The Setup Man (17 page)

Asshole.

I grab my phone and dial the number Ursino barks to the listeners before every commercial break. Two rings and I am speaking with a screener who sounds about two hundred pounds overweight, wheezing like a whale with a congested
blowhole. “
Talking Trash with Jesse Ursino
, please state your name and location.”

“This is Johnny Adcock. Let me speak to Jesse.”

You can hear the guy sit up. “You’re kidding, right?”

“If you don’t believe me, tell him it’s Sparkle Dick.”

Ursino is famous for the incident with Kirk Gibson, but he staged plenty of other pranks, too, including one on yours truly. Unlike Gibby and the shoe polish, this one never entered baseball lore. Only a member of the late-nineties Bay Dogs would get the reference.

There is a full minute of silence before Jesse Ursino comes on the line. “Fucking Sparkle Dick Adcock, is that you?”

“Since when am I your friend?” It comes off more aggressive than I intended, but I decide not to worry about it. After all, this is the man who put glitter glue in my athletic supporter.

“Hold on,” Jesse says, “let me patch you in.”

There is a pop on the line, and the fat assistant asks me to turn off my radio. I do as I am told.

Through the phone now, I hear the show’s theme music, followed by Jesse’s voice: “Welcome back to
Talking Trash
. Would you believe that during the commercial break none other than the who-cares man himself, Johnny Effing Adcock, picked up his phone and called the Trashman? Yes, it turns out Adcock was cruising through the airspace in his automobile and heard our program. Seems we hit a nerve. Can’t imagine why that would be.… Johnny, are you there, my man?”

“I’m here, Jesse. Thanks for having me on.”

“So tell me, how are you feeling post-trade?”

“I haven’t joined the Padres yet, but I know I’m going to miss my teammates in San José. And the whole Bay Dogs organization, the Eberhardt family, the front office, everyone.”

“You’ve spent your whole career in San José, correct?”

“That’s right. Thirteen years.”

“You don’t see that much anymore.”

“You would know.”

“Hey! Okay, yes, it’s true. The Trashman did make the rounds a little bit. But as I always say, baseball is a business, not a hobby. We sell our services to the highest bidder.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“Are you saying you would have preferred to remain with San José? I would have thought you’d want to move closer to your family. They’re still in SoCal, no?”

“I don’t talk about my family with the press.”

“Oh, right …”

I hear the rare twinge of regret in Ursino’s voice. He knows he fucked up. Any other player, sure, but he knows what I do in my spare time. In fact, he knows too well: six years ago, just before he retired, I helped him find his teenage daughter. She was a rebellious girl who got mixed up with drugs and disappeared with some questionable friends. All Ursino knew was that she was heading south. Thanks to my network of contacts in Central and South America—yet another reason to be grateful for Latin American baseball—I located her at a resort in Costa Rica and had her home within a week.

“Anyway, the Padres—not exactly a trade up. fifteen games out of first place with sixty to play. Mathematically, their season is not over, but for all intents and purposes …”

“I don’t want to talk about the pennant race, Jesse. I want to talk about Frankie Herrera.”

“Herrera, folks, was the Bay Dogs catcher killed in a car crash last week.”

“That’s him. I wanted to say for the record that Frankie Herrera was a good man.”

“I never said he wasn’t.”

“You suggested earlier this week that the callers were making too much of his charity work in Mexico.”

“Did I?”

“You did.”

“We can review the tape, but I have no recollection of saying anything like that. I never knew Frankie Herrera, and I certainly had nothing against him personally.”

“You should be careful what you say on the radio, is all I’m saying.”

“Thank you for the warning, Johnny Adcock. The Trashman will certainly mind his P’s and Q’s. But now it’s time to pause for a station identification. You’re listening to K—”

The show goes to a commercial break, and Ursino clicks over to a private line.

“You there, Sparkle Dick?”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t know why I called in. It was a bad idea.”

“I’m glad you did, because I’ve got a piece of news that may interest you. It concerns our friend Frankie Herrera, as a matter of fact.”

“What’s that?”

“Turns out he was something of an actor, if you know what I’m saying. I haven’t seen the clip personally, but ESPN is about to break the news that there is a video on the Web of Herrera and another dude tag-teaming a chick who looks like Herrera’s wife.”

I take a deep breath. “They can’t show that on ESPN.”

“You’ve never seen a censor bar? Maybe they’ll tip TMZ or Smoking Gun and give them the link, I don’t know. Did you have any idea he was up to this?”

