The Setup Man (26 page)

I watch Marcus’s hands. One quick move to his coat and I’m sharing the roster with Frankie and Bam Bam. For now he’s quiet, looking over the rail. I wonder if he isn’t surprised it turned out like this.

“Once you figured out Maria was going to double-cross you, you had to kill her. It wasn’t going to be easy. She had armed guards and plenty of places to hide, with lots of connections in Mexico. But you had a secret weapon. You knew that I would lead you to her when the time was right. All you needed was an excuse to show up. What I don’t understand is why she didn’t recognize you.”

Marcus narrows his eyes. “You serious? That’s the oldest play in the goddamn book. I know her, but she don’t know me, same as niggas slanging rocks on the street don’t know who they dealing with upstairs.”

“To prevent squealing.”

“I’m not saying you’re right, Adcock, but do you really think a jury is going to feel sorry for Maria Herrera? She was smuggling wetback pussy. I didn’t start that—she did.”

“I wasn’t going to confront you until I had a solid case. I knew Maria wasn’t going to be a sympathetic victim. The same goes for Frankie and Bam Bam. But there was another option: the girl in the car with Frankie.”

“A hooker! You think anybody cares about a dead hooker?”

I hold up the RFID tag. “A surgeon at Scripps Mercy Hospital took this out of one of your girls six months ago. She had a fever of a hundred and five and internal bleeding. The surgeon estimated that if he hadn’t intervened she would have died within twenty-four hours. How’s that for a case?”

“Great, but it don’t stick to me.”

“You were using these devices to track the girls, monitoring everything from Bam Bam’s office. If it worked like you hoped it would, you could get rid of the local muscle and manage the talent yourself. Nice cost savings there. But you’re always thinking ahead.” I have to pause here. Stay calm. “But if you could implant cattle tags, why not try putting something more lucrative inside the girls?”

Marcus gives me a dead look. “Like drugs?”

“Whatever it is, you still have to get the cargo out. The IUD procedure was your cover on the Mexican side, but in the United States you can’t just set up an illegal operating room in your basement. That’s why you proposed the women’s health clinics. You did your homework, figured out what it would take to open a site and bring in a doctor or two from Mexico. You could have gotten by with just one location, but as usual you got ambitious. You put together an investment prospectus and started looking for venture funding. I had a copy of the prospectus, but you got it back eventually. You also took back the copy from Bethany’s office, but I’m sorry to say they scan everything over there.”

Marcus exhales. “I’m impressed, Adcock. That’s some nice detective work. You got me on—what—four homicides? But
what are you going to do … make a citizen’s arrest?” He chuckles. “You always had trouble closing.”

It’s a low blow, but I should have seen it coming. The man has been my mentor for over a decade. A naïve part of me hoped that we could let baseball be baseball, leave our history alone. I should have known he’d dredge up insults he’d been swallowing for years. All it took was me accusing him of murder.

“We always made a hell of a team,” Marcus says. “How about you give up this detective thing and work with me?”

“There’s a difference between agreeing to work at your sushi bar and helping you run an international prostitution ring.”

“Come on, Adcock, let’s be smart about this. What are you going to do when you retire, after you’re done snooping on people’s wives and rescuing kitties caught in trees? I’m offering you the long term. We’ll be partners.”

“So I can end up like Maria Herrera?”

Marcus shakes his head slowly. Now his hands go under the coat and he unsnaps the holster, removes a .38-caliber revolver. For the second time in a week, my life is elapsing like the penalty time at the end of a soccer match, no way of knowing how long it will last.

I tap my chest, just below the collar. Clear my throat.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” Marcus says. “You can’t just lay all that out and expect me to roll over.” He cocks the revolver and levels it at my nose. “I’ve got to finish what I start. I was a closer before they had a word for it.”

