Mortal Stakes (4 page)

“Like what?” he said.

“Like anything at all.”

“You mean, does he occasionally place a wager? That kind of thing?”

“That, or anything else.”

“Well, he never placed a bet with me,” Seltzer said, “but I heard something peculiar about him. The odds seem to shift a little when he pitches. I mean, there’s some funny money placed when he’s scheduled to go. Nothing big, nothing I’d even think about if somebody like you didn’t come around and ask about him.”

“You think he’s in the satchel?”

“Rabb? Hell, no, Spenser. Nothing that strong. There’s just a whisper, just a ruffle, that not everything is entirely jake. I wouldn’t hesitate taking money when Rabb’s pitching.

I don’t know anyone that would. It’s just…” He shrugged and spread his hands out palms up. “Want another drink?”

I shook my head. “The last one took the enamel off my front teeth,” I said.

“Aw, Spenser.” Seltzer shook his head. “You’re going soft. I remember twenty years ago you was fighting prelims in the Arena, you thought that stuff was imported from France.”

“In those days I don’t remember you dressing like George Brent either,” I said.

Seltzer nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “things change. Now instead of a newspaper, they give you a freaking road map.

You know?”

I left him refolding his paper and went to get something to eat. The bar whiskey was thrashing about in my stomach, and I thought maybe I could smother it with something.

I HAD TWO CHEESEBURGERS and a chocolate shake at an antique brick McDonald’s on Huntington, just down from Symphony Hall. The food throttled the whiskey okay, but I was furtive coming out. If anyone saw me, I could never eat at LockeOber’s again. The guilty part was I liked the cheeseburgers.

It was a little after six and I had some time to kill.

There seemed to be more of it and harder to kill as I got older.

I strolled back down Mass Ave toward the river. The college kids were out on the esplanade in large numbers, and the air was colorful with Frisbees and sweet with the smell of grass. I sat on a bench near the Mass Ave Bridge and looked at the river and watched a boy and girl share a bottle of Ripple.

Sailboats veered and drifted on the river, and an occasional powerboat left a rolling wake upstream. Across the river MIT loomed like a concrete temple to the Great God Brown. A sixfoot black girl with red hot pants and platform sandals went by with a Lhasa apso on a short leash. I watched her out of sight around the bend westbound.

At seven fifteen I strolled back up Mass Ave toward Church Park. Church Park is a large, gray, cement urban development associated with the Christian Science church complex across the street. It replaced a large number of shabby brick buildings with a very long twelve-story cement one that had stores on the bottom floor and apartments above. The doorman made me wait while he called up.

When I came out of the elevator, Marty Rabb was at his door, looking down the corridor at me. There was something surrealistic about the way his head appeared to violate the fearful symmetry of the hall.

“Down this way, Spenser,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

The front door opened into the living room. To the right a bedroom, straight ahead a small kitchen. To the left the living room opened out toward the street and looked out at the dome of the Mother Church of Christ Scientist across the street. Traffic sound drifted up through the open windows. The living room was done in wall-to-wall beige carpet; the walls were eggshell white. There were framed mementos of Rabb’s career scattered on the walls. The furniture was in browns and beiges, and the tone was modern. On the glasstopped coffee table near the couch were a tray of raw vegetables and a bowl of sour cream dip.

“Honey, this is Mr. Spenser that’s writing the book,” Rabb said. “Spenser, this is my wife, Linda.”

We shook hands. She was small and black-haired. Her features were small and close together, and her eyes dominated her face. They were very round and dark, with long lashes. Her black hair was long down her back and pulled back at the nape of her neck with a dark wooden clip. She had on a salmon pink sleeveless shell and white jeans. Her makeup was so understated that at first I thought she wore none.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Spenser. Why don’t you have a seat here on the couch? It’s closest to the dip.” She smiled, and her teeth were small and rather sharp.

I said, “Thank you.”

“Would you like a hard drink, Mr. Spenser, or beer?"Rabb said. “I got some nice ale from Canada, Labatt Fifty, you ever try it?”

“Tried and approved,” I said. “I’ll take the ale.”

“Honey?”

“You know what I’d love, that we haven’t had in a while, a Margarita. Have we got the stuff to make a Margarita, Marty?”

“Yeah, sure. We got about everything.”

