The Fan (28 page)

Just after dawn the next morning, Gil knocked on door 3A of a suburban condo. He kept knocking for a minute or so; then the door opened and Figgy, wrapped in a towel, sleep in his eyes, peered out.

“Gil?”

“Right, old colleague. May I come in?”

“Gee, it’s pretty early, Gil, and—”

But he was already in.

Gil looked Figgy over. “I didn’t know Bridgid could cook.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Spare tire’s inflating, Figster.”

Figgy pulled the towel higher. “You’ve come for the fifty bucks, is that it, Gil?”

Gil laughed. “What’s fifty bucks between old colleagues? Didn’t I already tell you that? What I’ve got in mind is a proposition of a different kind. One I think you’ll like, Figster, especially if you’re still stoked on the 325i.”

“You want to sell the car?”

“Bingo.”

Figgy licked his lips. “How much?”

“Five Gs. This is a one time offer. The book is ten-six.”

“I haven’t got five Gs.”

Gil moved past him, toward the rear of the apartment.

“Where are you going?”

“Bridgid’s got five Gs. She’s a regular little squirrel with money, everyone knows that.”

Gil went into the bedroom, Figgy hurriedly following. A shaft of sunshine poked through the slightly parted curtains, fell across the bed, spotlighting Bridgid, asleep under a sheet that covered her to the waist.

“Hey,” said Gil. “I never knew Bridgid had such nice tits.”

Her eyes snapped open. “Oh, my God,” she said, tugging at the sheet.

“It’s all right, Bridg,” said Figgy, coming into the room. “Gil wants to sell the car, that’s all.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“His car. The 325i. He’s giving us a deal. Five Gs. The book is ten-six.”

Gil sat on the bed. He smiled at Bridgid. “One time offer,” he said.

Bridgid opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “But we’ve already got two cars.”

“Mine’s a piece of shit, Bridg,” said Figgy. “You know that.”

She looked at Gil, at Figgy, at Gil.

Gil smiled at her again. “Strictly business, Bridg, old girl. No personalities.”

She nodded, glanced again at Figgy, got no help from him, and said: “I’m sure we appreciate the offer, Gil. We’ll have to think it over seriously, of course, think it over and let you know.”

“That’s right,” said Figgy. “Think it over and let you know.”

Gil kept the smile on his face, but it was work. “A onetime offer means a limited-time offer. I thought that was understood.”

“Let’s be businesslike,” Bridgid said. “I don’t see how you can expect—”

Gil grabbed the sheet and yanked it off her. Her body
trembled. That made it all the more attractive. “You’re a lucky man, Figgy,” Gil said.

Figgy stiffened, as though he was about to do something; but that was it.

Gil took in the sight for as long as he wanted. Then he rose. “Let’s get going.”

They drove to Bridgid’s bank in the 325i—Figgy at the wheel, Bridgid in front, Gil in back. “Rides like a dream, doesn’t it?” Gil said. The pissy smell was almost undetectable.

With five grand in cash and his knapsack of knives, Gil took a cab to the airport. He unstrapped the thrower and put it in the knapsack as well. Inside the terminal, he paid cash for a ticket, checked the knapsack, passed through security, and boarded the plane. He took a coach seat, a tight squeeze for a man his size, and he didn’t like flying to begin with, but there was no choice. His team was playing on the coast. They needed him.

J
ewel Stern parked in front of the peeling three-decker. The green garbage bags were no longer on the porch. She was about to buzz number four, Renard, when she saw that the front door was open an inch or two. She went in.

On either side were the doors to one and two; ahead, the stairs. She climbed them. At the next landing, she found number three on her left and a dim corridor on her right. She followed it, past a closed and numberless door—the bathroom; she could hear the toilet running—to number four at the end. Like the front door, it too was slightly
ajar. She pushed it open a little more so she could see inside.

The room was small and without belongings: no clothes, no papers, no bedding. Deserted, abandoned, tenantless: except for the man in jeans and a T-shirt, standing at the window, his back to the door. Jewel cleared her throat.

He wheeled around. A slightly built man with wire-rim glasses, freckles, and red hair, graying at the sides, thinning on top.

