Stranger in the Room: A Novel (33 page)

“I never could resist a hot dog at the ballpark,” Rauser told me. That might have been true, but I knew he wanted to check out the vendor inside the trailer. We lined up, took a step at a time, until he was forking out eight dollars to the guy inside with the brown eyes, a cap that showed brown hair at the temples, late twenties, early thirties, wide shoulders.

We squeezed mustard and dill relish on fat hot dogs. Me, I’m not really a hot dog fan, but some food is about the experience. Like popcorn at movies. Rauser said what I was thinking. “He fits the body type and the coloring. And he’s parked right here where two vics frequented.” He got on his phone. “Anything come up today on a food vendor called Burger Dog Bob?” He waited. “Okay, double-check his event permits for the Stone Mountain/Clarkston area. And send me a picture. I want to know if the guy that made my hot dog owns the business.” He disconnected.

We balanced food and drinks, headed toward the bleachers at the field where the Cardinals were about to take on the Midtown Bulldogs. “No felony record on the owner. I’ll know in a sec if that’s him on the grill. He’s registered a thirty-eight. No nine.”

“What’s his name?”

“Robert Crammer.”

“Robert? Fatu’s Mr. R?”

“Let’s hope.” He looked around. “It’s organized out here. Takes a lot of people to pull this off. Kept us busy all afternoon.”

We found space at the end of the fifth row and sat down. “Have you noticed almost everybody’s white?” I whispered.

“I don’t look at race, Keye.” He stuffed about a third of a hot dog in his mouth, then proved he had no problem talking with his mouth full. “I’ve evolved past that.”

“I can see that.” I smiled. Why his bad manners were attractive to
me can be explained only by a flood of pheromones. Or a chemical imbalance.

He washed his hot dog down with iced tea from a red plastic cup with a Coca-Cola logo. He rattled the ice in the cup, then elbowed me. “Kelly’s granddaughter’s down there with her husband.”

I recognized them from the interview tapes. They were two rows below us. They’d both been there that day waiting for Donald Kelly to arrive for his ninetieth-birthday party. They said the volunteer driver, Abraam Balasco, had rung up to say he was in the lobby with Kelly. They’d waited in the hall for the elevator with everyone else, fifteen or twenty people with plastered-on smiles prepared to sing happy birthday as soon as the doors split open. But the elevator never came. Finally, Phil Sobol, who is married to Kelly’s granddaughter, had gone down to the lobby. He’d found Balasco unconscious and his wife’s grandfather missing.

Boys in clean uniforms and baseball mitts sprinted onto the field. The coaches shook hands, then went back to their caged-in wooden benches. I gave Rauser the rest of my hot dog and we sat for a while just taking it in—the vendors, the parents, the coaches, the kids. Was this where a killer had first noticed Troy Delgado and Donald Kelly? What was the attraction? Troy Delgado’s exceptional talent? But what about Kelly? And how did they connect with Fatu Doe? And my cousin, whom he had chosen not to kill?
Sometimes it’s just more fun to watch her kill herself
. How long had he watched Miki coming apart, then piecing it back together? The fact that she was out searching for twisters spoke directly to her suicidal tendencies, in my opinion. I’d been caught in a tornado once on the highway. I had made it to an overpass, parked underneath, got out of my car, and climbed up a concrete incline to a covered ledge. Two more cars stopped, and I found myself waiting on that ledge with four strangers—a man and his young daughter and a sixtysomething couple that looked like they’d just left the buffet at Shoney’s. We’d all seen the funnel cloud barreling toward the interstate, gaining width, swirling debris. And then hail the size of walnuts spattered the ground. My ears started to pop a moment before it sounded like a seven-sixty-seven was sitting down on top of us. The air turned black. I couldn’t catch my breath.
The man next to me was fighting to keep his little girl from being sucked out of his arms. Sixty seconds of terror and uncontrolled chaos reminded us all how small we were, how fleeting our time. Come to think of it, that was the first time my father had to put my car back together, but it would not be the last.