“Okay, and put a lot of salt on the rim,” she said.

She sat on one of the big armchairs opposite the couch, kicked her sandals off, and tucked her feet up under her. “Tell me about this book you’re writing, Mr. Spenser.”

“Well, Mrs. Rabb—”

“Linda.”

“Okay, Linda. I suppose you’d say it’s along the lines of several others, looking at baseball as the institutionalized expression of human personality.” She nodded and I wondered why. I didn’t know what the hell I’d just said.

“Isn’t that interesting,” she said.

“I like to see sports as a kind of metaphor for human life, contained by rules, patterned by tradition.” I was hot now, and rolling. Rabb came back with the Margarita in a lowball glass and the ale in Tiffany-designed goblets that said COCA-COLA. I thought Linda Rabb looked relieved. Maybe I wouldn’t switch to the talk show circuit yet. Rabb passed out the drinks.

“What’s patterned by tradition, Mr. Spenser?” he said.

“Sports. It’s a way of imposing order on disorder.”

Rabb nodded. “Yeah, right, that’s certainly true,” he said. He didn’t know what the hell I had just said either. He drank some of the ale and put some dry-roasted cashews in his mouth, holding a handful and popping them in serially.

“But I’m here to talk about you, Marty, and Linda too.

What is your feeling about the game?”

Rabb said, “I love it,” at the same time that Linda said, “Marty loves it.” They laughed.

“I’d play it for nothing,” Rabb said. “Since I could walk, I been playing, and I want to do it all my life.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Rabb said. “I never gave it any thought. When I was about five my father bought me a Frankie Gustine autograph glove. I can still remember it. It was too big for me and he had to buy me one of those little cheap ones made in Taiwan, you know, with a couple of little laces for webbing? And I used to oil that damn Frankie Gustine glove and bang my fist in the pocket and rub some more oil until I was about ten and I was big enough to play with it.

I still got it somewhere.”

“Play other sports?” I didn’t know where I was going, but I was used to that.

“Oh yeah, matter of fact, I went to college on a basketball scholarship. Got drafted by the Lakers in the fifth round, but I never thought about doing anything else but baseball when I got out.”

“Did you meet Linda in college?”

“No.”

“How about you, Linda, how do you feel about baseball?”

“I never cared about it till I met Marty. I don’t like the traveling part of it. Marty’s away about eighty games a season. But other than that I think it’s fine. Marty loves it. It makes him happy.”

“Where’d you two meet?” I asked.

“It’s there in the biog sheet, isn’t it?” Rabb said.

“Yeah, I suppose so. But we both know about PR material.”

Rabb said, “Yeah.”

“Well, let’s do this. Let’s run through the press kit and maybe elaborate a little.” Linda Rabb nodded.

Rabb said, “It’s all in there.”

“You were born in Lafayette, Indiana, in nineteen forty-four.” Rabb nodded. “Went to Marquette, graduated nineteen sixty-five. Signed with the Sox that year, pitched a year in Charleston and a year at Pawtucket. Came up in nineteen sixty-eight. Been here ever since.”

Rabb said, “That’s about it.”

I said, “Where’d you meet Linda?”

“Chicago,” Rabb said. “At a White Sox game. She asked for my autograph, and I said, yeah, but she had to go out with me. She did. And bingo.”

I look at my biog sheet. “That would have been in nineteen seventy?”

“Right.” My glass was empty, and Rabb got up to refill it. I noticed his was less than half gone.

“We were married about six months later in Chicago.”

Linda Rabb smiled. “In the off-season.”

“Best thing I ever did,” Rabb said, and gave me a new bottle of ale. I poured it into the glass, ate some peanuts, and drank some ale.

“You from Chicago, Linda?”

“No, Arlington Heights, a little bit away from Chicago.”

“What was your maiden name?”

Rabb said, “Oh for crissake, Spenser, why do you want to know that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You ever see one of those machines that grades apples, or oranges, or eggs, that sort of thing, by size? They dump all sizes in the hopper and the machine lets the various sizes drop into the right holes as it works down. That’s how I am. I just ask questions and let it all go into the hopper and then sort it out later.”

“Well, you’re not sorting eggs now, for crissake.”

“Oh, Marty, let him do his job. My maiden name was Hawkins, Mr. Spenser.”

