Service Dress Blues (20 page)

“Fair enough,” Halftoe said with an equanimity that surprised Rep. “Monday it is.”

They got up and made their way through the dimly-lit and increasingly boisterous establishment toward the door. When they got outside, Halftoe pointed to a sleek, black Chrysler Imperial that had apparently been circulating around the area and was now approaching.

“At least let me give you a ride back to your hotel,” he said.

“Thanks, but I always like to get a walk in after dinner.”

He started to move away. Halftoe subtly grabbed his right bicep and stopped him cold. At the same moment, Rep noticed the driver of the Chrysler get out. The man was quite large. He wasn't smiling.

“Here it is,” Halftoe said quietly. “We need to talk. I have to find out what you know and what you're guessing about and what you're just making up. So you're going to come with me.”

Rep's belly dropped. He'd dodged every bullet so far, but he hadn't anticipated being kidnapped in the heart of Annapolis, in front of two or three dozen witnesses.

He tried to jerk his right arm away from Halftoe's grip, while simultaneously swinging his left fist around to hit Halftoe as hard as he could. He aimed for the diaphragm, but he hit Halftoe's chest instead.

“Nice shot, junior,” Halftoe said, grinning. “By the way, yell all you want to. People are used to it down here. They'll just think you're drunk and my buddy and I are doing a Good Samaritan thing.”

The other guy had reached them now. He got a grip on Rep's left arm.

“Let's go,” Halftoe said.

“Let's not,” an unhurried drawl interjected.

All three people in the group turned toward the unexpected injunction. It came from a guy with at least a two-day growth of salt-and-pepper beard. He was wearing a shiny red windbreaker.

“Remember me?” he asked Halftoe. “I'm the harmless codger you asked for directions to Federal House about an hour ago. You said you had a mid at the Academy and you wanted to meet him there.”

“Sure.” Halftoe beamed. “Your directions were right on. Took me straight to the front door.”

“Federal House Bar and Grille is off-limits to midshipmen.”

This comment left Halftoe speechless for about two seconds.

“So I lied,” he shrugged then. “What do you want?”

“I want to take a stroll with this gent. Now, if you don't like that idea, we could play a little game I call ‘gunny roulette.'”

“Tell you what, gramps,” Halftoe said, pulling a twenty from his pocket with his free hand and holding it out to the interloper. “Go on in there and have a couple on me.”

Less than a second later, the iron grip on Rep's right arm relaxed. The next thing he knew, Halftoe was on his knees, doubled over with his arms wrapped around his middle. Rep didn't even glimpse the punch that had felled him. One instant Halftoe was standing there holding out a twenty and the next he was kissing cobblestones, sounding like he wanted to vomit.

“What?” the guy on the other side of Rep yelled. “What'd you do?”

Shoving Rep away like a rag doll, he surged after the guy in the windbreaker as Rep tripped over Halftoe and sprawled on the pavement. The assistant thug looked like he knew what he was doing, getting his hands up briskly and keeping his footwork clean. He shot a quick, sharp jab at the gunny. Partially blocked, the punch hit the gunny on the right side of his head instead of his face, but it still sounded like a baseball bat solidly hitting a ball. Rep scrambled to his feet so that he could pitch in somehow.

He never got the chance. The fight was over before he had both feet back underneath him. The gunny didn't flinch or retreat in reaction to the punch. He just plowed forward without wasted motion. The next thing Rep saw was the head of Halftoe's fellow thug snap backwards as the heel of the gunny's right hand smashed into the base of the thug's nose. Remarkably, the blow didn't knock the thug over—but it didn't have to. Three quick steps staggering backward, a quarter-second or so to think things over, and the thug decided that he had urgent business elsewhere. Within seconds he was around the nearest corner in inglorious retreat.

“Thanks,” Rep said, holding out his hand. “Rep Pennyworth.”

“Champ Mayer,” the guy in the windbreaker said as he shook with Rep. “Commander Seton asked me to keep an eye on you while you were here. Sounded silly at the time, but that's why he's an officer and I was just a jarhead sergeant.”

“How would you like a drink or two at the Loew's Hotel?”

