Chapter Ten    

SATURDAY

Randall Whitestone Jr. has no memory of his father ever receiving any kind of postcard with numbers on it. He even seems a little put out that I would wake him at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning to ask him about it. Must be a late sleeper.

I ask him if his mother’s still living, and if she might have gotten anything like the postcards Roy and Brenda Haas received.

“I think you’re nuts,” Randy Whitestone says. “What the hell has this got to do with some story about a damn minor-league baseball team?”

It might mean nothing, I concede, but it might mean a lot. I don’t really want to go any deeper than that right now with Lucky Whitestone’s son.

Finally, he tells me that his mother is still alive, although she’s married again, and been widowed again.

“But for God’s sake,” he says, just before he hangs up, “don’t call her at eight o’clock, and don’t tell her I gave you her number. She’s pissed off at me enough as it is.”

I check the Richmond paper online in the lobby and see that Sarah Goodnight had a full evening pinch-hitting on the cops beat. Two dead, one wounded in a too-usual overnight shootout on the South Side. It happened after one, which means a call to Sarah any time before noon probably would not be appreciated. It also means another freebie for the Internet, another reason for our web masters to crow about how fast our online “product” is growing without further explaining that they aren’t actually making any money giving our shit away.

A year or so ago, Enos Jackson got a call from some bone-head who wanted to know why we couldn’t get all the good stuff in the paper, the way “those fellas on the Internet do.” Jackson says he used to try to explain about early deadlines and space and time to the unwashed when they’d ask dumbass questions like that.

“Now,” he said, when he related the conversation to me, “I just tell them those fellas on the Internet are just smarter than us.”

IT TAKES us a little more than four hours to drive from Tallahassee to Mobile, then another half hour to find the little town where Phil “Wimpy” Holt was born and died.

His widow is expecting us. It’s already summer hot by the time we get there a little past two. She takes us out on the back porch, screened to protect us from the mosquitoes, and brings us some iced tea. This far south, they don’t even bother to ask if you want it with sugar. I think we’re at the epicenter of the Diabetes Belt. The house is on a little lake, and the log out in the middle turns out to be Sally. Every community should have a pet alligator. Lurleen Edwards says Sally isn’t really much of a danger “although I wouldn’t advise letting a small dog run loose around here.” I trust her, but I do glance toward the lake every once in a while.

Lurleen looks to be about seventy. She is attractive and well kept; it’s very easy to see why she was a beauty queen in her prime. And she’s kept herself in shape. There’s a photo on the wall of her finishing a 10K last year. She married again a few years after her husband was killed. Her second spouse, Walter, is out on the golf course that runs through their community. I ask if Walter can outrun an alligator. Cindy kicks me under the table, but Lurleen just laughs.

“Oh,” she says, as she passes a glass of sugar water to me, “Walter says you don’t really have to be that fast, just faster than your partner. Gators can’t handle but one at a time.”

She’s a nice lady, and I don’t want to do a bull rush on what I’m here to find out. We spend an hour or so chatting about Wimpy Holt’s career, interrupted occasionally by Cindy asking her about a particularly attractive knickknack or an interesting photograph.

“They call him Phil around here,” Lurleen says. “He never did like that nickname.” Can’t blame him.

Finally, though, I get around to that night in 1985, the one that ended Phil Holt’s career as a life form.

“He didn’t really make that much money in baseball,” his widow says. “And he didn’t really invest it all that well. I’ll be honest with you: we were living in a condominium that was just a teensy bit bigger than this porch and falling behind on the payments.

“But Phil was the love of my life. When he got killed, it just about took me with him. I never really got over that.”

She asks me not to use the part about her late first husband’s place in her romantic pecking order, so as not to upset Walter, who obviously has done all money can do to heal a broken heart.

Normally, I’m a hard-ass on people who tell me something and then don’t want to be quoted. This time, though, I’ll make an exception.

Phil Holt was, as I’d been told by Jumpin’ Jimmy, managing a Kwik Mart, far from the bright lights of the majors. He’d have been forty-five that year, a good ten years away from the last paycheck he got in the bigs. He didn’t quite make it to the Promised Land of free agency, where a guy who won fifteen games for the Detroit Tigers could pick up a few million by just showing up alive at somebody’s training camp the next March.

