Green Monster (4 page)

“You know how the press is,” Heather said. “They'd start questioning everything that's happened here since 2004.”

“We beat the Rockies so easily, they'd probably start investigating that one, too,” Kenwood said.

“The fans would stay with you.”

“If anyone's more cynical than the Boston writers, it's the Boston fans,” Kenwood said. “On top of everything else that's happened to this franchise, a thrown World Series would be ten times worse. I can't put our city and our fans through that.”

“Any reason to think it's true?” Sam asked. He held Kenwood in his gaze while he took another sip of his bourbon.

“None,” Kenwood said. “We won that trophy fair and square.”

“Are you sure?” Sam asked. “Maybe the Babe knows something you don't.”

“That's your professional advice—that we should pay this guy off?” Heather said.

“Can you afford it?”

“Theoretically, I can,” Kenwood said. “But $50,000,000 is a lot of money, even for me, Mr. Skarda. And it would be difficult to transfer a sum like that to someone else without having to explain to the government what it was for.”

“What if you told this guy to piss up a rope?”

“Then maybe he goes to the press, like he's threatening to do.”

“We'd lose more in gate receipts, advertising and broadcast revenues than he's asking for,” Heather said. “This season we're getting $300,000 per half-inning on those rotating ads behind home plate. If this becomes public, who's going to pay us those kinds of prices?”

“Then it sounds like it would be cheaper to pay him.”

“We didn't bring you out here to advise us to pay off an extortionist,” Heather said.

“I haven't advised you to do anything.”

Sam was starting to feel irritated that Heather kept making premature assumptions, like the smartest kid in class trying to get one step ahead of the teacher.

“We're just talking through the scenarios here,” Sam said. “Now, let's say, for the sake of argument, that you give this Babe his $50,000,000. If the Series really was fixed, a payoff won't change that. Somebody will still know what really happened—maybe a lot of somebodies.”

Kenwood sighed and got up to pour himself a drink. He asked Heather if she wanted anything. She declined with a little sideways wave of her hand. There was a casual familiarity between them that transcended the standard boss-employee relationship.

“What I really want is for this to go away,” Kenwood said. He returned to the couch. “Everything's good now. For the first time in four generations, this franchise doesn't feel as though some sort of hex is hanging over it. We brought optimism back to Boston.”

“Some people say you've become a little arrogant.”

“If so, we've earned it. But everything we've done will be ruined if this gets out.”

No one said it, but the thought hung in the air among the three of them: That “we” was really an “I.” If this scandal broke, no more Lucky Louie. His days as a hero would be over.

“What do you want me to do?” Sam said.

“Find out who sent this note. Find out if it's true. If it is, I guess we'll have to face up to that somehow. But if it isn't, I want proof, and I want this guy in jail. Quietly, if possible.”

“It's tough to prove a negative. I can't prove to you that I didn't read a magazine on the flight out here.”

“But millions of people watched that World Series,” Heather said. “No one was paying attention to you on the plane.”

“You'd be surprised. I caught several admiring glances from the flight attendants. Most of them were women.”

Heather shook her head and looked away.

“Who else have you talked to?” Sam asked Kenwood.

“The only people who know about this letter are sitting here now. And my wife, Katherine. Paul, my driver, has heard some of my phone conversations, so he knows something is up, but he hasn't seen the extortion note.”

“Your club president and general manager don't know about this?”

“No.”

“So why did you tell Ms. Canby here?”

Heather squared her shoulders and assumed a convincingly offended expression.

“I tell her everything about my business,” Kenwood said. “I couldn't run it without her. She's a graduate of Harvard Business School. Don't be put off by her legs, Sam.”

“Never crossed my mind.”

“I couldn't keep this completely to myself. I needed to be able to talk to someone I can trust.”

“Besides Mrs. Kenwood?”

Kenwood nodded.

“Someone who knows this business as well as I do. Someone who works here every day and knows how much this could hurt us.”

