The Setup Man (8 page)

Because Frankie hadn’t been with the team that long, the eulogy is given by a player who knew him in the minor leagues, a young outfielder named White.

“Frank Herrera was many guys all at once,” White says. “He was a ballplayer first of all, but he was also a husband, a father, and a businessman.”

A couple of the guys in my pew snicker at the word “businessman,” even though the speaker hadn’t meant it to be funny. I want to reach over and clock them. Silence is an underrated virtue, but there are a few instances where it is absolutely essential. A funeral, for example. I know very little about Frankie’s life outside baseball, but what I do know suggests he was a selfless and energetic member of his community, both here and in Mexico. He didn’t have to build a baseball field in Sonora. Plenty of athletes make millions and give nothing back.

The outfielder continues, “After games, on the road, in the middle of the night, Frankie was always there to listen. His friends would do anything for him. And he had friends in every city, it seemed like. Anyone who knew him understood that Frankie loved bringing people together.”

Another snicker from the assholes in my pew. Look, I get it: “bringing people together” could mean that Frankie enjoyed female companionship. I understand that you can’t say that in front of the guy’s wife, but still I wish these guys had the decency to shut their mouths.

After a perfectly competent rendition of “Eagle’s Wings” by the church organist, the mourners form a line to pay their respects. The casket is closed—a smart move, given the scene I saw on Highway 92—and propped on a cart before the altar. One by one, we pass before Frankie’s remains. The widow and
the twins stand off to the side, receiving condolences. The Latin players make a big show of kneeling and crossing themselves, muttering prayers in Spanish even before they reach the front of the line. When my turn comes, I put my left hand on the casket and bow my head. A few seconds later, I straighten up and walk over to the widow.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “We’re all going to miss him.” I lean in to give her a hug—the polite kind, where you pat the other person’s back and leave room for the Holy Spirit. But as I’m patting, I feel something between my legs. For a minute I think it’s one of the twins horsing around, but then I realize it’s the widow’s hand. She’s cupping my balls. Or maybe grabbing them. I can’t tell if it’s a gesture of flirtation or aggression. I lean back. The look on her face offers no clues. Her wide, dark eyes are intent; her mouth is tight and small. The expression could mean “Let’s fuck” as easily as “I own you.” Sometimes the two go hand in hand. Or balls in hand, as the case may be. I would never sleep with her, but I’m tempted. Six years and two babies since she made that film, and she hasn’t lost a drop of the juice. But even if she’s coming on to me—it’s a funeral, what does she expect?

“Any progress?” she whispers.

“Stay tuned,” I say. “It’s early days.”

This is not the answer she was hoping to hear. She squeezes my nuts.

“What the—?”

“Work faster,” she says.

I understand she’s upset, so I repeat my promise to do everything I can, adding (because she has me by the balls) that I will work as quickly as possible, but that, like her late husband, I am a professional ballplayer with a busy schedule.

With her other hand, she reaches up and strokes my cheek.
“Oh, Adcock,” she whispers, “I know you won’t let us down.” She gives my balls one last tug, then lets them swing free.

The team has chartered a bus to take us home from the funeral—home being the ballpark, where batting practice awaits. I’m slouched in a rear seat, reading the paper, when the phone rings.

“You need to get your ass down here,” Marcus says.

“I’m on the bus,” I say, “but I’ve got my bike at the park. Let me see if I can sneak away for a few minutes.”

“No—I’m not at the restaurant.”

“Where are you?”

“L.A.”

“L.A.?”

“Yeah, I found Bam Bam.”

“No shit, that was fast. How is he?”

“He’d be a lot better if he wasn’t dead.”

“How do you know he’s dead?”

Marcus snorts. “How do I know? Because I just fucking shot him, that’s how.”

After my shaky debut as a closer, Skipper doesn’t owe me any favors. But when was the last time you needed a favor from someone who actually owed you one?

“My daughter is sick,” I say.

Skipper is halfway through his customary pregame plate of linguine. Today is Wednesday, which means clam sauce. I wince as he slurps the greasy noodles, pausing every so often to chew a rubbery morsel of gray mollusk.

“I’m gonna call bullshit here, Adcock.”

