The Setup Man (14 page)

“No, I’m really not. But it’s kind of you to say so.”

Luck leaves me at the door of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown L.A. Since they opened the Staples Center down the street, there seems to be at least one professional sports team staying in the hotel at all times—baseball, basketball, hockey, whatever. A few of us have talked about forming an investment group and buying the place, closing it down to the public. The talk always stalls over the issue of groupies. They would still be allowed in, right? Dennis Rodman once famously said that life in the NBA was 50 percent sex. He was dating Madonna at the time, so you can adjust his figures however you like. But at the risk of stating the obvious, the fact is that sex is a big part of professional sports. How could it not be? We are men living out our boyhood fantasies. Once you have stepped to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, runners at second and third, your team down by one (does this sound familiar, gentlemen?)—once you have actually lived that fantasy, what’s next? The league and the players’ association like to paint a picture of baseball players as hardworking family men, and that is true for some percentage of us. But the vast majority of ballplayers couldn’t make a marriage work if they were coming home every night on the six-thirty train. A hundred days a year on the road? Forget it. Those “behind the scenes” ESPN
documentaries made a big deal out of players packing suitcases, kissing their children, a big teary montage. Those films are moving, but they aren’t entirely truthful. The wives know the score. They know what they are getting into. It is a pretty nice bargain, if you think about it: a big home in some sunny spring-training city, large enough so your mom and your sisters can come and stay as long as they like. Five-figure deposits appearing in your bank account every couple of weeks. A bunch of kids to play with if you’re into that, and if not, a staff of nannies to watch the little brats. Really, it is the best possible widowhood you can imagine. There might even be a pool boy or a yoga instructor to take the edge off the loneliness.

The problem from the players’ perspective is the sketchiness of it all, the sneaking around, the threat of disease and paternity suits. Hence the plan for the Bonaventure. We would close it down to the public, screen the staff and the, um,
staff
, and
voilà
—no team visiting Los Angeles would stay anywhere else. And L.A. would be just the beginning: there could be one of these in every big-league town. Sam Malone be damned, this is my retirement plan. Or should be.

I walk through the brightly lit lobby past a gaggle of young women in Bay Dogs jerseys. I know even without seeing the number on their backs that they are “Diggies”—Modigliani fans.

“Is he a Bay Dog?” I hear a girl whisper as I walk by.

“No, he’s too old,” her friend answers.

I am waiting for the elevator when I hear my name. I turn to find Skipper sitting alone at a table in the lobby restaurant.

“Come here, Adcock,” he says. “I need to talk to you.”

“Late dinner?” It is nearly two o’clock in the morning. Skipper is twirling spaghetti marinara around his fork. “My daughter says you shouldn’t eat pasta,” I say. “She says carbs make you fat.”

“I always thought it was fat that makes you fat,” he says. He takes one more mouthful of spaghetti and pushes the bowl away. “But I am willing to be wrong.”

“What’s on your mind, Skip?”

“GM called and woke me up.” He exhales loudly, thrums his fingers on the tabletop. “Used to be that front office business was conducted during business hours. That’s why they call them business hours. But now all the GMs are twelve years old, and they sit up at night with their computers, talking to each other through the computers, and they treat this whole sport like it’s a video game.”

“Like fantasy baseball, you mean?”

“It’s a fantasy, all right. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“You’re trying to tell me I’ve been traded.”

The manager’s blue eyes shiver. “Not yet,” he says. “But there’s a deal on the table that sends you and Big Bob to San Diego.”

“For who?”

“For Richard Millman.”

Millman is fourth or fifth on the all-time saves list, and among active players, he is number one. But his fastball has lost its edge, and his off-speed stuff is no longer beguiling batters like it once did. Everyone knows the Padres have been trying to unload him.

“Are the Pods going to pay part of his salary?”

A word of explanation here. Sometimes a club will be so desperate to get rid of a player that they offer to keep paying him while he plays for another team. Sometimes in these cases there are clubhouse issues nobody talks about. One time, a guy I knew got traded because he took the GM’s daughter on a date and then didn’t call her. But I have heard no rumors about Richard Millman.

