rest of the players as the dugout emptied.

I put the binoculars on Preacher as he did some fancy broken-field running through the fans who were streaming onto the field. He lost his cap on the way but didn’t let go of the ball, which he gave to Thorson.

Thorson put his arm around Kelsey’s shoulder and then, surprisingly, handed the ball back. Then tears blurred my eyes again, and I got up and joined the rest of the reporters heading for the elevator.

Moose hugged me.

“Holy fuck. They did it.”

We ran down the corridor to the clubhouse, with the sound of the stamping, shouting fans booming and echoing overhead. As I walked through the doors, I was hit by the first champagne shower. The sickeningly sweet Ontario bubbly stung my eyes terribly. When I could see again, Bony Costello was holding the now empty bottle and grinning, his own uniform soaked, his hair hanging in his eyes.

“Gotcha,” he said, then hugged me and lifted me off my feet. It was like being mauled by a bear, but not altogether unpleasant. When he dropped me, I retrieved as much dignity as I could, given that I was drenched with wine, and set off in search of Joe Kelsey.

He was on the platform that had been set up by the NBC crew, waiting with Thorson and Ted Ferguson while Bert Nelson interviewed Red O’Brien. The other players watched, swigging champagne from the bottles and whooping with joy, already drunk with happiness.

Alex Jones had five bottles stashed at his locker. He opened them, one at a time, and made forays into the room to douse his teammates. When Nelson turned his microphone to Ferguson, it was Jones who jumped on the platform and christened the pair. I took snide satisfaction in watching Ferguson’s expensive ultra-suede jacket soak up the wine.

There was no point in taking notes while they spouted platitudes on the stand. I went looking for comment from some of the lesser stars.

I found Gloves Gardiner sitting in front of his locker, tears streaming down his face.

“I’ve got twelve years in this game, and I’ve never even come close,” he said. “I was afraid I never would.”

“It was a great game.”

“I’m so proud of all the guys. Steve was awesome.”

“You and he almost got into it in the first inning. What was that about?”

“I was just reminding him that we are all in this together,” Gardiner said, smiling tightly. “But that’s all history now. Now we have to look ahead to the playoffs.”

“What about the A’s? Are you thinking about them yet?”

“Yeah, a bit. Oakland is a tough team, but we had a good record against them during the season, and in our division they would have finished fourth. This was the big one to win.”

I could see that Kelsey was finished with the television interviews, so I left with Gloves and fought my way to Joe’s locker.

There was such a mob I couldn’t even see him or hear a word he said until Tiny Washington, at the next locker, pulled his stool out for me to stand on. I tried shouting questions, but it was no use. I stood on my perch and just watched for a moment.

Plastic sheets had been taped over all the lockers to protect the players’ clothes. The clubhouse was as crowded as the Eaton’s Boxing Day sale, a happy, jostling mass of players, reporters, and hangers-on.

Jones was still a one-man champagne raiding party. He was going nuts, a nineteen-year-old man-child in his glory. When he ran out of targets, he poured the stuff over his own head.

Flakey Patterson had found a Canadian flag and stood draped in it, babbling and eating, released from his vows. Thorson was in a corner, surrounded as completely as Kelsey, smiling and talking. Eddie Carter had a tape deck turned up to full volume and was boogying with Archie Griffin in a corner.

A couple of bat boys were sneaking drinks, looking around furtively. Goober Grabowski and Stinger Swain had lined up bottles in front of them for some competitive chugalugging.

Moose Greer, sweating profusely, came to the door and bellowed: “Cover up, guys, you got guests!” Then he ushered in the players’ wives and girlfriends.

Jones, spying new victims, grabbed several bottles and ran across the room, and soon the women were soaking, too, carefully coiffed hair in rattails, mascara running down their cheeks. They found and embraced their husbands in the chaos.

“Pretty sight, isn’t it?”

Startled, I turned and found that Joe Kelsey had climbed up next to me on his stool. He had neither wife nor girlfriend in town, but didn’t seem to mind.

“You did it, Preacher,” I said.

He turned to me, eyes wet, and said, “I did it, Kate.”

We shook hands solemnly, then laughed. I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and he hugged me, hard.

“He gave you the ball?”

“You saw that? Wasn’t that something?”

“You both deserved it, today.”

Just then, Moose shouted to Kelsey from the doorway. “The man who caught your homerun ball is outside. He wants you to sign it for him.”