All of a sudden the air explodes with sirens and flashing lights. A black-and-white squad car accelerates around the curve and does not stop until Marcus is lifted off the ground, caught in the bumper bars. His gun skitters onto the roadway. An officer leaps out of the car with handcuffs. Within fifteen seconds it seems like every cop in San Mateo County is on the
scene. With all the pulsing lightbars, Highway 92 looks like a suburban cul-de-sac on Christmas. Somehow, despite the noise, I hear through the wireless bud in my ear the voice of Jerry Díaz: “Sorry, Pops. I might have waited a beat too long there.…”

I reach under my shirt and yank out the wire. It has been itching ever since I taped it on at the rest stop in San Gregorio. When I called Díaz from the bathroom stall, I warned him that I would be able to hold off Marcus only so long after I accused him of killing Frankie. He assured me that the cops would step in as soon as things got dicey, that they would be waiting around the corner in the surveillance van, guns at the ready, with plenty of backup.

I probably should have set up a code word. If there’s one thing rookies and cops both love, it’s a damn code word.

It takes months for the dust to settle on the Herrera affair. The state charges Marcus with the murders of Bam Bam, Frankie, and Ana—and of conspiracy to kill Maria, whose body is never found. There are also charges of conspiracy and racketeering related to the prostitution ring, but the big question is whether the prosecutors will charge him with human trafficking, which is a slippery crime and difficult to prove if you haven’t caught the smuggler in the act. Ironically, as a sex offender, Marcus will be monitored on a Department of Justice Web site if he ever gets out of prison.

And he may get out. His legal team is excellent, and the newspapers speculate that he will eventually plead guilty to a package of lesser charges, maybe calling the Bam Bam incident self-defense and knocking Frankie’s and Ana’s murders down to manslaughter of some kind. With luck, he’ll go free a couple of years before he dies. It’s a disappointing outcome, given how many bodies piled up, but I’m satisfied. Justice is so often subverted in this state that a conviction of any kind for a man so obviously guilty feels like a major victory to me.

The cops never find the computers Marcus removed from Bam Bam’s office—another credit, I’m sure, to the yeoman work of Marcus’s brother—but they do locate Bam Bam’s
account with a commercial cloud-backup service. The cache of evidence includes a spreadsheet with the names and addresses of each of the prostitutes, along with the hexadecimal ID of her tracking tag. I find it hard to believe that Bam Bam Rodriguez, a man who couldn’t be bothered to use a trash can, backed up all his data, but there you have it: the human brain is a dark and unknowable place, full of contradictions and happy accidents. The police forensics lab also confirms that Bam Bam sent the texts to Frankie, but the most stunning revelation is that the anonymous tip to the
DawgPound
blogger also came from Bam Bam. The e-mail was scheduled on an automatic timer. How’s that for a new wrinkle on the celebrity sex tape? A dead player’s secret tape, exposed by another dead player. Not sure what it means, but it certainly captures the flavor of this case.

More pressing than Frankie’s tape is the fate of the girls he employed. With help from Rosario, the police uncover prostitution operations in every California city with a major-league team, plus a few minor-league towns like Fresno and Bakersfield. With help from the police in Tijuana, the California authorities are able to track down the surgeon Rosario described, and they learn that, yes, he did insert something more than an IUD into each girl’s
sanctum sanctorum
. The doctor had no idea what it was—apparently, surgery is a don’t-ask-don’t-tell proposition down in TJ—but when the cops show him a cattle RFID tag, he says it looks familiar. The police find RFID scanners in all of the girls’ apartments, confirming that Marcus and Co. were indeed monitoring their herd from afar. Just as Jerry Díaz thought, the cattle tags have never been tested on humans, so their long-term effects are unknown and presumed potentially hazardous. The state’s social workers try to make contact with all the prostitutes listed on the spreadsheet, but of course the girls aren’t excited to take
calls from the law. A few of the women allow themselves to be scanned by ultrasound, to determine if the implants have put them in danger, and the very bravest ones, including Rosario Velásquez, endure surgery to remove the devices. The whole thing turns my stomach. I’m reminded of a photo I once saw in a magazine of elephant carcasses abandoned on the African savanna, their tusks sawn out by poachers. Beautiful creatures reduced to meat.