“Okay, Marty, let’s go back to why you love baseball,” I said. “I mean, think about it a little. Isn’t it a game for kids? I mean, who finally cares whether a team beats another team?”

It sounded like the kind of thing a writer would ask, and I wanted to get them talking. Much of what I do depends on knowing who I’m doing it with.

“Oh, Christ, I don’t know, Spenser. I mean, what isn’t a game for kids, you know? How about writing stories, is that something for grown-ups? It’s something to do. I’m good at it, I like it, and I know the rules. You’re one of twenty-five guys all working for something bigger than they are, and at the end of the year you know whether or not you got it. If you didn’t get it, then you can start over next year. If you did, then you got a chance to do it again. Some old-timey ballplayer said something about you have to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game, but you gotta be a man too.”

“Roy Campanella,” I said.

“Yeah, right, Campanella. Anyway, it’s a nice clean kind of work. You’re important to a lot of kids. You got a chance to influence kids’ lives maybe, by being an example to them. It’s a lot better than selling cigarettes or making napalm. It’s what I do, you know?”

“What about when you get too old?”

“Maybe I can coach. I’d be a good pitching coach.

Maybe manage. Maybe do color. I’ll stay around the game one way or another.”

“What if you can’t?”

“I’ll still have Linda and the boy.”

“And when the boy grows up?”

“I’ll still have Linda.”

I was getting caught up in the part. I’d started to lose track. I was interested. Maybe some of the questions were about me.

“Maybe I better finish up my Labatt Fifty and go home,” I said. “I’ve taken enough of your time.”

Linda Rabb said, “Oh no, don’t go yet. Marty, get him another beer. We were just getting started.”

I shook my head, drained my glass, and stood up. “No, thank you very much, Linda. We’ll talk again.”

“Marty, make him stay.”

“Linda, for crissake, if he wants to go, let him go. She does this every time we have company, Spenser.”

They both walked with me to the door. I left them standing together. He towered over her in the doorway. His right arm was around her shoulder, and she rested her left hand on it. I took a cab home and went to bed. I was working my way through Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, and I spent two hours on it before I went to sleep.

LENNIE SELTZER CALLED me two days later at my office. Neither Maynard nor Floyd does any betting at all I can find out about,“ he said.

”Sonovabitch,“ I said.

”Screw up a theory?“

”Yeah. How sure are you?“

”Pretty sure. Can’t be positive, but I been in business here a long time.“

”Goddamn,“ I said.

”I hear that Maynard used to bet a lot, and he got into the hole with a guy and couldn’t pay up and the guy sold the paper to a shylock. Pretty good deal, the guy said. Shylock gave him seventy cents on the dollar.“

I said, ”Aha.“

Seltzer said, ”Huh?“

I said, ”Never mind, just thinking out loud. What’s the shylock’s name?“

”Wally Hogg. Real name’s Walter Hogarth. Works for Frank Doerr.“

”Short, fat person, smokes cigars?“

”Yeah, know him?“

”I’ve seen him around,“ I said. ”Does he always work for Doerr, or does he free-lance?“

”I don’t know of him free-lancing. I also don’t know many guys like me ever made a profit talking about Frank Doerr.“

”Yeah, I know, Lennie. Okay, thanks.“

He hung up. I held the phone for a minute and looked up at the ceiling. Seventy cents on the dollar. That was a good rate. Doerr must have had some confidence in Maynard’s ability to pay. I looked at my watch: 11:45. I was supposed to meet Brenda Loring in the Public Garden for a picnic lunch.

Her treat. I put on my jacket, locked the office, and headed out.

She was already there when I arrived, sitting on the grass beside the swan boat pond with a big wicker basket beside her.

”A hamper?“ I said. ”A genuine wicker picnic hamper like in Abercrombie and Fitch?“

”I think you’re supposed to admire me first,“ she said, ”then the food basket. I’ve always been suspicious of your value system.“

”You look good enough to eat,“ I said.

”I think I won’t pursue that line,“ she said. She was wearing a pale blue linen suit and an enormous white straw hat. All the young executive types looked at her as they strolled by with their lunches hidden in attache cases. ”Tell me about your travels.“

”I had a terrific blackberry pie in Illinois and a wonderful roast duck in New York.“