Follow the Sharks (15 page)

The entrance to the Fox Hill Estates was marked by a discreet wooden sign with carved gold lettering set into the ground in an island that divided the long driveway. Along either side of the pea-stone drive swept a broad expanse of Cape Cod meadow—bull briers and low-bush blueberries and knee-high grass already turning yellow. It looked like terrific country for quail. The driveway dipped down, and over the rise I glimpsed the gray line of ocean touching the hazy Cape Cod sky.

The condos were laid out on a low bluff in a shallow horseshoe that followed the waterline below. They were finished with natural cedar shake shingles weathered to silver, with dark green shutters and red brick chimneys poking up at regular intervals. The Fox Hill Estates nestled into the landscape comfortably, as native to Cape Cod as sand dunes and scrub pines. I estimated there were twenty-four town-houses, all connected to each other, distinguished one from the other only by the colors of the doors.

Number fourteen belonged to Stump Kelly. It had a moss green door. I parked in front of it and rapped on the brass knocker. The door opened abruptly, and I faced a woman with hair the same color as the door knocker and eyes remarkably close to the color of the door. She was, I guessed, in her mid-forties—about my age. Once she had been a beauty, and now, perhaps, some might think she still was. She wore scarlet shorts and a white tee shirt. Her upper arms and thighs were just beginning to pouch and pucker, but the skin on her face was marshmallow smooth and her green eyes were clear and sharp.

“Yes?” she said, her smile more than a formality but short of a flirtation.

“Mrs. Kelly?”

“Yes.”

“Is your husband home?”

“Arnold is at the club. Arnold is always at the club in the afternoon.” She looked me up and down, conducting, it seemed to me, an assessment. “Can I help you? Do I know you?”

“My name is Brady Coyne. I knew your husband when he was in baseball.” I gave her my disarming, lopsided, good-old-boy grin. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d look him up.”

Mrs. Kelly lifted into view a square-cut old-fashioned glass, which she had been holding discreetly at her side. She rattled it in front of my face, indicating it had been drained except for a few ice cubes. “It’s martini time,” she said. “Why don’t you come in and join me? He’ll be home in an hour or so.” She stepped back from the door expectantly.

“Oh, thanks, but I haven’t got much time. If you could just tell me how to find the club…?”

She shrugged, sucked a shrunken ice cube into her mouth, and crunched it loudly. “Back to the road, go right, take your third left and you’ll see the sign. The Wedgewood Country Club. You can’t miss it, with all those old ladies in pink shorts buzzing about in those silly little buggies hacking away at those garish orange balls. I’d look for him in the locker room. He likes to sit around in his underwear with all those sweaty men telling dirty stories and drinking beer and pretending he’s still in the big leagues.” She cocked her head at me. “Were you a ballplayer?”

I nodded vigorously. “Oh, sure. I played.”

She smiled. “I thought so. I can always tell.”

I thanked her for the directions and backed away from the door. When I had climbed into my car I looked back. She stood there, holding her glass aloft, wiggling her fingers at me and smiling with what I assumed was supposed to be seductive intent.

The Wedgewood Country Club, like the Fox Hill Estates, was clearly not designed to service the leisure pursuits of the vulgar mob. I wedged my BMW between a current model Fleetwood and a classic old Corvette, got directions to the men’s locker room from a veiny old guy in Bermuda shorts, and found Stump Kelly sitting with three other men at a table near the bar in the dark paneled room adjacent to the showers. The room was empty except for those four and the young man perched behind the bar watching television.

They were playing bridge. I pulled a chair close and sat near Kelly’s left elbow. He glanced at me, muttered, “Hiya, fella,” frowned, and returned his attention to the cards he held in front of him. He clenched a straight-stemmed unlit pipe in his teeth. A can of Budweiser sat beside him. He looked exactly as I remembered him—leathery seamed face, sharp little blue eyes, and a smooth hairless dome.

“
Three
spades, then, if you insist,” he said to the man across from him. “I ain’t gonna argue with you.”

The guy on Kelly’s left mumbled, “Pass,” and Kelly’s partner said, “Okay, then, four goddam spades. Your lead,” he added to the man at his left.

“I haven’t passed yet,” protested the fourth in a deep Harvard-cultured tone. “The rules stipulate—”

“You
gonna
pass?” interrupted Kelly.

“Of course.”

“Me, too,” said Kelly.

“Me three,” said his left-hand opponent.

“The rules
stipulate,
” mocked Kelly, “that you gotta make the goddam opening lead, then, Norman, and you better make a goddam good one cause this is for a seven-hundred rubber.”