“Oh, he tried all kind of things to make a buck,” Lurleen says. “Amway. A baseball card shop. We finally went flat busted when some fella convinced him to take most of what we had left and plow it into a sports bar. Wimpy’s. Well, you can imagine Phil hated the name, but it was right out by the interstate, where they get lots of traffic, and people still remembered his name. In all the ads and the TV commercials, they’d say, 'Come have a beer with major-league all-star Phil Holt.’

“Trouble was, Phil had a lot of beers with a lot of people who wanted to shake his hand, and he didn’t spend a lot of time checking the cash register. The fella showed up one day and said they were broke, and there wasn’t any way Phil could prove they weren’t, although we heard later the same fella opened another sports bar up in Huntsville a year or so later. Phil was kind of naïve. And he didn’t have a lot of patience. Walter says he didn’t pay attention to the bottom line, which was true.”

Lurleen stops and swallows. She seems to be about as close to losing her composure as she’ll ever get.

“But he was something,” she says, then pauses and waves her well-tanned right arm as if she’s pushing the past away. “Let’s move on.”

The night it happened was in late October. Phil was working the night shift by himself. The kid who was supposed to come in and close the place down, so Phil could go home at nine, called in sick.

“I still see that boy. Well, he’s a grown man now, obviously, and he still kind of avoids me, like he knows it might have been him instead of Phil.”

She shows me the stories from the Mobile paper. “Ex-major leaguer killed in robbery.” “Police seek suspect in Holt murder.” “Man questioned, then released in Holt case.” And then, a year later, “No new leads in Holt killing.”

“They questioned this one fella, because he was seen in the same block and he had held up a liquor store and done time ten years before, but nothing ever came of it.

“And then, I think they just stopped looking.”

The crazy thing, she said, was that almost nothing was taken from the register.

“He was good about locking the cash up in the safe every couple of hours or so,” she says, “and there wasn’t any sign that whoever shot him even tried to get at that. Phil wouldn’t have gotten himself killed trying to protect the Kwik Mart’s money, I can tell you that. And there wasn’t any sign of a struggle.”

Eventually, she said the police told her that it might have been some crack addict from Mobile or New Orleans just stopping to get enough money for a rock, and then he just got spooked or something and started shooting.

It’s past four thirty when I get around to asking her about postcards.

I describe the kind of cards Brenda Haas says she’s gotten over the years.

Lurleen gets a strange look.

“Yes,” she says. With her sweet-tea accent, it comes out “Yay-uss.” “There was a card, like what you’re talking about. It came right after Phil’s death, along with all the sympathy cards, just like she’s talking about. I remember how peculiar it was, with no return address, just postmarked Mobile. And it did have those little numbers on it. It’s just like she said, one through nine. And I think the one was crossed off. I got another one, just like it, maybe two or three years later, and I think that one had two numbers crossed off. Like maybe the one and the five or the six?

“I think that’s all I got. It wasn’t long after that that Walter and I started seeing each other, and then I moved.”

She asks me why I’d ask about something like that. I tell her that I’m not sure, but that I will tell her what I know when I know something.

“If it’s about finding who killed Phil,” she says, lowering her voice as if the neighbors might be listening, “I’ll do anything I can to help catch the son of a bitch.”

BEFORE WE head out for what we’ve been told is the best fish camp in the general area, I make my call to Lucky Whitestone’s widow back in Tallahassee.

She’s been expecting my call.

Thelma Boyle is, I’m estimating, about the same age as Lurleen Edwards. She sounds a little more world-worn, though. She has a voice that sounds like it’s been filtered through a few million cigarettes and a truckload of bourbon.

But she has what I need.

“Hell, yeah, I got them cards,” she says. “Still gettin’ ’em.”

I ask for some more detail. The then-Thelma Whitestone says she got a postcard like the one Phil Holt’s and Roy Haas’s widows got right after Lucky’s fatal hunting accident.

“But it wadn’t the first one,” she says. “I’d got one a couple of years before that. The one after Lucky got killed, it had two numbers crossed off. I don’t remember about the first one.