“Mr. Renard?” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Remembering Bobby Rayburn in the pool, she wondered whether she had advanced beyond merely making men emotionally uncomfortable, as her mother would have it, to some ultimate disjunctive phase of physically terrifying them.

Like Bobby, the red-haired man said, “You didn’t scare me.”

“Of course not,” Jewel said.

His eyes, narrow to begin with, narrowed some more. “Who are you?”

“Someone looking for Gil Renard. Have I found him?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Nor you mine.”

“The difference is,” said the red-haired man, unfolding a badge, “I’m a cop.”

Jewel crossed the room and read it. The red-haired man was a sergeant in some town up north she’d never heard of. His name was Claymore.

“Has there been a crime?” she said.

Sergeant Claymore stuck out his jaw. She could picture him as a kid: scrawny red-haired scrapper. “I’m still waiting,” he said.

“Jewel Stern,” she said. “I’m a reporter.” She handed him her press card.

He examined it carefully. “What kind of reporter?”

“Sports,” she said. “Baseball, particularly.”

He gave it back. “And what are you doing here?”

“Working on a story.”

“What story?” he asked, and before she could settle on just
the right evasive answer, his eyebrows, bushy and rust-colored, went up and he said, “Don’t tell me he still plays ball?”

“Who?” said Jewel.

“Gil Renard. Isn’t that who you said you’re looking for?”

She nodded. “But I didn’t know he was a ballplayer.” Her assumptions about the encounter in the men’s room at Cleats began to change shape in her mind.

“I don’t know as he still is,” said Sergeant Claymore.

“But he was?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“At what level?”

“What would you mean by that?”

“The majors? Triple A? Double A?”

Claymore smiled a shy, small-town smile. “Oh, nothing like that, to the best of my knowledge.”

“College? High school? Legion?”

He laughed, embarrassed. “We played Little League together, is all.”

“I see,” said Jewel, although she didn’t, not at all. The puzzle of what had happened at Cleats, barely begun, fell apart completely.

“Getting back to the story you were working on,” he said.

A scrapper. Well, she could scrap too. “I don’t have to tell you.”

He surprised her. “That’s true. Constitutionally, although I’m no expert. But on top of that I’m out of my jurisdiction. And it’s my day off. So you don’t have to tell me a thing.”

“You’re friends, is that it?”

“Who?”

“You and Gil Renard.”

“What makes you say that?”

She shrugged. “Little League.”

“We’re not friends. Never were.”

“Then there has been a crime,” Jewel said.

He gave her a long look. “Yes.”

“What kind of crime?” Jewel said. Sergeant Claymore
stuck out his jaw again. “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” she added. “Constitutionally.”

He smiled, and was still smiling when he answered, “The crime of murder. Double murder.”

“And Gil Renard did it?”

“I’m a long way from knowing that.”

“But you suspect him?”

“Suspect
is too strong a word. It’s just that …” He paused. Whatever thought he was pursuing went unspoken.

“That what?” Jewel said.

He sighed. “The victims were stabbed, for one thing.”

“And Gil Renard sells knives.”

“Did, until he was fired. But it’s much more than selling knives. His father was a well-known blade maker back home, a real artist. Gil’s been around knives his whole life.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what else have you got?”

Sergeant Claymore’s face colored slightly. “You seem to be asking all the questions.”

“Let’s not stop,” she said. “We’re getting along so well.” His face colored some more; then he shook off his annoyance, almost visibly, and pressed on, like a tourist coping with a foreign culture. “What else I’ve got is something a little weird. One of the victims was buried in Gil’s father’s grave. Right on top of the coffin.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. He was a local guy, a thief and brawler named Len Boucicaut.”

“Like the Crusader.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Who was the other victim?”

“His girlfriend. A prostitute, just out of jail.”

“Did Gil Renard know them?”

“I couldn’t say about the woman, but he knew Boucicaut. Long ago, that was. Gil left town and never came back.” He hesitated. “As far as I know.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably nothing. I stopped Boucicaut for speeding a while back. Not unusual. He had a passenger. Didn’t make much of an impression at the time, but when Boucicaut’s body turned up where it did, I got to thinking.”

“That the passenger was Gil Renard.”