“Millman has another year on his contract,” Skipper says. “Naturally, we don’t want to pay the whole thing if we don’t have to.” He takes a deep breath, lets it leak out of the sides of his mouth. “Used to be,” he says, “that when a guy played for your club you had to pay him.”

“Times have changed,” I say.

“That’s for sure.” Skipper reaches for his spaghetti. He takes a stab, then thinks better of it and pushes the plate away again. “I mean, this guy …” He stops. I know who he means.

I should clarify, our GM is not twelve years old. But he can’t be more than twice that. He is a scrawny, undernourished young man who probably could not swing a thirty-ounce bat. But he is smart and shrewd. He signed Modigliani as a minor-league free agent after the Tigers organization let him go. The Tigers said that the twenty-five-year-old catcher was too old for them, that his knees were already turning forty. Now that Modigliani is an All-Star, Detroit’s GM claims Modigliani was not healing from knee surgery when they ditched him, but everyone knows what really happened. The Tigers were just impatient. Because, you see, their GM is also a Red Bull–slurping teenager.

“I would be sad to go,” I say.

“I know you would, Adcock. And I’d be sad to lose you. Less adult supervision in the clubhouse, for starters.”

“Thanks, Skip. That means a lot.”

This gets a smile out of the old manager. “You know,” he says, “if you don’t want to go to San Diego, you could always just retire.”

The thought has already crossed my mind. I always imagined I would retire a Bay Dog, same as I started. These days it is rare to spend your whole career with a single club. You probably can’t name ten players who have done it. Chipper Jones in Atlanta. The holy trinity of Jeter, Rivera, and Posada in New
York. Varitek in Boston. Jimmy Rollins in Philly. Who else is there?

Thirteen years with San José. It was never my favorite marriage, but it was the one that stuck.

“What if I’m not ready to retire?”

Skipper nods. “It’s a hard decision. Me, I knew my time was up when I started looking forward to meals. When I first came up, I would eat anything—pizza, cheesesteaks, the quicker the better. I hated to spend time eating. Then, one day, I was sitting on the bench halfway through a game, and I realized I had spent the last two innings dreaming about what I was going to have for dinner. I quit as soon as the season ended.”

I am not sure if Skipper has seen me zoning out, but his story strikes a nerve. I have basically had the moment he describes—seeing the rookie Jerry Díaz staring wide-eyed at the game in progress, noticing his dumb wonder and how far I had come from anything like that. But I never thought to quit. Does that make me a bad man?

“I don’t know, Skip. I tend to think my body has more baseball in it.”

“Might be,” he says. From the way he picks at his pasta, I can tell he is skeptical.

Privately, I consider the risks of pushing on: I might die tomorrow in a burning wreck alongside a girl who is neither my wife nor my daughter, who has three names, and who is dating a starting pitcher on a rival club. It might happen—it happened to Frankie Herrera—and would anyone care in that case whether the charred body in the car was a Bay Dog or a Padre?

As I wait for the elevator, I return to thinking about Frankie Herrera. My stomach sours. I feel like a surgeon who has cut into a patient to remove a section of cancerous intestine only to discover, once the guy is laid open, that all the other organs are diseased, too. I’ve read that in a case like that the doctor just sews up the patient and calls a priest.

On the eighth floor, I root in my pockets for the keycard, trying to remember the room number the clubhouse guys gave me at the ballpark. I try a few doors until I get a green light.

Even before I’m inside, I know something is wrong with the room. For one thing, the lights are all on, and the air is thick and wet, like Atlanta in August. The mirror on the closet door is fogged. It might be Bethany. She has surprised me on the road before. Then I see the rest of the room: the drawers have been pulled out of the bureau, the mattresses upended and slashed. I roll open the closet door. Inside, my suitcase has thrown up: clothes and toiletries everywhere, strewn across the carpet like flood debris.

I reach into my pocket to make sure Herrera’s phone is still there. I’ve had hotel rooms searched before; you can’t be too careful. When I’m working a case, I never travel with anything I can’t replace at Target. Anything that can fit in my pocket
stays there. Anything else of value—and even items of questionable value, like the investment binder I took from Bam Bam’s office—I leave at the ballpark with my playing gear. That stuff follows me at a distance, hauled to the next park by the clubhouse crew.

