The Setup Man (5 page)

Plenty of things, I want to say. He could have been a gardener and left you with squat instead of a major-league pension.

“The reason I came to see you,” she continues, “is that I suspect my husband was murdered, and I want you to find out who did it.”

“You realize it was an auto accident.”

The widow takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Something was wrong with Frankie. He was preoccupied.”

“And from that you conclude he was murdered?”

“I know my husband, Mr. Adcock.”

“Of course you do. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.” This is where I might have mentioned the girl in Frankie’s car, but something holds me back. Loyalty to the brotherhood of ballplayers? Maybe I just can’t stomach the bullshit about Frankie being “preoccupied.” Whatever it is, I resolve to keep that bit buttoned up, at least until I sort out this mess. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted him dead? Did he have gambling debts?”

“Frankie never gambled.”

“Drugs?”

“None that I know of.”

“I would say it might be the person who was trying to blackmail
him, but you have to wonder how they expected to get money from a dead man.”

The widow’s gaze is insistent, bordering on desperate.

“I assume since you’re standing here that you don’t want to go to the police.”

“I’m not ruling it out,” she says. I know she doesn’t mean it. I’ve had clients wield police investigations like a goad, as though the threat would spur me to reach a speedy and amenable conclusion to the case. I just ignore them. If they were in a position to call the police, they would have done so before they called me.

“Let me ask you something, Mrs. Herrera. Do you have any idea who might have sent that link to Frankie’s cell phone?”

“Would I be standing here if I knew that?”

“Probably not. But if you had to guess?”

“The guy who made the film was named Steve Doubilet. I guess you’d call him the director, although he didn’t do much directing. But, you know, Steve’s not a very good suspect.”

“Why’s that?”

“For one thing, he found Jesus five years ago. I’d lost touch with him by then, but I heard from a friend that he’d been saved. A couple months later he killed himself.”

“Just couldn’t wait, huh?”

No reaction from the widow. I make a note that she is not amused by wit.

“Who else knew about the film?” I ask.

“Just us. Steve promised Frankie he’d never upload the file.”

“Yeah, Frankie said the same thing when he gave me the phone. You must have realized, though, that there was a chance it would get out at some point.”

“We figured. But Frankie was in rookie ball. We had nothing to lose.”

“So why make the film at all?”

The widow raises her brow. “What’s that expression? Young, dumb, and full of …?”

I think back to when I was in rookie ball. Ginny and I were newly married, living in a one-bedroom shit trap in Tucson. It was 110 degrees outside, and the window-unit A/C in our apartment worked only for about ten minutes before it blew the circuit. We used to go to department stores and screw our brains out in the dressing rooms. We did it in a public bus once, too. But that was a more innocent time. People weren’t packing video cameras on their cell phones back then.

“Watch the video,” she says. It seems like she is going to say more on the subject—she opens and closes her mouth a couple of times—but then she says, totally straight, “You’re a good man, Adcock.”

“With all due respect, Mrs. Herrera, you don’t know that.”

“Frankie said if the league were filled with guys like you it would be a much more civilized place.”

“He said that?”

“He did.”

“Well, that was a nice thing to say.”

“Yeah, Frankie surprised me sometimes with his niceness.” I notice for the first time the way the widow’s chest presses against the inside of her blouse, stretching the fabric so you can see her bra in the space between the buttons. I can’t help wondering what she looks like without clothes. Nude, as Bethany would say. It seems I’ll find out soon enough.

“I’ll call when I have news,” I say. “What’s the best number to reach you?”

“You have Frankie’s phone,” she says. “Let’s hope my number is in there.”

“Let’s hope,” I say. I show her out and close the door, and I do not watch her little half-moon ass sway down the hall through the peephole. I promise I do not.

So much for sleep. I dial a cappuccino from the machine on my kitchen counter. The device cost me two grand, but it is hardly an indulgence. I would sooner give up my bed. Use it often enough, you don’t even need a bed. To be fair, the brew is not as good as they make in the café downstairs, but the convenience is worth it. This I can drink in my underwear.

While watching a dead teammate’s wife have sex.