“I’ll do better than that!”

He grabbed a bat and went to the door. He was back a moment later, with the ball in his hand.

“I traded him,” Kelsey said, “for a bat and a pair of tickets to the first playoff game.”

Then he walked across the room to Thorson’s locker. I couldn’t hear what he said when he handed it to him, but I could see their faces. They were serious, as though making a pledge. Then they embraced.

Oh, shit. It set me off again. I hopped down from the stool and began to make the rounds, happy as Elwy in a bowl of cream. I found Jeff, and we split up the team, making sure we got quotes from everybody. I started off with Thorson, fighting my way through the crowd.

“What did you have to say to Kelsey after the game, Steve?”

“Jesus Christ, woman, don’t you ever let up? I just pitched the team into the playoffs and you want to know what I said to Kelsey? Get off my case.”

He turned away from me and kept on answering questions.

“Charming,” said Christopher Morris.

“A real prince of a guy,” I agreed.

“QUIET!”

Moose’s voice cut through the babble.

“Can I have your attention, please? The clubhouse is now closed. We ask all players to please stand by for a meeting, wives and girlfriends to go back to the lounge, and all members of the media to assemble immediately in the boardroom for a press conference.”

There was a general murmur of confusion and protest, but one look at Moose’s face was enough to convince most of us that something serious was up.

Ted Ferguson was waiting for us, looking uncomfortable. As soon as we were settled, he told Moose to close the door.

“I regret to have to inform you that Pedro Jorge Sanchez was found dead in his condominium at approximately 3:45 this afternoon.” The announcement was formal and chilling.

“What happened?”

Drugs? Heart attack?

“The cause of death won’t be official until the autopsy is complete, but it appears that he died during a robbery.”

“When did it happen?”

“Probably sometime last night.”

“Who found him?”

“When he hadn’t appeared by game time, and there was no reply to repeated telephone calls, one of our staff went to see if he was all right. The superintendent of the building provided a key and the two discovered his body. The police were then called to the scene.”

“Was he shot, or what?”

“We don’t have any details.”

“Who is in charge of the investigation?”

Ferguson checked a notepad in front of him.

“Staff Sergeant Lloyd Munro, of the homicide squad, has been assigned to the case.”

“What about his wife? Does she know?”

“We’re still trying to reach her in Santo Domingo.”

There was an uneasy silence. Finally, I asked the cold, but inevitable, question.

“What does this do to the rest of the season?”

“We don’t know. Red is telling the players now, and I expect they will come to a decision about continuing or not. Tomorrow is an off day, as you know, so they’ll be able to think about it overnight.

“Moose will keep you informed, and we’ll have some sort of press conference tomorrow. And that’s really all I have to say. If you’ll excuse me, I must go talk with the players.”

When Ferguson left, everyone began to talk at once. Murders were not the normal stuff of our professional lives. I hadn’t covered a crime since I was a junior reporter fifteen years before. I’d hated it.

I called Jake Watson from the phone in Moose’s office and told him what I knew.

“It just came over the wire,” he said. “I’ve checked with city side. Jimmy Peterson’s working on it. I’ll get you transferred.”

Peterson is the cop reporter, an ancient, old-fashioned guy who has held down the beat for thirty-five years and has better connections on the force than the chief.

“Peterson.” His voice was gruff and impatient, but that’s just his style. He always sounds as if he’s got a fedora on the back of his head, with a press pass stuck in the band. He still smokes cigars, no matter what rules the newsroom tight-asses try to enforce.

“Jimmy, it’s Kate Henry. I’m at the Titan offices. We’ve just heard about the Sultan Sanchez murder. What do you know?”

“Beaten to death. The proverbial blunt instrument. The place was a mess. Looks like he interrupted a burglar.”

“Who’s this guy who’s in charge of the investigation? Lloyd Munro? I haven’t heard of him before.”

“He’s good. Young. Smart. He’s a little unconventional but gets away with it because he’s Donald Munro’s son. Head of homicide in the fifties. Killed on duty. Before your time.”

“What’s he like to deal with?”

“Tough. Doesn’t like the press. He’ll talk to me. I knew his dad. Don’t know about you. He’s at Fifty-two Division.”

He gave me the number and I asked him to transfer me back to the sports desk. He didn’t say goodbye. In a moment, Jake came back on the line.

“Jimmy’ll do the murder. You get reaction down there from the players and cover the baseball angle. What’s going to happen with the rest of the season?”