“Skip, I promise—”

“Spare me. We both know it.”

Skipper slurps. “But I’ll tell you what,” he says, “let’s make a deal. We go to L.A. the day after tomorrow.”

“Right. But you know, I keep thinking about Herrera, wondering if he got to say goodbye to his kids—”

“I talk, then maybe you talk. Got it?”

I nod.

“How about this. How about I let you go—I can repeat that disgraceful lie about your daughter if you like, or I can come up with something better—and then you rejoin the club when we get to L.A.”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is that when you come back you quit this pussyfooting and man up to the role I gave you.”

“You mean being the closer?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Adcock! What the hell were you doing out there? You may have fooled the frigging Padres, but you didn’t fool me. I know you were trying to throw the game. And let me remind you, that is a capital offense.”

Skip played for the Reds in the mid-eighties, when Pete Rose was player-manager. He took the lessons of Charlie Hustle very seriously—the bad as well as the good.

“I wasn’t sandbagging out there, Skip. It was bad luck.”

“Bad luck, my ass. You don’t want to be our closer, fine. But here’s news for you, Johnny: we don’t always get to do what we want.”

“I know that, Skip. I wasn’t trying to fail.”

Skipper finishes the noodles. He tears a hunk of garlic bread from the half-baguette the kitchen provides with his meal. He uses this like a sponge to mop up the oil on his plate.

“This is the deal I’m offering you,” he says. “Take it or leave it, but there are plenty of arms in the minors perfectly willing to do what they’re told.”

Half past midnight, my plane touches down at LAX. I turn my phone back on and see that I have a text from Bethany. Two words:
Call me
.

Her voice is garbled, which worries me until I remember that she swims two-a-days on Wednesdays. She is back in the pool, talking to me on her waterproof throat mike. She says that because of the poor sound quality—it is an early-stage prototype from a company she has funded—she uses the apparatus only on calls where she is expected to speak very little, like board meetings. The fact that she takes my call suggests her news must be important.

“Hello, Johnny? [
Gowmp! Gowmp!
] Johnny, can you hear me?”

“Roger that, deep-sea diver.”

“Johnny [
Grrrrimp!
], I went to the San Mateo coroner. [
Krrrz-gowmp!
] Can you hear me?”

I try to speak as slowly as I can: “The name, Bethany—tell me the girl’s name. That is all I need.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing, Johnny. She has lots of names. They ran the prints [
Grrrgle grrrgle
], and this girl is known as Luisa Valdez, Alejandra Sol, and one more [
Gowmp!
] that I can’t remember right now. I will e-mail it to you when I get home.”

“Don’t e-mail anything! Do you hear me? Something has happened.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in L.A.”

“Why L.A.? [
Gowmp!
]”

“Marcus is here.”

“But you have a game.”

“It’s okay. Skipper knows. Listen, Bethany, I want you to go home and stay there. As a favor to me.”

“What happened, Johnny? [
Grrrrkle!
] Tell me what happened.”

“Nothing—a guy down here was killed. A pornographer. Nobody important.”

“Do you know who [
Gowmp!
] killed him?”

“I have some idea. So are you going home after this?”

“Yes [
Grrkle grrkle
], yes, Daddy.”

“You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“Sorry. You should come [
Gowmp! Gowmp!
] and punish me.”

“I have to go,” I say. “Thanks for going to the morgue.”

“No problem [
Splash!
]. It was fun!”

Either she ends the call or her submarine Bluetooth finally gives up. At any rate, I text her a proper thank-you (no specifics, just in case) and grab my bag from the overhead bin.

Three names. A girl with three names is nothing but trouble. You can quote me on that.

Marcus is waiting curbside, leaning against the front fender of a 1972 Cadillac Eldorado coupe, brown paint and a brown vinyl canopy. The hood alone is longer than any other car in sight. I have never been a car guy, but there is a special place in my heart for the Eldo. One of my buddies in high school had one—a gift from his father, who taught auto shop at our high school. It got about six miles to the gallon, but you could lie down flat in the back seat. My buddy and I couldn’t understand
why the girls didn’t flock to him. It was like a bedroom on wheels. We even loaded the ashtrays with condoms.