“Herrera isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last.”

“I know,” Ursino says, “but stories like this never get old. This is huge. We’ll be talking about this for weeks, maybe more.”

I hang up and throw the phone into the passenger’s foot-well. I am furious, but not at Jesse Ursino. Jesse can’t help himself. He is paid to be an asshole. But I should have kept my
mouth shut. So I was wrong about Frankie Herrera—did I really need to go on the radio and pretend I was still right? The release of the video will only make it worse: Ursino will play back the clip of me defending Herrera, juxtaposed with audio from the porno. I don’t blame him. If it were my show, I’d do the same thing.

I take the exit for La Jolla, a tony enclave wedged between the University of California’s San Diego campus and the Pacific Ocean. In that peculiar California way, La Jolla refuses to advertise its wealth. No Gangnam Style here. La Jolla is full of millionaires who wear fleece jackets to five-hundred-dollar dinners, where they order entrée salads and glasses of organic chardonnay. This bastion of restraint is where Frankie Herrera chose to settle his family. He told me it had been a tough decision: his wife’s parents live in Chula Vista, a gritty strip between San Diego and the border, and Frankie knew the homeboys there would say he moved because he thought he was better than them.
Whiter
is what they meant, although Frankie told me that La Jolla is actually more Asian than white. His sons’ best friend in preschool was an Indian boy named Saahil whose parents worked at UCSD and at Scripps, the medical research institute next door. Frankie said he understood why some ballplayers settled in places like Phoenix or Orlando, where you could be surrounded by the families of other professional athletes. But he did not mind being surrounded by scientists. They are quiet, he said. Nobody gets into your business.

Only as I am turning off the engine in front of the Herreras’ enormous Spanish-style home, with its nonfruiting olive trees, smoke bushes, and showy fountains of raspberry bougainvillea, does it occur to me that I should have called first. But it is too late for that. Besides, it would have given Maria Herrera a chance to hide. I know she doesn’t want to hear what I have to tell her, and I have no idea when the news about her video is going to break.

I pull the heavy brass knocker and let it fall. The blow echoes through the timbered door like the voice of God. I feel suddenly like an inquisitor at the door of a medieval Spanish monastery. It occurs to me that even the tastefully rich make errors in style. Laugh all you want at the hillbilly quarterback who builds a replica of the Playboy mansion on his property in Scottsdale, Arizona: a dungeon door on your fake California mission is no better. In fact, if you are Latino and have some native blood, it is worse. But I don’t blame the Herreras or any of them. The root problem is not taste but wealth.

As expected, my arrival takes the widow Herrera by surprise. She answers the door wearing a pink velour track suit trimmed with shiny white stones, the kind where the butt—I know this without even seeing it—is emblazoned with some embarrassing word like “Juicy” or “Cherry” or, for the colorblind, “Pink.”

“Johnny Adcock,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Sorry, I should have called.”

She looks at her watch. “Don’t you have a game?”

“Later.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What happened?”

At first I think she means the trade, but then I remember how I look. I touch my temple, the more busted-up one. It feels hot and puffy.

“No big deal,” I say. “I’ve been treated.”

She nods without any special concern, like I’m not the first injured man to show up at her door unannounced.

“Can I come in? I have something to tell you about Frankie.”

She leads me through a long entry hall lined with pilasters—think Caesars Palace minus the triremes and chiming slots—ending in the kitchen. The gleaming marble island in the center is larger than my childhood bedroom. She pulls out a stool and asks if I would like some carrot juice.

“How are the twins?” I say.

“They don’t understand. They think their dad is at work.”

I feel bad suddenly for bringing up the twins. There is the story the boys will come to know about their dad—the star athlete, the hero, the philanthropist—and then there is the rest, which they will never be able to accept. Here I am, the bearer of that infamy, and I’m asking how they feel.
Pretty fucking bad, Adcock, what did you think?

“Did you find him?” the widow asks, and for a moment I am stumped.
Find who?
And then I remember. The murderer, she means. She’s convinced Frankie was killed. Run off the road, I guess.

“Mrs. Herrera, I have some difficult news. It turns out there was another person in the car when Frankie died.”

She is silent for a moment as the information settles in, as questions present themselves.

“Now you are going to tell me it was a woman,” she says.

She must see it on my face.

“I’m not surprised,” she says. “Who was she?”