“Don’t bully me, Arnold,” muttered Norman. He slid a card onto the table and Kelly laid his hand down in front of him.

“Nice,” said his partner.

“Betcher goddam ass,” said Kelly. He pushed himself back from the table and turned to peer at me. “Help ya, there, friend?”

“I’m Brady Coyne. We—”

“Hold it. Wait a minute.” Kelly held up his hand and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yeah. I got it. Donagan, right? You were Donagan’s agent. Friend of Sam Farina’s. Am I right?”

I grinned. “Right on the button.” I held out my hand and Kelly grasped it firmly.

“So. You playing golf, or what? Never saw you here before. Not a member, are you?”

“Actually I came to see you. Your wife told me I might find you here.”

“Was she sober?”

I shrugged. “Seemed to be.”

“Well, then, I’ll wait awhile before I go home. Hey, how ’bout a beer?”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I don’t want to take you away from your game.”

“The game’s over. Provided my partner doesn’t screw up this hand completely. We all gotta get back to our old ladies, soon’s they’ve had a few martinis and get human. So we’ll pound a coupla brews, huh?”

Kelly went to the bar and persuaded the kid behind it to abandon the rerun of “Get Smart” long enough to fetch us two cans of Bud. We took them to a table and Kelly fussed with his pipe, finally got it lit, and thrust his face at me through a cloud of perfumed smoke.

“You wanted to see me, huh? Something to do with Donagan? I heard about his kid. Damn tragedy. That what you wanna talk about?”

I took my time lighting a Winston before I answered him. “Not exactly,” I said carefully. “I wanted to ask you about some other men you scouted.” I spoke the names of the five ballplayers from Annie’s list, then looked at Stump Kelly. “What can you tell me about them?”

“Christ, what a question! I can tell you everything about them. I practically wiped their asses for them when I was birddogging them. You wanna know what brand of tobacco they chewed?”

“I want to know what they might have had in common with each other. And with Eddie Donagan.”

He puffed his pipe and stared at the ceiling. “Bello. Warrick. Halley. Bloom. Geralchik.” He sounded as if he were reading off a lineup. “Sure. I scouted them. Sox signed them. And they made it.” He turned his gaze to me. “And that’s it. Except for Donagan, they were the only ones who did. Not a goddam superstar in the bunch of ’em, though God knows when they were kids there wasn’t a one of ’em who didn’t have the tools. Not Stump Kelly’s fault they didn’t turn out better. Lookit Donagan, for Christ’s sake. How the hell was I supposed to know he was gonna be a head case?”

“They didn’t blame you, did they?”

He waved his hand. “Naw. But after a while, you know how it is, the fat guys behind the desks begin to wonder about old Stump. You know, maybe Kelly ain’t all that sharp, maybe Kelly ain’t got the instinct for a prospect’s mental makeup. Can’t judge their sense of the game, their attitude, how they react to pressure. Only one with the attitude was Geralchik, poor old Gus, he died, you know, and he maybe didn’t have the talent. But the rest of ’em?” Kelly took a long draught from his Budweiser.

“What about Bobo Halley?”

On the other side of the room the three bridge players burst into loud conversation. Kelly’s partner called over to him, “We made it. With an overtrick.”

Kelly raised his beercan toward him. “Good. They didn’t lead trumps, huh?”

The one they called Norman said, “It wouldn’t have mattered. If he’d played it properly you’d have had a slam. Which proficient bridge players would have bid.”

“There was no God damn slam in there,” said Kelly’s partner. “We did damn good to make five.”

The three men came over to our table. Kelly said, “This here is Brady Coyne. This is Norman, and Pete and Francis. Brady’s an attorney. Old friend of mine.”

I shook hands with each of them.

“D’you finesse that diamond, or what?” said Kelly to his partner, the one he’d introduced as Pete.

“Didn’t need to. Francis led one for us. That was the overtrick.”

“Good, good,” chuckled Kelly. He swiveled around and called to the bartender. “Give these boys a drink. Put it on my tab.”

The three men went to the bar. Kelly turned back to me. “Where were we?”

“I was asking about Bobo Halley.”

He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. Then he said, “Bobo was a pretty good ballplayer.”

“I meant, anything about him, you know, different?”

He shrugged. “A decent ballplayer, that’s all. I guess that makes him different from the others.”

Whether Stump Kelly knew about the pitcher’s gambling problems and felt he ought not to divulge it to me, or whether he had been kept in the dark about it, I couldn’t tell. I tried a different track. “He was killed in an automobile accident, I heard.”