Before I can ask where he got the car, Marcus tells me it’s not his. “Belongs to a friend,” he says.

“Does she know you have her car?”

“You think I’m a car thief?”

“Just be careful when you open the doors—they swing wide.”

Marcus heads north on Sepulveda into silent, foggy Westchester and begins to tell his story.

“It was like Bam Bam wanted me to find him,” he says. “I show up at his office Tuesday morning at ten-thirty, but nobody’s there. I go around to the back—but before I do, I take a little something from my girl’s glove box, you know what I’m saying, and stuff it down in my pants. Not that I ever thought I would have to use it.”

He looks me square in the face and I can see he’s pissed. Yeah, I’d be angry, too.

“I go around back, and there’s nobody there, neither.”

“This his porn company’s office?”

“Yeah, Two Lives Video in North Hollywood. Then, all of a sudden, I hear a motorcycle, and this fat dude riding a Kawasaki crotch rocket turns the corner and stops right in front of me. Sure enough, he lifts off his helmet and I see it is Bam Bam, and of course he’s surprised to see me. I sense right away that he’s coked up or something. He’s all smiles and hugs and my-nigga this and my-nigga that. I’m making up some shit about how I was in the neighborhood and heard he was making videos, and he says, ‘Oh yeah, come in and see!’ So I’m, like, ‘Great,’ and he unlocks the back door and leads me into his office. It’s a plain sort of room, blinds over the windows, lots of flat-screen TVs hanging on the walls. He flips the light switch and all the TVs turn on at once. Each one is playing a different scene. Bam Bam is smiling ear to ear, just all the
gladness you can stand, and he says, ‘I almost don’t miss baseball.’ So we start laughing about old times while these folks are slanging bone on the TVs. I say, ‘Hey, Bam Bam, you ever heard of this girl name of Maria Herrera?’ And as soon as I say the name, this motherfucker reaches into his jacket and pulls out a fucking nine.”

“Like as a joke?”

“I wish. His face is set, man. No more smiles. He lifts up the gun and just kind of admires it for a second. He must have been high. Then he pulls back the slide—”

The Cadillac swerves a little. Marcus has been cool to this point—much cooler than I expected him to be—but this part of the story is hard to tell.

“What did you do?”

“What could I do?”

“Karate?”

“Fuck karate, man! I shot him in the head.”

We ride in silence for a moment, then Marcus says, “You realize you owe me.”

“I know. Big-time.”

“Bigger than big-time. You told me to come down here and find the motherfucker. To find him, not to spray his brains against the wall.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“You are going to make it up to me.”

“I will. I promise.”

Another few minutes of silence as we roll north. We are not far from the neighborhood in Culver City where Ginny and I had that first house. She doesn’t live there anymore; she sold the house years ago and moved to Santa Monica. She said the schools were better in Santa Monica, but then she put Izzy in private school. I never asked why. This is one of the battles I have chosen not to fight.

“Did anyone see you go into Bam Bam’s office?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And did you pick up the casings?”

“Of course. I ditched his gun, too.”

“Was anyone in the office when you left?”

“Don’t you think I would have told you that?”

“Calm down, Marcus. It’s over with, and I said I was sorry. I’m just trying to figure out who might find the body.”

“Nobody going to find shit.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

“Because I took him with me.”

“You what? Where?”

Marcus flips his head back slightly, quickly—the motion he used on those rare occasions when he accepted the catcher’s sign. “In the trunk,” he says.

My professional opinion is that Marcus is too shaky to drive. I reach over and steady the wheel. “Move over,” I say. And, just like we used to do in high school, I slip over Marcus’s knees into the driver’s seat. He slides along the warm Naugahyde to shotgun.

“Did you wrap him up in something?” I say. “A tarp, maybe?”

“No time for that.”

“Sounds like I owe your girl a detailing.”

Marcus snorts.

We’re in West L.A., near the interchange of the 10 and 405. “You know this neighborhood?” I ask Marcus.

“No. You?”

“A little.”

I get off at National and turn right. Aside from a few bums loitering in front of a twenty-four-hour Ralphs supermarket, this part of Babylon is fast asleep.

“Look for a church,” I say.

“A what?”

“You look right, I’ll look left.”