“Mr. Kenwood and I decided that our best approach was to investigate this note quietly, together,” Heather said.

“It's going to be hard to find out anything if we can't tell anyone what we're trying to find out,” Sam said.

“I know,” Kenwood said. “That's why I called David Porter at Augusta National.”

“You're a member?”

“Yes, for almost thirty years. I liked how you handled yourself at the Masters, but I wanted to be sure that you could be trusted to keep your mouth shut, so I called David. He recommended you without hesitation.”

“There were lots of other cops working on that case. I just happened to be the one who was there at the right time.”

“He's so modest, Lou,” Heather said.

“Never mind. Sam, I believe you can help us now, or I wouldn't have sent for you.”

For the next hour, Sam talked over the facts of the situation with Kenwood and Heather. Neither of them had ever heard Sox manager Gil Mahaffey or any of the players even suggest that the Cardinals—who went into the Series as a very slight underdog—had not tried their best in that Series sweep. Yet the writers and broadcasters who covered that Series were unanimous that the Cards did not play as well as they'd been expected to. They'd booted easy plays, missed signs, had runners picked off, hit poorly with runners on base, and their pitchers had been hammered.

In particular, the Cardinals' two best players, Ivan Hurtado and Alberto Miranda, had played badly. Hurtado, an All-Star right fielder, hit a home run in Game One, but was thrown out stealing three times, dropped a fly ball, misplayed several others, and hit only .211. After the Series, the Cardinals decided they didn't want to try to sign him to a long-term deal and traded him to the Red Sox for pitching prospects.

As disappointing as Hurtado's play was, he'd been stellar compared to National League Most Valuable Player Alberto Miranda. Miranda had been the first major league player since Babe Ruth to regularly play a position in the field when he wasn't pitching. He'd won 23 games as a starting pitcher, batted .328 with 27 home runs while playing 120 games in the field, and had gone to the mound from his third base position to post three saves late in the season. He'd made the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
, heralded as the vanguard of a new kind of player, who would actually be a throwback to the multi-position players of baseball's early days. Writers kept predicting that Miranda would break down physically as the season progressed, but if anything, he seemed to get stronger as the Cardinals leaned on him more and more—that is, until the World Series. He batted just .188 with three singles and no RBIs, and he was shelled in his two starts. Worse, he'd thrown two balls away on potential double play grounders that could have got the Cards out of big innings.

The Cardinals, and the reporters who covered them, wrote off Miranda's poor performance to exhaustion from the supreme effort it had taken to get his team to the Series. In retrospect, it should have been expected, they said. The following season, Miranda went back to his normal workload, starting 30 games on the mound and playing third base when he didn't pitch. He was among the league leaders in both wins and home runs; all along, however, Miranda's name had been linked to steroid rumors. No one could believe a modern baseball player—even one as young and strong as Miranda—could excel at both hitting and pitching. A year after the Series, the Cardinals allowed Miranda to sign a four-year, $60,000,000 free-agent deal with the Dodgers, the team that had initially signed him and brought him to the big leagues as a skinny twenty-year-old.

The dismal World Series performances by Hurtado and Miranda had been forgotten in the lingering euphoria over Boston's long-awaited championship. But in light of the extortion note from Babe Ruth, they had to be considered prime suspects.

“But why would they have done that?” Heather said. “What did they have to gain?”

“Same reason the Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series to the Reds,” Kenwood said. “Gamblers paid them to lose.”

“Wasn't it obvious?” Heather said.

“I know you probably think I was there to see it, but I wasn't,” Kenwood said, smiling slightly. “I do know that observers at the time were divided. Some didn't see anything suspicious. The White Sox manager, on the other hand, was sure something was wrong.”

Sam had read about it, too. Eventually some of the players admitted to throwing games, and eight were thrown out of baseball for life. “No Gambling” has been baseball's Number One rule ever since.