“But the other ones, after that, they would have more and more numbers marked off.”

I ask her how many she’s gotten, over the years, and she says maybe six or seven. The last one, she says, was maybe four years ago.

“I remember that one, because it made me curious,” she says. “It had everything marked off except the two and the nine.”

She’s heard from her son that I’m doing a story on some minor-league team Lucky played on. She says she can’t really tell me that much, because she wasn’t with him in Richmond.

“We’d dated and all,” she says, “and we had sort of an understanding, but I never went up there. I’m sorry I can’t tell you much more. Randy can tell you what you need to know.”

I tell her that she’s been a big help.

“Are you going to talk to Randy again?” Thelma Boyle asks me.

I say that I’m not sure.

“Well, if you do,” she says, “tell him to get his butt over here and mow my damn grass. He promised to do it on Tuesday.”

I HAVEN’T had anything of note to drink in the last two days. I’ve been so good that I decide to reward myself. Many of my problems over the years have started with me rewarding myself.

I have a couple of Early Times on the rocks while we wait for a table. Cindy nurses a glass of white wine that, tragically, comes from Alabama. Ever the trouper, she says it’s not bad.

Another ET at the table and most of the bottle of chardonnay we’re supposed to share, and I’m feeling good, although from the looks Cindy’s giving me, maybe I’m not sounding and looking as good as I feel. She doesn’t try to stop me from having another ET after our fish dinner. She doesn’t even try to stop me from driving when we get in the rental car.

We’re not half a mile down the road when the blue lights go off like some kind of state police light show in the rearview mirror. Heartsick, I pull over. I’m thinking this is the worst possible scenario. Being the son of a light-skinned African American, I seldom even think about race these days. I know we’re not past it, but I’ve been a noncombatant in that sad, ridiculous war for a long time. I’m in the deepest South right now, though, and I’m feeling a major dose of paranoia coming on. Even if the state trooper thinks I’m some kind of Middle Eastern mélange, that has its own downside. Either way, it’s DWIANW—driving while intoxicated and not white.

“Quick,” Cindy says, already undoing her seatbelt. “Switch.”

It is not one of the noble moments of my life, but I’m barely back to full driving status again after an unfortunate incident in downtown Richmond in which everyone but me seemed to be going the wrong way on a one-way street.

Somehow, we manage to switch seats and even buckle up before the state trooper ambles up and shines his light in Cindy’s eyes.

“Have you been drinking, ma’am?” he asks her, as polite as a cat contemplating a canary. He looks over at me suspiciously. I look straight ahead.

“Two glasses of wine, officer,” she says, and she’s not lying by more than one. “I’m the designated driver. This one”—she points dismissively in my direction and shakes her head—“sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to get me back to the hotel safely.”

She’s really laying the southern accent on thick. She dipped at least two states toward the equator.

He takes her driver’s license, making a note that it’s from Virginia, which probably qualifies as Up North down here. Then he hands it back.

Because she’s minding her manners and is pretty, he doesn’t make her get out and walk the centerline or recite the alphabet backward. He does, however, make her blow into the breathalyzer. I’m holding my breath, but Cindy doesn’t seem fazed.

“How’d I do?” she asks the officer, bright as a penny.

He grunts.

“Good enough,” he says, “but not by that much. You know, I could take you in anyhow.”

“Oh,” Cindy says, “I hope you don’t. I need to get this jerk back to the hotel.”

The trooper finally manages a smile.

“Well, you do that,” he says. “And be careful out here. Don’t want to have somebody as pretty as you get in an accident. You all be safe now.”

He gives me one more look, like he’s trying to figure out what the hell I am.

She thanks him, then slowly pulls out into the road. In the five minutes between there and the hotel, I don’t say anything. All that blue-light adrenaline has gone a long way toward sobering me up.

Finally, in the parking lot, I clear my throat.

“Thank you.”

I can’t think of anything else to say. I feel like Mr. Johnson has shrunk about two inches. I am not feeling very manly.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cindy says, then turns off the ignition and turns to me.