“I'd take that very kindly.”

“Good.” Rep took out his mobile phone as they began to walk away from the scene. “I have to call my wife and let her know that things are a little dicier than we thought they were.”

“You go right ahead and make that call, son. Lots better for wives to hear things before they read them in the papers. That's always job-one.”

Chapter 26

“What was that cheer?” Rep asked when he and Melissa finally connected with each other live during the break between the sixth and seventh innings. “Home run?”

“Not exactly. The Diamond Dancers just came out for their next routine. Gold lamé miniskirts and silver-sequined blue tops are a bit gaudy for my tastes, but they seem to be crowd-pleasers.”

“
O tempora, o mores
,” Rep sighed. “To old-school types like Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, and me, that kind of thing doesn't exactly scream ‘baseball.'”

Melissa made a sympathetic noise, but Rep's standard-issue rant didn't really engage her. In the course of tonight's game she had witnessed baseball blasphemies far graver than the Diamond Dancers.

In the middle of the sixth inning, for example, she had seen a seven-foot bratwurst with spindly arms and legs beat a seven-foot hot dog in a footrace around the grandstand warning track, while three other giant sausages trailed behind. The fans had cheered this event wildly, even though most of the sausages didn't really seem to be trying.

The fifth inning had featured grinning twenty-somethings in Brewers t-shirts spilling onto the field with those three-foot translucent tubes Melissa had seen in the prep room, using them to shoot tightly rolled t-shirts into the upper deck. The carbon-dioxide propellant that the head dancer had referred to did its job. The plastic cannons sent the apparel far over her head in long, gracefully arching parabolas.

In the fourth inning, a randomly chosen fan had tried to guess which of three animated baseball caps on the message board hid an animated baseball. The fans not only cheered but shamelessly yelled the answer at him. Melissa thought that was cheating, but no one seemed to care.

“Tell me you're okay,” she said to her husband.

“I've had an interesting night, but I'm safe and sound,” Rep said.

“Interesting in what way, beloved?”

“I'll tell you all about it sometime, from a distance exceeding three feet.”

“You promised you wouldn't take any risks.”

“I didn't, but some risks tried to take me. It all worked out fine, though, with some help from Frank and Gunnery Sergeant Mayer. The bottom line is that this mess is a lot nastier than we thought it was.”

“What do you mean?”

Rep explained. Melissa frowned. She had three frowns in her repertoire, one suggesting irritation, one dismay, and one concentration. She had used all three before Rep paused.

“Did you at least get to talk to Laurel Wolf?”

“No, I got to talk to someone pretending to be Laurel Wolf. She was pretty good at it, but she was faking. In fact, I'd give you three-to-one it was the other Laurel—Laurel Fox.”

“You'd lose,” Melissa said.

“How can you be so sure? There aren't that many women running around in this Chinese fire-drill who could have brought it off.”

“Because Laurel Fox is about forty feet from me right now, doing the splits.”

“She's a Brewers Diamond Dancer?”

“I think she's filling in for one. For an old-school type, by the way, you seem rather familiar with the group's act.”

“I think someone on ESPN must have mentioned it during
Baseball Tonight
.”

“Uh
huh
. Well, get a good night's sleep and hurry home, darling. Walt may have some news for us tomorrow that will bear analysis.”

“I can't wait.”

Melissa clicked the phone off and pensively watched the Diamond Dancers hustle off the field.
”There aren't that many women in this Chinese fire-drill….”
Rep was right about that. Laurel Fox was one of them, along with Lena and Veronica Gephardt. But Fox was the one who got paid to “lay down tracks,” according to Carlsen—and who apparently used a machine to do it. The last of the dancers was twenty feet up the walkway behind her when Melissa impulsively jumped from her seat and scurried after them.

Panting a bit as she went, she followed the athletic young lasses through the concourse. She missed the elevator they took, but found a discreet set of stairs that took her to the prep room level. The door had closed behind the last of them while Melissa was still ten feet away. A black guard in a red t-shirt with
EVENT SECURITY
silk-screened on it in gold jumped in front of her.

“You can't go in there, miss!”