I prop the phone on the kitchen table, sip my coffee, and settle in. When the film begins, a young Maria Herrera is in someone’s living room, looking at the camera over one shoulder and then the other, kissy kissy. Her hair is dyed black, which makes her complexion look lighter than it appears in person. She is also younger, of course, but otherwise she’s the same woman who was just standing in my front hall. She curls her finger to beckon someone from behind the camera—the film has a kind of shaky, grainy, home-movie conceit. A man in a red nylon tracksuit walks into the frame. However, the shot is set up so that his face is not visible. You can see that he is black, muscular, somewhat overweight. Reminds me of the ballplayer Prince Fielder. When Maria Herrera stands before him, you see that he is at least a foot taller and probably outweighs her three to one. She looks up at him, takes hold of the zipper
on his jacket, pulls it down. Same with his pants. His endowment is as large as you would expect. The widow kneels down, and the camera comes in for a close-up. After five minutes of polishing the pole, she stands and walks over to an overstuffed leather armchair. She removes her tank top, licks her nipples like ice-cream cones, moons for the camera. She removes her shorts and drapes herself across the chair, legs akimbo. The Prince of Power (back turned to the camera) crouches down between her thighs. She looks down and says in a cloying, girlish voice, “I’ve never done this before.” I laugh in spite of myself. “Don’t worry, baby,” the Prince says, “I’ll be gentle.”

Upside, downside, frontside, backside: you know the routine. After twenty minutes you start to wonder how much longer it will be before the Prince anoints her with his royal jelly. Then a telephone rings. Maria reaches over and fetches a massive, bricklike cellular from the side table. She pulls up the antenna and flips it open. “Hello?” she says. “Oh, hi, Pablo. No, I’m not doing much. Why don’t you come over?” The big guy stops thrusting for a minute, asks who it was. “Just my cousin,” she says. “He’s coming over.”

“Cool,” says the Prince, “I’m sure we can find something for him to do.”

A minute later, you hear a doorbell, then footsteps. A new man walks onto the set. His face, too, is kept out of the shot. Quickly he sheds his clothes, and Maria Herrera kneels between the two gentlemen, a cock in each hand. A few minutes later, she changes positions so the new guy is on her back door. The shot tightens around their midsections—hers is the smooth unblemished brown of a Coppertone ad, his thick with ropy muscle, a few pimples, and an amateurish tattoo. The camera pans out a bit and I see that the tattoo reads “Granma” in crude Old English script.

I nearly drop my cappuccino.

I rewind to the moment when Pablo enters the apartment, replay the banter between the “cousins.” No question, the male voice belongs to Frankie Herrera.

My mind races to the consequences: Bay Dogs management would have been furious if this clip hit the Internet. Frankie’s endorsement deals, if he had any, would have been terminated as well. No energy drinks or breakfast cereals want to be associated with a porn star.

The trouble, as Frankie surely understood, was that the video was already online. Its only saving grace was the anonymity of a DIY porn site. All it would have taken to ruin Frankie Herrera was for someone to identify the actors and post the link on a Bay Dogs message board. Anyone who had ever seen Frankie Herrera in his underwear—years of teammates and half the sportswriters in the Bay Area, for starters—would have recognized him instantly.

I pick up the phone and call Bethany’s office. Her assistant, a deadpan Korean American kid fresh out of Harvard, answers on the first ring.

“Good morning, Johnny,” he says. “May I offer congratulations on last night’s win? Fifteen runs is six standard deviations from the Bay Dogs’ median production.”

His tone is astonishingly flat. The voice in a GPS has more affect.

“Thanks, Jun. I guess we got lucky.”

“I was going to mention luck, but I was worried it would offend you.”

“No offense taken. We’ll take luck.”

“Just a moment, please, while I transfer you.”

When she comes on the line, Bethany sounds as busy as always. I hear men chuckling in the background.

“Done with the Latin babe?” she says. “I thought for sure you’d beg fatigue.”

“It was Maria Herrera,” I say. “Frankie Herrera’s widow.”

I assume she cups her hand around the phone, because the background noise is suddenly gone. “Wow, John. Is she already auditioning replacements?”

“Listen, I have to be at the park in half an hour. Do you still have that project with the morgue? The one where you take DNA from stiffs.”