We moved down to an empty space next to Levi Sobol’s parents. The welcome mat didn’t exactly roll out. “Lieutenant. What are you doing here?” Phil Sobol asked. Neither of them smiled. A follow-up visit from a cop after crime and violence rocks your family must feel like the other shoe dropping. The Sobols had that look on their faces.

Rauser feigned disinterest, said he was here on another matter, just wanted to say hello. He introduced me casually, no explanation.

“Is it about that boy on the Blue Jays?” Virginia Sobol wanted to know. “It’s horrible. You think someone out here did it?”

Rauser was looking out at the game, tapping crushed ice into his mouth from the cup. Mr. Casual. He side-glanced Virginia Sobol. “You knew him?”

“Everyone did,” she answered. She was brown-eyed and a little plump, dark hair tucked behind her ears, and wore a Cardinals cap. “He was
the
major threat out here. There wasn’t a batter in the league that wasn’t terrified of him.”

“The kid was a machine,” Phil Sobol told us. “Thirteen years old and he’s consistently throwing at eighty miles an hour. Everybody that wasn’t a Blue Jay fan hated that kid.” His astonished wife slapped his leg.

“It gets a little competitive out here. Parents don’t like seeing their kids lose,” she explained defensively.

Phil Sobol clapped his hands. “Show ’em what you got, Levi,” he bellowed.

“It can get heated from time to time,” Mrs. Sobol told us. “But I don’t know one person who would have laid a hand on that child or any other child.”

Wood cracking against a ball turned our heads. Once you’ve heard it, you never forget the sound—music to a baseball lover. Levi had sent one flying into left field. We were on our feet. It was easy to see how you could get caught up. As we held our collective breath, he rounded first and slid into second base. One set of bleachers roared;
the other heckled. He strayed a few yards from base. The pitcher looked over his shoulder, faked a windup, then spun and hurled the ball to the second baseman. Levi slid in, hands first.

“Out,”
the base umpire yelled. Levi Sobol’s coach was on the field and in the ump’s face in fifteen seconds flat. The umpire’s hat came off and hit the ground, revealing a shiny clean-shaven skull. He scooped up his cap, banged it angrily against his pant leg, then shoved it back on his head. Both bleachers were on their feet. It felt like a schoolyard just before a fight breaks out. Phil Sobol and other parents were yelling suggestions at the field and generally impugning the umpire’s vision. The coach kicked sand at the ump’s shoes. The umpire pressed a pointed finger against the coach’s chest. Their faces were too close. Someone ran out and tugged the coach off the field. Levi Sobol walked calmly back to the dugout. The kids, it seemed, were the only ones who hadn’t totally lost their cool.

“Friendly game, huh?” Rauser whispered.

I thought about my dad putting my brother and me in his pickup truck and hauling us to games long before we were old enough to understand the sport. But we did understand the vibe, the food and the crowds, the over-the-top excitement from a normally quiet and unemotional father who’d leap to his feet and cup his hands around his mouth and offer loud, unsolicited advice to both players and coaches.

I leaned forward once the drama had subsided and spoke to Virginia Sobol. “I understand your grandfather was a baseball fan. I’m sorry for your loss. He must have really enjoyed coming out to see your son play.”

“Oh he did,” she said. “Mother didn’t really want Granddad getting out too much. She worried he’d fall out here. But we couldn’t keep him away. If we couldn’t pick him up he’d just find another way. He’d call a volunteer or take MARTA or call a cab.” She shook her head, smiling. “I think Levi was the only one who could get along with my grandfather. He was sick, and he’d gotten mean. But he and my son loved one another.”

Rauser was staring out at the field, but I knew his cop’s brain was doing sixty-five. Had Kelly’s family arranged the old man’s murder? What would connect Troy Delgado to that scenario? Had one of the parents gotten too heated up over Troy Delgado’s super-charged
pitching arm? If so, what connected Donald Kelly and Fatu Doe and Miki? I knew he’d put cabdrivers on his mental list. His detectives would soon discover what companies and which drivers came out to this ballpark and when. No one, no possibility had been excluded.

His phone went off, and he looked at the screen. “Robert Crammer,” he whispered, and handed it to me. I looked at the photograph of the man who had served us the hot dogs.