“God bless you for the ‘miss,' but I'm one of the professors from the event earlier in the game. I have to pick up my cap and gown.”

The guard's lips split in a broad grin and he pistol-shot her with his right index finger.

“Riiiight. Unlimited sacrifice flies in one inning. I loved that.”

He rapped sharply on the door and then opened it a couple of inches.

“Heads up, girls, don't panic. It's the lady prof here for her monkey suit.”

Melissa pushed through to find a gaggle of Diamond Dancers sponging off, slipping out of costumes and into robes, talking on mobile phones and, in one case, giggling a bit manically as she used one of the plastic t-shirt cannons to fire her gold lamé miniskirt against purple cinderblock. Melissa saw Fox directly in front of the no-smoking sign, hastily pulling on a pink hoodie. She strode over to the younger woman.

“We need to talk.”

“Sorry, boss,” Fox muttered without looking at her. “I'm on break 'til the top of the ninth.”

“It's important.”

“Not as important as getting out of this Campfire Girls meeting for twenty minutes. Move it or lose it, sis.”

Fox brushed past Melissa and slipped through the door. Melissa turned quickly to follow her.

“Don't forget your cap and gown!” one of the other Diamond Dancers called, holding out the flat, brown cardboard box with “UWM” scrawled in Magic Marker across its lid.

Melissa paused for just a moment to accept the parcel on her way out the door. As she scurried upstairs and onto the concourse, she realized that the wasted moment might be crucial. The concession stands at Miller Park don't sell alcoholic beverages after the seventh inning. Forty-thousand people were by now within five outs of last call, and a fair percentage of them weren't taking any chances. Melissa found herself submerged helplessly in a churning wave of beer-seeking humanity, with no Laurel Fox in sight.

She came to a complete stop, deployed her sharp right elbow to discourage a brace of serial jostlers, mentally smacked the side of her head, and firmly instructed herself to
think!
She remembered Rep's description of his first encounter with Fox. Unless he was grotesquely exaggerating—and her husband wasn't given to hyperbole—the single most logical place for Fox to go was a designated smoking area. Miller Park has two on the right field side of the stadium, and Melissa headed for the nearer one.

Tracking Fox down, of course, would only be half the battle. If the insight sparked by Rep's offhand comment was going to get her anywhere, she would have to figure out some way to grab a piece of Fox's apparently limited attention span and somehow motivate her to speak. Rep's description of his conversation with a fake Laurel Wolf, combined with his comments about the device looking like an old-fashioned answering machine that Fox had lugged out of Future Cubed, gave her the germ of an idea. To do anything about it, though, she'd need some help. While she picked her way through the surging crowd, she opened her mobile phone and hastily thumb-punched a nine-hundred number into it.

As she had expected, she reached a recorded message. It seemed to shout in her ear because she'd had to crank the phone up to maximum volume in order to hear Rep in the grandstand. The recording wasn't new to her, but it still brought a disgusted moué to her lips and a hint of blush pink to the tops of her ears.

“Have you been naughty? Do you need—”

“This is spoiled sibling's friend,” she said sharply, speaking over the insinuating patter and hoping that Rep's mom was just screening calls and would pick up. “He said you could give me some advice—”

“Hello, spoiled sibling's friend,” a throaty, no-nonsense voice cut in. “Advice about what?”

“I've heard about machines you can use to modify your voice when you talk over the telephone or make a recording—if you want to use one person to play multiple parts on a radio ad, for example.”

“Or if you want one person who can talk like a man or a woman on a nine-hundred telephone call. Machines like that exist, all right.”

“Is there one that looks like a mini-control board about a foot square with four black control levers that you can slide up and down?” The urgency in Melissa's tone clicked up a notch as she saw the first sign for the designated smoking area.

“That sounds like the Boss Voice Transformer VT-One model made by Executive Pro Voice Changer. Runs between five-hundred-fifty and six-hundred dollars. I recorded some scene scripts a while back on audio cassettes: two women and two men, and with that thing I could do all four voices myself.”

“Is that the one you'd expect someone who was really serious to use?”