I go into the bathroom and turn off the faucet, then sit on the bed and calmly dial Security.

“This is John Adcock,” I say. “I’m going to need another room.”

While I wait, I scroll through Herrera’s texts, looking for a clue. The threatening notes all came from a blocked number. I decide to give the thing to Bethany first chance I get. She’ll know what to do.

Five minutes later, a young man in a police-style brush cut arrives at the door. He is wearing black cargo pants and a black polo shirt with the hotel’s logo on one breast. A walkie-talkie dangles from his hip. “Mr. Adcock?” His eyes grow wide as he looks into the room. He says, “Holy shit,” and then, regaining himself, he thanks me for calling. “Normally when the phone rings on third shift it’s some old lady who can’t figure out how to turn off the TV. But this—whew—this is an actual burglary!”

“Glad to make your night more interesting,” I say. “But this wasn’t a burglary.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Adcock,” the kid says, “I think I know more about crime than you do.”

“Let’s hope not.”

I go to the closet and begin scooping my clothes back into the suitcase. Behind me, the kid fumbles with his walkie-talkie and tells the scratchy voice on the other end that Mr. Adcock needs a fresh setup, and that an upgrade would be good. The voice agrees, and the kid replaces the radio on his belt.

“Mr. Adcock, sir, I’ll be right back. I have some forms you need to fill out for the report.”

“Fine.”

A few minutes later, I finish packing and wheel the bag into the hall. I tell myself I wasn’t tired anyway. I’ll go downstairs and have a drink while they fix up the new room. If Skipper’s still there, I can tell him this trade has me all worked up. Which isn’t exactly a lie.

Then I stop. Halfway down the hall, I see two well-muscled men in black polo shirts. They have just stepped off the elevator and are now running full-tilt toward me. Twenty-five yards between us. Now twenty. Now fifteen. Years ago, I would have stopped and tried to piece this out: Who are these guys? Are they with the kid from the security desk? Maybe one of them was the voice in the walkie-talkie? Now I know there is a time to be Sherlock Holmes, and there’s a time to be Dr. Richard Kimble. This is the latter. I turn around, dig for the stairwell, and slam the metal door behind me. I begin leaping down the stairs, taking three and four at a time. I descend maybe twelve stories. When I exit, I am in the hotel’s parking garage. The air is stale and hot, like the exhaust from a clothes dryer. I look around. I am alone for the moment. I duck behind a red Ford pickup and lift myself onto the running board so my feet are hidden from view. In the driver’s-side window, the red LED of the truck’s alarm pulses like a slow heartbeat.

The stairwell door slams open. “Where the fuck is he?” one guy says.

“Fuck if I know,” says the other.

They make a few halfhearted laps around the lot, bending down to look under a few cars, but it is clear they were not prepared to do any real work to find me.

“How many levels of parking they got in here?”

“I don’t know. Four? Five?”

“
Motherfucker
!”

I want to peek and get a good look at them—see if I recognize a face—but before I can stick my neck out, they’ve gone up the ramp to the next level.

I stay behind the red Ford a couple more minutes, just in case. The guys on my tail don’t seem like geniuses, but you never know. They may have crept back down the ramp to wait for me. I advise young pitchers never to underestimate the enemy. Just because a hitter has sixteen-inch biceps and the bat looks like a twig on his shoulder, do not assume he is a moron. They say Barry Bonds knew what pitch you were going to throw before the catcher even gave the sign. There are 150 pitchers in the National League, and Bonds knew every one of them by heart. He was a student first of all, and then a monster.

But neither of these assholes is Barry Bonds. When five minutes have passed, I stand up. My knees pop like knuckles, and I am reminded what a luxury it is to be a pitcher. Skipper is right: had I been stuck behind the plate, I would not be agonizing over whether to call it quits; that call would have been made for me, probably five years ago.

As I turn for the stairs, I nearly trip over a beer can standing in the middle of an empty parking space. The can is unopened, which is strange, but it gives me an idea. I scoop it up, and when I get to the stairwell, I turn around to face the red Ford. I put the can in my left hand and call up the ramp, “Hey, assholes! Hey, you pieces of shit! I’m down here!”