We said good-bye to the Sobols and ambled around a little. Rauser wanted to get a feel for the place, work our way casually back to the food vendor. I struck up a conversation with the woman behind a collapsible table covered with folded T-shirts. She had a metal cash box open on the table, flimsy, drugstore variety. Clearly, security at the ballpark wasn’t a big issue. She was a volunteer, she told me, along with several of the parents. Everything sold under the wooden canopy was to help buy new uniforms. I shelled out seventeen dollars for a T-shirt and watched Rauser talking to one of the parents who was selling canned Cokes and bottled water from a cooler of ice.

“I heard one of the players was killed,” I whispered in a gossipy way as she handed me change for a twenty. She then explained how awful it was for everyone to think something like that could happen in a “good” neighborhood.

I felt Rauser’s hand on my shoulder and noticed he’d turned his baseball cap to the backward position, which meant he was feeling cocky. He gave the T-shirt seller a winning smile. And she gave him one back. I let him have the moment.

We crossed over the poured concrete of the pavilion. A man in a stained white apron and a Braves baseball cap that matched Rauser’s was leaning against the concession trailer watching the field where Levi Sobol’s team played. I noticed Robert Crammer’s shoes right off—thick-soled and black.

Brown eyes cut from the field and tracked our approach. Was this the man who had twisted a piece of fine rope around a child’s neck, the man who had murdered a sick old man and hung his body from a door frame? Was this the man who nearly killed me and Neil today?

“Must get hot in that hot dog trailer,” Rauser remarked in a friendly way.

“Y’all ready for another?”

“You Bob?” Rauser asked.

“That’s me.” The man shook a cigarette out of a red-and-white box, lit it, dropped the match. His eyes landed on me, then back to Rauser. He was close to Rauser’s height, doughy but powerful.

“I’m thinking about a burger this time,” Rauser said.

Bob crushed his cigarette under his heel and opened the trailer door, went up metal drop-down steps to go inside. He pulled the door closed behind him.

“You make ’em yourself, Bob?” Rauser was still shooting the shit with him.

“Every morning.” Bob opened a big cooler, the kind ice-cream vendors use. He pulled out a hamburger patty wrapped in paper and dropped it on the grill. It sizzled like bacon in a skillet.

“Must be hard to make a living,” Rauser said. “You gotta do a lot of these events, I bet.” He covered his burger with pickled jalapeños and yellow mustard and ate it while Bob bragged for five minutes about how successful he was. The mobile vending business was impervious to downward shifts in the economy, he claimed. He owned two concession trailers and two stationary versions of Burger Dog Bob’s in shopping malls. He handled events all over the metro area.

Rauser demolished his burger in about five bites. Rauser ate like a cop—fast, on the go, never sure when he’d have time for another meal. He balled up his napkins and burger tray and tossed them into a bag-lined event bin. “Hey, honey, how ’bout taking my picture with Bob here before he gets too rich and famous to be bothered? Come on out, would ya, Bob?”

Crammer came out of his trailer, wiped his hands on his fry-cook apron. Rauser threw an arm around him. I backed up so I could get the whole package, Bob head-to-thick-soled-shoes, the trailer, the logo. Robert Crammer was a thick, powerful man. The victims shared a certain physical vulnerability—young, elderly, female. So the killer’s selection process was designed to satisfy not only emotional needs and fantasy behaviors but certain practicalities as well. He wanted to be able to physically dominate them.

I held out my camera phone and looked at the two of them through the display. Rauser crossed his eyes just as the tiny shutter opened and closed. It was not only the picture Rauser’s detectives would later
enlarge and circulate through the department as a way to torment him, they’d hang it on their suspect board. The cropped version along with the driver’s-license photo Williams had sent to Rauser’s phone would be shown to Balasco, the Kelly family and their neighbors, everyone at the assisted-living facility, drivers, cabbies, the Delgado family and their neighbors, the staff at the Majestic Diner, the Midtown building supply. I messaged both photos to Miki’s new number before we had reached the car.

My phone rang. Neil’s name came up. “You’re awake,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“What happened, Keye? They took a bullet out of my leg.”

“I’ll explain everything. I’m on my way.”

  
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