Still, this case didn't add up. Those eight White Sox players were bribed with $10,000 apiece, which was more than their yearly salaries. But that was almost a century ago. Miranda and Hurtado were both making somewhere around $15,000,000 per year. They'd clear $50,000,000 in just over three seasons. On the free agent market, their next contracts could easily be worth over $100,000,000. Why would they get involved in something like this?

“Could be blackmail,” Sam said. “If a player was using steroids, and somebody could prove it…”

“He might do something stupid to avoid being exposed,” Kenwood said.

“What are the chances Hurtado's using?”

“I've never heard anything about it,” Kenwood said. “Maybe he is, but he looks normal enough.”

The first thing Sam had to do was get in touch with gamblers and bookies to find out if anything unusual had happened to the betting lines during the Red Sox-Cardinals World Series. He wouldn't have to tell them too much.

“I can start looking into this tonight,” Sam said. “Maybe there's nothing to it.”

“Be very careful what you say, and to whom,” Kenwood said. “If this leaks out, I'll hold you responsible.”

He stared steadily at Sam the way he must have stared down hundreds of business competitors over mahogany desktops. Sam had been pleased to discover that he was now considered a go-to guy in the high-finance sporting world. Earning that status had almost cost him his life, and could be lost quickly if he bungled this case.

“We understand each other,” Sam said.

“Good,” Kenwood replied. “Now, I want you to be my guest for tomorrow night's game. Sit in my suite with me and Katherine. I'd like you to get a feel for this franchise.”

“I've been to Fenway many times, Lou.”

“Oh?”

“I went to college up in Hanover.”

“Dartmouth man,” Kenwood nodded. “And you became a cop?”

“Like my dad.”

“He must have set a powerful example.”

“He did.”

“Paul will pick you up at five sharp, in front of your hotel.”

Sam put his drink on the table and stood to go, but Kenwood and Heather remained seated.

“There's one other thing,” Kenwood said. “I want Heather to go everywhere you go, and be kept informed of everything you learn. If you have to leave town, she goes with you. She has my full confidence.”

Sam looked at Heather, who clearly recognized that Sam wouldn't like the arrangement.

“Wait a minute, Lou,” Sam said. “I don't work that way. When I was a cop, I knew my partners had the same training I had. I could count on them to have my back, and not make dumb mistakes that put us both in danger.”

“Heather's an extremely competent young woman, Sam.”

“I'm sure she is—no offense intended, Ms. Canby—but this work can be dangerous. Has she ever been in a fight, or been in a car chase, or had a gun pointed at her?”

“Are you expecting that kind of trouble?” Kenwood asked.

“That's just it—I have no idea what to expect. I have to be prepared for anything, and I can't worry about the safety of some desk jockey.”

“Desk jockey?” Heather said, her eyes flashing. “Listen, I was on the ECAC women's crew champions, I've run the Boston Marathon three times, I'm a skeet shooter…”

“Yeah, and you ride English-style equestrian, and you studied fencing in Europe,” Sam cut in. “Great, but none of that is going to help me find Babe Ruth, or keep somebody from putting a bullet through both of us.”

Sam worked alone now, and liked it that way. It allowed him to be in complete control of his movements and his responses. He doubted that Heather was equipped to do anything to help him, but she was definitely equipped to distract him.

“Sorry, Sam, but this is the way it's got to be,” Kenwood said. “It's too much money and too much scandal to risk if I let you go out on your own. I'm too old to follow you around—much as I'd like to—but Heather can handle anything that comes up.”

I'll bet, Sam nearly said out loud. He was tempted to walk away from the job. A case like this was the ultimate dark alley, and he couldn't begin to guess what he'd find at the other end. But he'd liked being the cop who brought down the bad guy at Augusta; it made him feel alive and valuable, in a way only aggressive investigative work could. He couldn't face the idea of returning to Minneapolis and tailing Beth Cheslak from motel to motel. Working for the Red Sox was almost like being called up to the majors again. Sam wanted this client.