“She had aliases. The one she used most was Alejandra Sol.”

I watch the widow’s face, but there is no flash of recognition. “A girl who uses multiple names,” she says. “Was she a spy or a stripper?”

“It’s funny you say that.…”

“She was a stripper?”

“Not exactly. She was more of a—I guess you would call her a prostitute.”

There, I’ve said it. The rest of the conversation is going to be a downhill ride. A little consoling, a little it’s-not-your-fault. Maybe a hug. Then I will get into my car, drive to the ballpark, and get on with my life.

But Maria Herrera hangs tough.

“I don’t believe you,” she says. “Frankie never had to pay his girls.”

“He had girls before?”

She snorts. “You guys always think it’s a revelation.”

“Us guys?”

“Ballplayers.”

“You knew?”

“Not this time, not specifically. But did I know that Frankie had girls? Sure. He wasn’t very careful about it.” She laughs. “I wonder how many other athletes’ wives got the joke when Tiger’s wife found those texts on his phone.”

“What was the joke?”

“You think she wasn’t reading his phone for months? For years? Personally, I think he was juicing, and his wife couldn’t take it anymore. Frankie never took those drugs, lucky for me, but I have girlfriends who say it’s like fucking a bear. But it’s the price of admission, right? If you want to live in La Jolla or Winter Park or wherever, you keep your mouth shut and spread your legs.”

“For the bear.”

“Like I said, Frankie never took steroids. He was gentle in bed.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“But now you’re telling me he paid for sex? No offense, Mr. Adcock, but if anybody in baseball was paying for girls, it would be long relievers.”

“I’m a setup man, Mrs. Herrera.”

“Same difference.”

“Actually, it’s not.”

But the widow has no interest in debating my job description. “What else do you know about Alejandra Cruz?”

“Alejandra Sol.”

“Where did she get my video?”

“I never said she had your video.”

“Isn’t that what I hired you for?”

“Your husband hired me, Mrs. Herrera. He was a friend of mine, a teammate, and I said I’d find out what I could.” I reach up without thinking and rub my forehead too hard. The pain spreads out from my thumbprint in waves.

Maybe because she sees my grimace, the widow backs off. “I appreciate what you’ve done,” she says. “I’m just disappointed you didn’t find out more.”

“There is a little more.”

I weigh how much to tell her, knowing that other people’s stories—George Luck’s, for example—might be compromised if I go on. But this woman deserves to know. Her husband is dead. He was consorting with a hooker behind her back. She has two small children she will have to raise by herself.

“The thing is,” I say, “Alejandra Sol was more than a prostitute. She was working for a group that sold foreign girls to American men.”

“My husband was screwing a wetback?”

“Not exactly—”

“How do you know all this?”

“I have people.”

“Who know this personally?”

“Let’s say yes.”

“Come on, Mr. Adcock.…”

“An old friend. He’s a pitcher. And not a long reliever, either. He is a starter on a big-league club.”

She sneers. “I stand corrected.”

“Look, Mrs. Herrera, I know how hard this must be. But I want you to know I’m not done. With your permission, I will get to the bottom of this. I will finish it.”

“Now you sound like a detective.”

“What did I sound like before?”

“Honestly? You sounded like my husband.”

In downtown San Diego, I pull into the players’ lot at Petco Park—and by the way, what kind of name is that for a major-league stadium? I know the Padres’ owner has bills to pay, but it’s hard to maintain your dignity in a palace built on kibble.

Anyway, the guard waves me in and shows me where to leave the car. A chain-link fence rolls shut behind me. The Padres’ clubhouse manager meets me at the door, shakes my hand, and shows me to my locker. I’m happy to see that my Bay Dogs equipment bags have arrived already. As soon as the clubhouse guy leaves me alone, I start digging through the bags for Bam Bam’s binder, but I come up empty. I find my gloves, my (mint-condition) game bats, and a photo of a six-year-old Izzy dressed like a cat on Halloween. But the binder is not there. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad about this. On the one hand, maybe now the wrecking crew will leave me alone. On the other hand, how will they know it’s missing? It occurs to me that they may have put two and two together and broken into Dodger Stadium before my bags shipped out, taken what was rightfully theirs. A much more likely explanation is that Bil Chapman did his usual erratic work and just forgot to pack the binder. I’m also missing a little Buddha statue, a souvenir
of the Bay Dogs’ trip to Japan for exhibition games three years ago.