“That it might have been,” Claymore corrected. “Until I can establish that Gil did come back, that they’d been together, it’s just a stack of guesses.”

Jewel nodded. A fly buzzed around Claymore’s head and darted off. “Did you recover the knife?” she said.

“That’s another problem,” Claymore replied. “Not just that we don’t have the knife, but it looks like two different weapons were used, and one might not have been a knife at all—the wound’s too deep.”

Claymore sat on the bed, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. A scrapper, but tired. So what? So was she. So was everyone she knew, except the ballplayers: they got all the sleep they wanted, like babies.

“What about motive?” Jewel said. “Were they enemies?”

“As kids? Far from it. In fact—”

“Boucicaut was on the team too.”

“How did you know that?”

I know boys and their games
, Jewel thought, but she didn’t say it. “Were you the star, Sergeant?”

“They were the stars, the two of them. Gil was the pitcher, Boucicaut was the catcher. They took us all the way to the regionals.”

“That means you won the state.”

“We won the state.” Claymore looked inward for a moment, and seemed about to say something more, but did not.

The fly returned, buzzed Jewel. She swatted at it, missed. It was hot in Gil Renard’s old room, and airless. No motive, no connection; she was getting nowhere. “This man you saw in Boucicaut’s car—”

“Truck,” he said.

Connection
. “A red pickup?”

“That’s right. How—”

“Was he a big man?”

“Yes.”

“Round face? Long black hair? Black beard?”

Sergeant Claymore got off the bed.

“Is that Gil?” she asked.

“Not Gil,” he told her. “Boucicaut. Where did you see him?”

Jewel went to the window, pointed down into the alley. “Right there.” She told him what had happened. Even as she spoke, he was inching toward the door. “Where are you going?” she said.

“No more guessing. I’ll put him on the computer right away.” Almost across the threshold, he turned, came back, shook her hand. “Thanks,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed, just the slightest bit this time. “The story you’re working on,” he said, “any murder in it?”

“Oh, no,” Jewel said. “Nothing like that.”

Sergeant Claymore left. Jewel stayed for a few minutes, opened every drawer, peered under the bed, saw nothing. She left Gil Renard’s room, went back down the corridor. At the base of the stairs leading to the top floor, she heard something from above. It sounded like a woman crying.

Jewel felt the personality of the house around her. She got out as fast as she could.

O
n the flight west, Jewel Stern, in business class, telephoned the
Times Magazine
editor in New York and got a one-week
extension on the Rayburn piece. After that, she took out her laptop and her notes and tried to find a beginning.

Why wouldn’t Bobby Rayburn, one of the brightest stars in the major leagues over the past decade, she wrote, want his only son to be a ballplayer too?
She read the sentence over and hit DELETE.

In a world where 35 is geriatric, middle-aged doubt comes early
. Jewel deleted that too.

The hands are what you notice first.
DELETE
.

Sometimes even All-American boys get the blues
. Jewel read that over a few times and went on to the next sentence.
If the phrase “All-American boy” still has any meaning at this late date, it surely applies to Bobby Rayburn, probably the best center fielder in baseball for the past decade
.

The hands are what you …

Jewel worked straight through, eating nothing, drinking nothing, not letting her eye be caught by the man in silver-filigree cowboy boots across the aisle, who didn’t stop trying to catch it until the movie began. She had fifteen-hundred words by shutoff time for all electronic devices.

At the back of economy, Gil Renard slept the whole way.

Gil took a taxi to the stadium, bought a bleacher ticket, was in his seat in the first row behind the center-field fence with two beers and a box of popcorn in time for the first pitch; knapsack at his feet, thrower strapped to his leg. He couldn’t tell what the first pitch was from that distance; all he could see was Primo slapping at it, and the ball looping over the second baseman and hopping over the grass. Under the lights, the ball looked too white, white as rabbit fur, and the grass too green; as though someone had messed with the tint control. Maybe it was jet lag. Gil rubbed his eyes, took a big swallow of beer, gazed again at the field. Nothing had changed.

Primo stole second on the next pitch; he had such a big jump the catcher didn’t bother to throw down. Then Zamora flied to right; not deep, but Primo tagged and went to third anyway, surprising the right fielder and just beating the throw.