“Probably. There's a cheaper unit called the PCV-One that sells for less than two-fifty, but it's really just a toy. To create different voices convincingly, you have to control both pitch and harmonics. Anything much cheaper than the Boss only affects one.”

“Thanks. That's a big help.”

Melissa paused in front of the entrance to the smoking enclave and braced herself. Not being prissy about cigarettes is one thing, and braving this toxic miasma was something else. The bluish-gray cloud floating over the two-dozen people on the patio promised a concentrated second-hand smoke experience several orders of magnitude worse than anything she'd undergone since high school. After a deep breath she strode onto the patio and worked her way steadily over to Fox, who was on the far side, leaning against a waist-high metal rail and dragging hard on an American Spirit.

“
Don't
tell me you want to bum a smoke,” she said when she spotted Melissa. “You could be the snarky little snot from the anti-tobacco commercials, the one who just shakes her head with this pissy, superior smile on her face when someone offers her a cigarette. Don't bother faking it.”

“Farthest thing from my mind. I tracked you down to tell you something you want to know, whether you realize it or not.”

Fox rolled her eyes and whiffed smoke disgustedly over her shoulder.

“The only reason I don't just blow you off is that I'm trapped here until I finish this and the one that's going to come after it. So go ahead. You talk and I'll smoke.”

“I'll keep it short.” Melissa flourished her mobile phone to suggest the source of her information. “Someone pretending to be Laurel Wolf talked to my husband by phone tonight. You might say it was a party line.”

“I don't get it.”

“Other people were listening. I don't know if they got the call traced, but they have figured out that whoever was talking to Rep was in Milwaukee and was using a Boss Voice Transformer VT-One to fake Wolf's voice. I don't think those are very common here.”

Fox's disdainful expression evaporated and her face transformed. Her eyes rounded to dinner-plate dimensions, her mouth gaped, and her face turned stop-sign red. She snapped her own phone open and punched a single speed-dial number into it.

The language that began her conversation a few seconds later was bluer than the smoke surrounding them. Her first epithet, delivered in a kind of spitting screech, accused whoever answered of practicing what seventeenth-century English judges primly referred to as “sodomy
per os
,” although Fox used the Anglo-Saxon terminology. Furious and fluently obscene observations on the stupidity, incompetence, and dubious ancestry of her interlocutor followed. Before she had finished, a buzz-cut in a chief petty officer's uniform pulled a thick cigar from the corner of his mouth and walked away as his cheeks flushed. Fox paid no attention.

“They've
made
me, you vermin!” she yelped into the phone. “How could you let this happen? You
promised
me.”

Well,
THIS
is suggestive
, Melissa thought.

Fox stopped bleating for about thirty seconds. Her body relaxed a bit, and as she straightened up her face resolved into something more recognizably human.

“Just a sec,” she said in a much calmer voice as she looked back at Melissa and lowered the mouthpiece below her chin. “This is, ah, kind of, like, confidential, so…. ”

Fox accompanied this with left-handed shooing motions. Melissa nodded understandingly and retreated toward the smoking area's gate. She watched as Fox continued the phone conversation for another couple of minutes. The younger woman was much calmer now. She brought her cigarette to her lips deliberately rather than desperately, and pulled on it with a thoughtful, contemplative expression. As soon as she ended the call she walked over to Melissa, clearly doing her best to look contrite.

“Sorry about being so bitchy just now,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “Stress and…you know…stress.”

“Sure.”

“I appreciate you telling me that stuff. You were right. I needed to know that.”

“You're welcome.”

A spasm that seemed to mingle pain, frustration, and fear rippled across Fox's face, like an underwater wave in a clear pond. From the stadium behind her Melissa could hear the
Beer Barrel Polka
winding down on the organ. That meant the top of the seventh was over and the crowd was nearing the end of the seventh-inning stretch, watching a pair of young couples stomp through an elementary polka on the top of each dugout. The kitschy scene, which she'd witnessed at every ball game she'd attended in Milwaukee, always struck Melissa as poignantly ordinary, unpretentious, and American. She regretted missing it. But she couldn't leave Fox now, even though she was pretty sure she had the information she wanted.