Then there are the twin sons of Frankie and Maria Herrera. Possibly because I feel guilty, rightly or not, for what happened to their parents, I have an urge to check up on them. I track down Maria’s sister, calling and introducing myself as a former teammate of Frankie Herrera’s. Mrs. Pamela Cruz is wary, but her resistance melts when I ask about the twins. She tells me that she and her husband are in the process of adopting the boys, who have been living with them since her sister’s disappearance. “Well,” I say, “I’d love to have a photo, if you wouldn’t mind. We have a corkboard in the clubhouse where players put up kids’ art projects and school photos, that kind of thing.” I don’t tell her that the board is labeled “Birth Control Reminders” (because this is baseball and not a daytime talk show). But that’s just swagger. Even the hardest players stop now and then to take a look. Pamela Cruz says she would love to send a photo, and we exchange addresses.

That’s why, when a letter arrives a few days later sporting a San Diego postmark, I assume it’s from her. I even take care in opening the envelope to avoid tearing the contents. But the envelope contains no photos. In fact, it is not even from Pamela Cruz, but from Frankie Herrera’s lawyer. I unfold the letter and find a check, drawn on a trust account, in the amount of $250,000. The letter explains that this is payment for professional services rendered by me. Apparently, Frankie wrote his lawyer the day before he died, requesting a payment in this amount.
As far as I can tell, the lawyer has no idea what “professional services” I provided his client, but he appears determined that I accept the payment.

“It is crucial,” the letter explains, “that all debtors acknowledge receipt of funds in writing so that the corpus of the estate (which will be placed in trust for the deceased’s heirs) can be declared free of claims. Please reply at your earliest convenience.”

I’m conflicted about accepting Frankie’s payment. For one thing, it’s way too much. I usually charge my clients only a nominal fee, or ask that they buy me dinner. In an era where the average salary for a major-league player is well into seven digits, it feels pointless to take money for something I’d probably do for free. My big hang-up with accepting Frankie’s money, though, is that I didn’t deliver what he paid for. Quite the opposite: I blew up his life. I sit on the problem for a few weeks, and then, one day, the answer comes to me. I am walking across the campus of San José State University, a public college downtown with something like thirty thousand students. It is a commuter school, part of the same university system as my alma mater, Cal State Fullerton. This afternoon I am making an appearance at a kids’ pitching clinic run by Kenny Glidewell, an old Bay Dogs teammate. The ball fields are on the far side of campus, fifteen minutes from the parking garage. As I am crossing in front of the student union, I notice a pretty young Latina rushing toward the automatic doors of the campus bookstore. She trips on a step and spills a handful of change. She looks around, embarrassed, then crouches down to gather the coins. I understand that this handful of nickels and dimes may have meant nothing to her—she might have been stopping in for a Coke, nothing more—but it gets me thinking.

That night, I write an e-mail to George Luck: “I am setting
up a scholarship fund at San José State named for Frank Herrera and his wife. The fund will support Latina girls, first-generation kids like Ana. Why don’t you do the same at Fullerton? Name the fund for Ana. I can’t imagine a better way to honor her memory—can you?”

Going through the widow’s black book (lifted from her house because you never know when these things might come in handy …), I pick out the johns I know, ballplayers who came through Cal State schools. It’s not hard to do. The California State University system might be the impoverished stepchild of higher education, but it churns out two products better than any other institution in the world: first-generation college graduates and professional baseball players. My request to each of these lucky gentlemen is simple: Match or exceed the quarter-million our late colleague Frank Herrera is putting up. And do it fast.

As I sit at my kitchen table, typing out the appeals, it occurs to me that some of these players may never have spent a quarter-million on anything, let alone something you cannot lock, drive, or screw. But by two in the morning, when I finally close my laptop, I feel pretty sure they will write the checks.

I don’t need to tell them what will happen if they don’t.

The off season: Some of the Caribbean guys play winter ball in their home countries, but American players generally go wherever their kids are in school and sit around the house, trying not to go crazy. Working out helps some. Modern contracts stipulate that you must arrive at spring training in reasonable physical condition—and, to be honest, the best players make it a point to improve their game in some way every winter, so they come back the next year with an edge. It’s never been that way for me. I have always struggled to stay in shape during the winter. Mostly I’m just lazy, but I do believe that working out by yourself will eventually crush your soul. Which is why I’m trying something new this year: keeping up with Bethany.