“Willie,” she says. “I’m not going to be a nag. I’m not going to be that person. We are who we are. I’ve got my faults, which I’m sure you’ll discover if you stay around long enough. Andy warned me—well, not warned, maybe, but told me—that you can hit it pretty hard when you get going.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop like a block of concrete on my muddled head.

“Here’s the thing, though. I’ll never hound you, never ask you why you drink so much. But I’m forty-five, and I’ve been through some shit. If things get bad, if I come to think you’re giving me insomnia and frown lines, I will leave, and I won’t look back. Life’s too short. That’s not an ultimatum or a threat or anything like that. It’s just the way it is.”

She says it quietly, calmly.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. Seldom have I been more sincere in that sentiment.

“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “Be better. And get your ass out of the car. The night’s still young.”

Inside, though, the night gets a bit older.

I check my cell phone, which I can never hear in restaurants or pretty much anywhere else these days.

There’s a call from Kate.

“Willie,” the voice mail says, “call me. Now.”

I do, and the news isn’t good. At least, it isn’t good for Raymond Gatewood.

For some reason, the cops didn’t get around to giving Gatewood’s jacket a good going-over until today.

“They found the key,” Kate says, and I hardly have to ask which one.

The missing key from Finlay Rand’s apartment, the one somebody took from the vase outside his door, turned up in Gatewood’s coat pocket.

I observe that this might just about seal the deal. Let’s get on with the hanging. I’m eager to put somebody on the scaffold, especially now, with Les holding on by a gnat’s eyelash.

“Well,” Kate says, “if he’s telling the truth about somebody dropping the jacket and him picking it up, the key thing doesn’t necessarily prove he was the shooter.”

I tell Kate it’s good enough for me until a better suspect comes along. And I’m pretty sure it’s good enough for Richmond’s finest and probably for the jury.

“It’s late,” I tell her. “I’ve got to go.” And I hang up.

I fill Cindy in on what’s happened.

“Sounds like they’ve got the right guy,” she says.

“Maybe.”

“Why only maybe? I mean, he was wearing the same clothes as the guy the camera caught leaving the building after the shooting, right? And he had the key in his coat pocket.”

It’s time to tell Cindy about the numbers.

“Holy shit,” she says, when I’ve finished. “I should’ve figured that out, as many scorecards as I’ve filled out over the years.”

“Well, sometimes things are so obvious you can’t see ’em.”

When Roy Haas’s widow first mentioned the postcards, I made notes, mental and otherwise, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But then, when I called back and she told me there were nine of them, and which ones had been crossed out, I started to see the light.

I’ve never known why baseball scorecards list the players the way they do. I should look it up sometime. I mean, I can understand why the pitcher is No. 1 and the catcher is 2, and then it makes sense to make the first baseman 3 and the second baseman 4. But why skip over the shortstop and make the third baseman No. 5, then go back to shortstop for 6? And why go from right to left across the infield, then left to right, 7 through 9, in the outfield?

The only numbers not crossed out on Brenda Haas’s last postcard were the 2 and the 9. Catcher and right fielder.

As far as I can tell, Buck McRae is still alive and kicking in North Carolina. And Les is still with us, for the moment.

I know Roy Haas, third baseman, had his heart attack four years ago. I know that Lucky Whitestone, shortstop, has been dead twenty-four years. I know that Phil Holt died in that convenience store holdup in 1985. I know Jackson Rittenbacker, center field, drowned in Lake Michigan eleven years ago, and that Rabbit Larue, second base, disappeared while walking the Appalachian Trail in 1990. I know about Paul Bonesteel, left field, who met his demise under a subway train in 1993.

All that leaves, in addition to Les and Buck McRae, is Jack Velasquez, the first baseman, and I’m not feeling too good about old Jack.

Most of the starters for the 1964 Richmond Vees seem to have met their fates, in a variety of ways and over a period of at least twenty-three years. It’s not unusual for people to die. Happens all the time. And it’s not unusual for former athletes to buy it while they were out hunting or fishing or walking the AT. But the only starters to get to their seventieth birthdays are Les, McRae and Velasquez, assuming he’s still living.

All this combined misfortune might make a nice hook for my story. The Curse of Parker Field or some such shit.

There’s only one thing that makes it more than a coincidence:

Somebody’s keeping score.