“The players are meeting right now. I’ll stake out the dressing room and get back to you as soon as I know anything.” Moose came into the office as I hung up.

“What else do you know? What staff member found him?”

“It was Jocelyn. She’s freaked out. You can’t talk to her.”

Jocelyn Mah was Moose’s secretary. Poor kid.

“Where is she?”

“She left. The cops told her not to talk to anyone.”

“Right. What’s the word from the players?”

“They’re still in the meeting.”

“I’ll go wait in the hall. See you.”

“Wait. Do you want to get some dinner after?”

“I don’t know when I’ll be through, Moose.”

“I thought I’d go to the Fillet around nine.”

“I’ll see. If I’m done, maybe I’ll meet you there.”

I went out into the corridor under the stands. An equipment truck was coming from the Red Sox dressing room, followed by a few players on the way to catch the team bus to the airport. Teddy Amaro stopped when he saw me.

“Is it true about Pedro?”

The two had once been teammates, in Cincinnati.

“I’m sorry, Teddy. I’m afraid so.”

I filled him in on the few details I knew until the Red Sox travelling secretary shouted at him that the bus was about to go. He thanked me and ran to catch up.

Down the corridor to the left, the stakeout was on. A dozen or more reporters leaned against the wall outside the Titan clubhouse door. There were three film crews. I went the other way, towards the visiting clubhouse. There was an unmarked doorway halfway around the curving corridor. I knocked on it.

Karin Gardiner let me in to the players’ families lounge. A dozen women sat around the room in silence, while the children played with toys on the floor. A couple were fighting, another couple crying, comforted by their mothers.

“What’s she doing here? No press allowed.” It was Dummy Doran’s wife, a former Las Vegas showgirl. She wore a fur jacket over tight blue jeans and stiletto-heeled boots.

“Maybe Kate can tell us what’s happening, Helene.” Karin said. “What’s the meeting about? Something about Sultan? He’s dead?”

“Yes. He’s been murdered.”

Sandi Thorson stood up, her hand to her mouth, took two steps towards me, and fainted.

There was a great commotion. More children began to cry. Wives gathered around her, ineffectually patting her wrists and cheeks, like they do in the movies.

“Step back, for God’s sake,” said Helene Doran. She kneeled at Sandi’s head, loosened her shirt, and lifted her head.

“Get me my bag,” she said, pointing a scarlet fingernail. “There’s a flask inside.”

I found it and brought it to her.

“Hurry up. Pour some, don’t be stupid,” she said.

I poured an inch of what seemed to be vodka into the silver cap. Helene forced it between Sandi’s lips. She coughed and came around. Imagine that. Just like in the movies.

“I’m sorry,” she said, getting up.

Steve, Junior, her two-year-old, put his arms around her knees. She sat down and took him onto her lap. He stuck his thumb into his mouth and leaned his head against her breast.

“Please,” she said. “Tell us how it happened.”

I told the story, watching for reaction. Most showed shock, horror, all sorts of appropriate emotions, but there were a few who didn’t. Helene Doran looked bored. Mary Mason, the wife of Josh Mason, the back-up catcher, looked somehow triumphant.

“He was a devil,” she said. vehemently. “He was punished for his sins.”

The Masons were the king and queen of Born-Agains on the team, and she was pretty hardline, but I was still surprised. Other wives nodded in agreement; Marie Sloane and Sandi Thorson were still stunned.

“Wait a minute,” said Darlene Washington. “No matter how evil he was, and he was plenty evil, it’s a horrible way to die. Poor Dolores. And his children.”

Trust Darlene to be as level-headed as her husband. I left them then and headed back towards the clubhouse. The meeting was letting out. I took down a few quotes from the shocked players, then waylaid Gloves.

“What’s going to happen now?”

“We’ll get together again late tomorrow afternoon to decide. Red figured that everybody needs the day off to think about it. Between you and me, I think we’ll play.”

It made sense. With the division clinched, they could take the rest of the week off in mourning and go straight into the playoffs, but it wouldn’t feel right. They’d cloak it in “Sultan would have wanted it this way” clichés, but most of them were probably thinking about their performance bonuses. Besides, they didn’t want an asterisk by their win.

That was too cold, maybe. Maybe it was just that the best way for them to deal with Sanchez’s death was to throw themselves into their work. Their work just happened to be play for most people.