The Setup Man (12 page)

I believe we have found our man.

He turns right on Twelfth Place, heading toward the beach. When I round the corner, I see that he is already halfway down the block, almost to Ocean. The streets here are narrow and steep, and the sidewalk is grooved perpendicular to the road for traction. I gallop down the concrete incline as fast as I can in long, knee-crushing strides. There are coaches who swear that pitching is a lower-body phenomenon—that the torque of the hips provides the force that propels the ball, and the arm is just a little whip at the end. Could be. For my own sake, I hope they’re wrong.

At Ocean, the punk turns south for one block, then cuts left, away from the beach. I follow, almost losing my footing in the sandy intersection. He runs behind a public bus, and for a minute I fear I have lost him—that he has paid his buck fifty or whatever and given me the slip. But when the bus pulls away, I see him disappearing through the front door of a Mexican restaurant called El Dingo. I push my way into the restaurant, filled at that hour with lunchers from the nearby office buildings, men and women in pressed khakis with magnetic badges clipped to their belts and blouses.

“Where is he?” I say to the room.

The diners go silent, the cowards, before a chunky gal in an asymmetrical coral dress points to the kitchen door and says, “He went that way.”

I nod my thanks and charge on. The kitchen is bright, hot, and steamy. It smells strongly of beans and cumin. One of the cooks’ cell phones is playing a
norteño
love song, something about a heart as big as the moon. Everyone stops what they are doing. Peppers burn on the grill. Fajitas sizzle in cast-iron skillets.

“Who the hell are you?” says a bald man in a stained white apron. Like everyone else in the kitchen, he is Latino, but he is not my guy.

“Give him up,” I say, “or I’ll close you down. I’m the health inspector.”

There is a crash behind the dishwasher—one of those tall rack-load jobs—and our guy squirts out into the room. I reach to grab him, but the floor is wet, and I am standing in the only spot in the room not covered by a black rubber mat. I go down hard. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the suspect climb out the window onto the roof of the next building.

“He’s not the fucking health inspector,”
the pudgy cook says in Spanish.
“Look at him.”

I look at the bastard and say, in Spanish,
“Maybe I’m not the health inspector, maybe I’m from Immigration. You want to try me?”

This silences the room. Can someone please tell me why it is always such a shock to Latin dudes when I speak Spanish? The language is only spoken by—what?—half a billion people worldwide? If they are looking for a secret code, they would do better to learn Lithuanian.

“Tell me who he is,” I say.

Nobody says a word for a minute, and then one of the line cooks, a skinny kid with a fuzzy lip and enormous, satellite-dish ears, says,
“I saw him once at Redondo Beach Pier. He’s a gangster.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He is! Drugs, guns, girls—business.”

“A businessman, huh?”

“Yeah.”

I scrape myself up off the kitchen floor. My ass is wet and my left ankle hurts. I hobble through the swinging door into the dining room and walk straight to the exit, avoiding eye
contact. Years ago I would have said something to the people in the room, made a joke, something to save face. Now I know better. More often than not, the best strategy is to get the hell out, fast.

I walk up the main drag a few blocks, heading back toward Luck’s street. I am not sure if I believe the cook’s assessment of our little friend. He may have stolen George’s girl from her last pimp, but drugs and guns are something else entirely. Something like 95 percent of the drug trade is controlled by a handful of Mexican syndicates. Same with guns, which run north to south, opposite the stream of drugs. Both are economies of scale. The flesh trade does not work that way. Pimping is still a mom-and-pop business. Each girl needs to be turned out individually, broken like a horse, and that takes time. You cannot simply land an unmarked 737 on an airstrip in Colombia and fill it up with hookers.

I turn onto Luck’s street and walk downhill, slowly this time. My ankle might be fine, or not—it is hard to tell. There are no nerve endings in cartilage.

I find the Porsche where I left it, the radio still blaring. Jesse Ursino raises his voice with the caller: “The root problem—are you listening?—the root problem is not that the McCourts got divorced. It is that they were married in the first place! Marriage is a time bomb, people! Major League Baseball should never allow married couples to own teams. Owners should be bachelors, widows, or faceless corporations, period.”