“You mean DataShape?”

DNA collection was only one part of the company’s business. A minor part, if I recall Bethany’s explanation correctly. The project that got her to pull out her wallet was DataShape’s operations at the sewage-treatment plant. Someone at DataShape got the idea that if you were to sequence human DNA from a city’s raw sewage, you could assemble a statistically representative model of human genetic diversity. According to Bethany, this has plenty of valuable implications—for example, the ability to pinpoint genetic variations that cause diseases. If you find that 1.91 percent of the DNA in the sample has a particular genetic mutation, you might look for a disease that also occurs in 1.91 percent of the population. This is called analytics. It’s not just for ranking draft picks.

“First of all, Johnny, it’s not a project, it’s an investment. I am on the board of DataShape. I don’t work there. Do you understand the difference?”

“Could you work there if you wanted to?”

“If you don’t tell me what you want in five seconds, I am hanging up.”

“Okay—I need to find out who was in the car with Frankie Herrera. The girl. I need her name.”

“There was a girl in the car with Herrera?”

“It’s a long story. The police are calling her an ‘unrelated minor.’ ”

“So you want me to go to the morgue and pose as an employee of DataShape.”

“If it wouldn’t be too inconvenient.”

“What’s in it for me?”

Fortunately, I am prepared for this question. “I watched the video,” I say.

“And?” Bethany is trying to mask the curiosity in her voice. And failing.

“It was surprising,” I say. “Surprisingly good.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It kind of put me in the mood.”

“Fine,” she says, “but this is the last time.”

“You always say that.”

“I always mean it.”

“Then why do you—”

“Do I have to spell it out?”

“I don’t know, it might be nice to hear.”

“Goodbye, Johnny.”

There are two pieces of news when I arrive at the clubhouse later that morning. First is that the new backup catcher has arrived from our triple-A affiliate in Riverside. Sad how quickly we are replaced. Already the kid has made himself comfortable in Frankie’s old locker. In the major leagues, lockers do not look like the ones you used in high school. In fact, they do not even have locks. Picture a wide, open-faced booth with a bar for hanging clothes, a chair or two for entertaining guests, and, in the case of our friend Modigliani, a flat-screen TV. The rookie will be allowed no frills, but you can tell he feels pampered just by the space. He has taped up photos of his folks—an overweight and sunburned couple on vacation in Hawaii—and an innocent-looking brunette who might be his girlfriend but could just as easily be his sister. On the shelf above the clothes bar, he has arranged a mini-library of self-help titles:
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Athletes, The Purpose-Driven Career
, and so on. I see that he also has a few detective novels up there, classics like Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye
, James M. Cain’s
Double Indemnity
, and Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco classic,
The Maltese Falcon
. The spines look worn. I am impressed, but not enough to break my stride. The kid sits with his head down, intent on
a text message. I try to walk past unnoticed, but he feels me somehow.

“Hey, Johnny Adcock!”

His exuberance reminds me of my daughter, Isabel, at two years old, the time I took her to Disneyland and she met Cinderella in the flesh.

“That’s me.”

The kid puts out his hand. “Jerry Díaz. I can’t tell you how excited I am to meet you. I’m a huge fan.”

Díaz is a stocky kid, another Ninja Turtle, maybe five ten and two hundred pounds. His dark hair is cut military-short, and his cheeks are rosy and dimpled when he smiles. His voice is colored by a surprising country-and-western twang.

“Díaz, huh? Where you from?”

“Fort Stockton, Texas, sir. It’s about halfway between El Paso and—”

“I know where it is. I played in the Texas League once upon a time.”

“I grew up on a ranch out there.”

“Yeah, I heard your voice, and figured—”

“You figured what? That I wasn’t a wetback? Thing is, my family has been ranching in Pecos County longer than yours has been in this country, so—”

“I was just asking where you’re from.”

“Damn it, I didn’t …” Frustrated, he mumbles, “Can we start over? I’m really sorry I jumped on you. I was hoping to make a good impression, and now I’ve screwed it up.”

“Look, kid, don’t get too comfortable here. Chances are you’ll be bounced between the bigs and triple-A half a dozen times before you stick. Happened to all of us.”