A WOMAN WALKING HER dog found John Gallo’s body trapped by the rocks below his property in the late morning, before the current could carry him away. By the middle of the afternoon, Ben Cantor was in my office at Wolves Stadium, wanting to know what John Gallo and I had talked about when he had been with me here the previous afternoon.
“How’d you know he was here?” I said.
“Knowing stuff is kind of a hobby with me,” Cantor said.
I told him as much of the conversation as I could recall and what I’d said to him before he left.
“And that’s it?” Cantor said.
“Yes, Detective. That’s it.”
It was the first time I’d seen him since I walked out of the restaurant that night, right before Cantor and I had been turned into San Francisco’s fun couple by the media.
“You’re not leaving anything out this time?”
“I’ve learned that only opens me up to heartbreak. Or opens you up to heartbreak. Or both of us.”
“He act like somebody who might go home and jump?” Cantor said.
“Because of a football team?”
“Somebody threw your father into the water over a football team,” Cantor said, “and someone threw your brother out a window. Maybe the same person threw Gallo off a cliff.”
“Let me know when you figure it out.”
“Is this the way it’s going to be with us from now on?”
“I’m not really sure, Detective. But if you don’t have any further questions for me, I have a team meeting to attend.”
“With the Wolves?”
“The Hunters Point Bears, as a matter of fact.”
Cantor went down the hall to talk to Danny Wolf about the death of John Gallo. I drove over to the high school. Chris Tinelli, my quarterback, was the one who’d emailed me earlier and said he and the other players wanted to meet with me in the gym before practice.
The Bears’ first playoff game was scheduled for Saturday, against Archbishop Riordan. If we won, the championship game would be in two weeks. I’d already arranged that it would be played at Wolves Stadium, whether the Bears were in it or not.
The players were waiting for me when I got there, already suited up for practice. They were seated in bleachers that had been pulled down off the gym walls, as if this were some kind of assembly. When I walked in, it occurred to me how good it was to see them. I’d missed three consecutive practices last week and then been in Seattle when we’d nearly suffered our first loss of the season.
I looked up at them and grinned and said, “Why don’t I make a few opening comments and then throw it open to questions?”
Nobody laughed.
Crickets.
Chris Tinelli had been sitting in the bottom row of the bleachers. He got up now and walked up to me, his face serious, his rubber cleats sounding loud on the gym floor.
“What’s going on, Chris?” I said to him.
He took a deep breath, looked up at his teammates, and then said, “We don’t want you to coach us anymore.”
I looked at him as if I hadn’t heard him correctly.
“I’m sorry. What did you just say?”
“We feel bad about it, Coach. We really do. But we’re kind of firing you.”