I can’t help smiling. Jesse has always had a talent for stating what everyone is thinking but would never say.

I reach in to open the little toy door of the Porsche, and then something catches my eye. A flash of white in front of Luck’s house. One look and I recognize our guy. In broad daylight, he is trying to jimmy the screen off one of George’s front windows.

Rather than risk another high-speed footrace, I duck behind the car and observe him for a minute. He manages to pry the screen off, placing it neatly next to the wall. Next he reaches into his back pocket and takes out an object like a double-A battery with a black wire hanging off one end. It looks like one of those microphones they clip on your shirt for TV interviews. He places the device in the lower right corner of the window, fiddles with it a moment, then moves to the left side and places another. When he is satisfied, he replaces the screen and stands back. For at least ten seconds he just stands there, admiring his work. Then he walks off.

I turn off the radio, lock the Porsche, and walk over to Luck’s front door. I have decided that I will knock, just in case any neighbors are watching, and then check the window. I walk up the steps, open the screen door, and reach for the knocker. There is something stuck under it—a tiny envelope of thick, expensive paper, like the reply card in a wedding invitation. Inside the envelope is a business card with a headshot of a pretty Latina. There’s a phone number, but no explanation. I assume it’s a gift from an overzealous realtor and am about to toss it away when I recognize the name under the digits: Alejandra Sol. This is one of the names Bethany gave me—an alias of the dead girl in Frankie’s car. I look more closely. The back of the card is a full-color photo of the same woman in a bikini. Her body is turned away from the camera, and she is looking back over one shoulder. She has glossy dark hair and a gleam in her eye that tells you she’s selling much more than condos.

I raise the knocker and give it a few good whacks for appearance. I take another look at the card. It might be a coincidence. “Alejandra” is a common name. Two of my colleagues on the Bay Dogs’ pitching staff have girlfriends named Alejandra. And “Sol” is pretty common, too; there was a guy who
played for Milwaukee named Pedro Sol. He could never hit my changeup, bless his little heart.

But what if it’s not a coincidence? What if this is the same girl who died with Frankie Herrera? It seems impossible. Even the most frequent-flying whore couldn’t serve johns in L.A. and San José at the same time. But if there was a network of girls, up and down the state, marketed to certain clients …

Or what if she marketed herself exclusively to professional baseball players? Why not? We certainly have the money, and we’re fairly discreet. Not to mention lonely.

I am coming down Luck’s front stairs, head full of theories, when I run into the little pimp. He looks surprised to see me here, which I can hardly believe, because what kind of moron returns three times to a location he knows is being watched? I reach back, ball up my right fist, and aim for his nose. My dad taught me to punch like boxer, with dexterity in both hands. Knowing how to hit with the right arm became a real asset later, as soon as it became clear that the left was going to be my meal ticket. When I connect with the kid’s face, there is the familiar crunch, and he doubles over. Blood trickles through his fingers.

I know I should beat his ass on principle. The little shit made me run halfway across Manhattan Beach. He deserves worse that what I’ve given him. But I am unarmed, and I do not feel strongly enough about teaching him a lesson to risk further injury. Here’s another boxing lesson from Dad: just knock out your opponent, don’t kill him. You don’t get extra points for beating on a corpse.

“What was that for?” the kid says. His voice is surprisingly low, a growl seasoned by nicotine. I notice grays mixed into his buzz and realize he is not a kid after all. He just acts like one.

“Where’s Miguel?” I say.

“What do you care, bro? This is business.”

“Some business,” I say. “Planting microphones in people’s windows—what kind of business is that?”

“They ain’t microphones. They’re like … firecrackers. I flip the remote, the glass breaks, that’s it. I wasn’t going to burn the house down or nothing.”

He has managed to get his nose to stop bleeding, so I pop it again.

“Hey! What do you want from me? I’ll take the pyros down, just leave me alone.”

“First you leave my buddy alone.”

“Fine, bro, but he ain’t who you think he is.”