“Yup. Damn shame, too. Listen. Why’re you asking me about these guys, anyway. What are they to you? This have something to do with Donagan’s kid, or what? Or are you still agenting for ballplayers?”

“No, I’m not agenting any more,” I said. I leaned across the table and lowered my voice. “But it is legal business, if you know what I mean. I can’t, you know, really talk about it. But any help you can give me…”

He nodded solemnly. “Oh, sure, I see. Of course. Anything I can do to help.”

I sat back. “Why don’t you just talk about these ballplayers, those five guys. Whatever comes into your head. How’s that?”

He placed his pipe on the table. “Sure. I can do that.”

He could do that, all right. He turned out to be quite a talker, and two hours and several Buds later he was only beginning to wind down. By that time my mind had begun wandering to the bowl of clam chowder that waited for me at Mildred’s in Hyannis, nearly an hour’s drive from where I sat at the Wedgewood Country Club in Chatham, and I had given up murmuring, “Hmm,” and, “Oh, yes,” into the occasional spaces Kelly left for me in his monologue. He told me nothing I hadn’t already learned from my reading or from Farley Vaughn. The only way I was going to rescue this silly trip to the Cape from the ranks of an utter wild goose chase was with that bowl of chowder.

By the time Stump Kelly lapsed into an abstracted and prolonged silence, his bridge partners had left the locker room, the bartender had switched the TV to the evening news and turned up the volume, and we had lined up ten empty red and white Budweiser cans on the table between us. I seized the opportunity to thank him and followed him to a row of urinals, where we stood side by side for a long time, staring at the tile wall directly before us.

I took my leave of Stump Kelly in the parking lot, where he climbed into a white Chevy sedan that seemed scaled much too large for him. I pointed my BMW toward Hyannis, not the least depressed by the realization that I had thoroughly wasted my afternoon. Nothing that Mildred’s chowder wouldn’t take care of.

I
BEAT JULIE TO
the office the next morning—my way of assuaging the guilt I couldn’t shake, despite some elegant rationalizations, at leaving Mrs. Bartlett and the rest of my clients on the lurch the previous afternoon. I gave Mr. Coffee a drink and switched him on, took the telephone off the answering machine, and strode purposefully to my desk, determined to put in a full, boring day of lawyering.

Julie had left one of her neat little stacks of new memos in the middle of my desk. “Mrs. Bartlett heartbroken. Rescheduled Thursday 2:00,” read the one on top. “Mr. Franklin insists on conference re Webb case. Call ASAP.” Doc Adams had called twice in the afternoon. “Questioning your priorities,” Julie had noted editorially. “Don’t forget Billy’s tuition payments,” read another.

And so it went. I shoved them aside and went back to the coffee maker, thanked it for its reliability (as opposed to my own, as Julie’s messages had succeeded in pointing out), and poured myself a black mugful.

When the telephone rang I automatically answered, “Hello,” before I remembered to add, “Brady L. Coyne, Attorney at Law.”

“Mr. Coyne, can we meet again?” I remembered her dark, tilted eyes, and her voice, even on the phone, accelerated the throb of pulse in my temples.

“Yes, of course,” I said quickly. “There are several things—”

“Please. Not now. Listen. Three o’clock today in the Sanctuary of the Old South Church. You know where that is. The last pew in the back on the left. Don’t be early. Don’t be late.”

“Okay, sure. Three o’clock. I hope you plan to—”

But she had hung up, and I was left with the brief memory of her voice, a sudden gust of cool scented air in an otherwise humid summer morning.

This time, I vowed, I wouldn’t let her off the hook. This time I would get some answers. I’d had plenty of cryptic clues, thank you. The names of five ballplayers meant nothing to me. It was time she told me what it was she wanted me to know about E.J. Donagan. It was time to get tough with her.

At a quarter of three that afternoon I told Julie I was going out for cigarettes and sauntered across Copley Square to the big hulking old stone church. I stopped at the corner to thumb through a
Field & Stream
at Maxie’s outdoor stall until my digital watch read 2:58, mindful that my instructions had been to be neither early nor late. Then I entered the dark coolness of the old church. The Sanctuary was on the first floor on the right. I entered it through the narrow doorway and paused just inside to allow my senses to adjust to the dim light and the moist musky odor of dead old souls. The dark oaken pews, the scrolled wood carved into the high vaulted ceiling, and the muted tinted light that filtered through stained-glass Bible scenes, all suggested a severe God presiding with harsh justice, and I felt, as I always do in places of worship, alien, unable to speak the language.