“You mean his girl? I know all about her.” I pull out the business card and wave it in front of the punk’s face.

He spits a wad of blood and snot on the concrete. “Look, I’m just paid to send a message, that’s all.”

“And what’s this message? That the price has gone up?”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you have new management.” He tips his head back, pinches the bridge of his damaged nose. “You’re not going to clock me no more, right?”

“Leave my friend alone. He is happy with the girl he’s got, and he’s not interested in paying more.”

“Fine. My boss won’t be happy, but fine.”

“Who’s your boss?”

The pimpito shakes his head. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this.”

I raise my fist. He winces.

“Tell me his name,” I say.

“You want to die? Because that’s what is going to happen. If my boss knew what I told you already, both of us would be dead, like tonight.”

“Glad I’m not the only one in danger.”

“Tell your friend he can keep his ho. Same price. But don’t ask no more questions—not you or him.”

I keep watch as the little shit struts to the window, pops off the screen, and puts the little remote-controlled firecrackers back in the pocket of his Dickies.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I yell after him.

He walks away slowly in a kind of impotent defiance, his two hands in the air with middle fingers extended and crossed like six-guns. The irony is that he has big hands, bigger than mine. With a little discipline, he might have had a career.

Though I was hoping the unlocked bathroom door meant I would be invited for dinner, it turns out to be just another of Ginny’s half-wrought gestures, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. At six o’clock I am back in the house in Santa Monica, Simon’s pocket rocket returned to the garage.

“Can I take Izzy out to dinner?” I ask.

“Please, Mom,” our daughter begs. “I haven’t seen Dad since the All-Star break!”

“You know it’s not easy to see your father during the season.”

“But, Mom, he’s standing right here.”

I am standing, to be precise, in my ex-wife’s haunted living room. The house actually has two living rooms—or parlors, I guess you’d call them—to the left and right of the entry hall. We are in the left parlor, which Ginny has decorated with a Day of the Dead theme. One wall is completely covered with painted papier-mâché skulls, or
calaveras
, that Ginny bought in bulk from a Mexican artist on the Venice boardwalk. Each skull is about the size of a baby’s head, and if that was not eerie enough, some of them are painted with commercial logos and other symbols of contemporary life. Not surprisingly (since the skulls were purchased in Los Angeles), there is one with
the San José Bay Dogs logo, the interlocking yellow-and-black “SJ,” on its sparkling black dome. That one has blood running from its eyes.

“Fine,” Ginny says, “but don’t go far. And no driving—the headlights don’t work in the Porsche.”

“We’ll walk,” I say.

There is a trattoria on Montana where I eat occasionally after visits with Izzy—other afternoons that might have led to dinner invitations but did not.

We set off into the Santa Monica night. Izzy is pumped, adrenalized. For her it is a treat of epic proportions to be out for dinner with her peripatetic father. I hope this never changes, but I cannot see how it won’t. Because I travel for a living, I have bought myself a little more of her adulation than other fathers enjoy. If I were living at home, or even divorced but readily accessible, she would be over me by now.

Then there’s the investigation thing, the other side of my professional life. I used to feel dirty—doing what I do, solving the kinds of problems I solve, and then spending time with my daughter. How else could you feel after spending a four-game series flying back and forth between Miami and Santo Domingo, tailing the left fielder’s wife, only to discover that the left fielder is banging his thirteen-year-old cousin? How do you then spend a weekend with your own thirteen-year-old without feeling that some part of you has been tainted by association with these predators? How do you not feel contagious?

Short of re-engineering the male endocrine system, there is little I can do. It should not surprise anyone that the hormonal imbalances that cause a thirty-year-old man to seduce and deflower his teenage cousin are the same ones that allow him to turn around on a baseball thrown ninety-five miles per hour and drive it 450 feet—and to do this once every four games,
on average, for ten years straight. That’s a valuable endocrine abnormality, a multi-million-dollar freak show.

And also a business opportunity. Just ask Alejandra Sol.

“I thought we could go to Angelo Mio,” I tell Izzy. “You like the pasta there, right?”

“When I was like ten.”