I headed to Deborah DiMassi’s second floor in the back apartment. I had to knock three times. She opened the door, saw me, and started to cry. She flung the door open and rushed back inside. I hurried after her.
I caught up with her at the kitchen sink. She filled a glass with water from the tap, slurped, gulped, coughed, and dropped the glass. It shattered on the floor. I got a rag, mop, broom, and dust pan. I swept and swabbed and dumped the shards in the trash bag under the sink. I found a plastic cup, filled it with water, and held it out to her. She took it and sipped. Tears streamed down her face.
“Why don’t we sit down?”
She nodded and plunked herself onto a plastic covered kitchen chair. She began to blubber and weep. I grabbed a fistful of paper napkins from a plastic holder on the kitchen counter and placed them on the table next to her hand. It took nearly five minutes for the tears and sniffles to stop. She blew her nose, picked up the cup, and sipped more water.
After she took several deep breaths, I asked, “How can I help?”
She plunked the cup onto the table top. A small bit of water sloshed out. She ignored it. When she spoke, her voice was shrill. “They’ve all been here! They’ve been accusing me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any friends in this town. They’re all against me. Tyler was my last friend, and he’s dead.” The tears started again.
I heard the baby begin to cry. She began to get up and stumbled. I rose and said, “I’ll get him.”
The baby was in the crib in a back bedroom. I picked him up and held him. I brought him to the kitchen and sat with him in my arms. He shut his eyes and sighed. Deborah gave a vinegary smile. I got up and began to hand the child to her, but it immediately began to fuss. Perhaps it sensed her upset. DiMassi dropped her arms. I cradled the kid and sat back down.
While I waited, I rocked the baby and made sure his mother was supplied with napkins and water.
When her tears were back under control, I asked, “Who’s been here?”
“All of them.” She gulped, and shook her head. “The police.”
“Rotella?”
She nodded.
“He’s your father.”
“He’s evil incarnate.”
“Why?”
“I got married to the boy he wanted me to, mostly to get out of the house. That jerk was some abusive local asshole who left town. After I divorced him, I moved back in with my parents. I couldn’t afford to be on my own. Then I got pregnant. My mom died of breast cancer just before the baby was born. My dad threw me out.”
I said, “He is a shit.” I rocked the baby for a minute. I wondered who was helping her with the bills to be on her own now. I asked, “Who else was here?”
“Some awful people who claimed they were from the league or the team or some kind of officialdom. Murray came. Connor Knecht. They accused me of all kinds of things. All of them! Accused me! And Murray should know better. You were nice to me the other day. You’re the only one who’s been willing to listen to me. Am I in trouble? Am I going to jail? Do I need a lawyer? What would happen to my baby if I got arrested? I can’t be arrested.”
“You’re here, so you weren’t arrested. We can get you a lawyer.” Georgia was going to be busy.
She paused then nodded. “I can’t pay for one.”
“We’ll figure that out when we have to. What did they want to know?”
“They wanted to know where I was before the bus left. They wanted to know where I was when Tyler died. They wanted to know if I knew Tim Czobel. They wanted to know if Tyler did drugs. They wanted to know how well I knew him. They seemed to know things.”
“Or assumed them and bullied you into admitting things.”
“They were all bullies and mean. That Murray! I’ll never forgive him, but I wouldn’t tell them anything. I’m not stupid. I demanded a lawyer. Those baseball people were mean.”
“Was Tyler taking drugs? His wife says she injected him.”
“Yes. He had this fear of needles. He was such baby. I injected him.”
“Where did he get the drugs?”
“Charlie Hopper. He took supplements that had to be injected.”
“Do you know what they were?”
“No, but he kept them here so they wouldn’t be found at his place.”
“You don’t still have them?”
“As soon as they left this morning, I flushed them all down the toilet.”
“Rotella didn’t have a search warrant?”
“He didn’t mention one.”
Maybe Rotella didn’t want to find drugs that could be traced back to Hopper.
“When did you last inject him?”
“I didn’t kill him.” Tears began again. The baby began to fuss. I rocked it, stood, and swayed gently back and forth.
“Are you sure you gave him the right dosage that last day?”
“It was the same one he always took.”
“Did he talk about the other players here taking drugs or who in the majors might be?”
“He told me that if any of his teammates or any of the owners turned on him, he’d take down everybody. There wouldn’t be another Hall of Fame player for ten years. He’d name more names than Jose Canseco, and he’d have proof. He bragged that he’d been threatening the owners. Trade him, bring him up to the big team, or he’d start naming names. He did a lot of bragging so I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth.”
So there could have been lots of people afraid of what Skeen knew. And maybe there were people fed up with him.
DiMassi continued, “He was angry the last few times he was here. He was afraid his career was over.”
“He was overweight and out of shape.”
“He thought he could be a designated hitter.”
I wasn’t about to dump on anybody else’s dreams, realistic or not.
“Was he going to take you with him?”
“He kept saying he would. I needed money.”
I took a guess. “Did Tim Czobel pay you to make a tape of Skeen doing drugs?”
“He offered me a lot of money.” She sniffed. “I didn’t know how much longer my thing with Tyler would last. I was desperate.”
“Does anyone know where the tape is?”
“I’ve got it.”
She retrieved a flash drive with the video from under a plastic bag at the bottom of the garbage pail.
“You made a tape for Czobel, but you didn’t give him samples of the drugs?”
“They were in carefully counted-out vials with very specific doses. I couldn’t. If any were missing or short, they’d have been noticed.”
She looked around the room, gave me a forlorn look. She said, “Things are never going to get better.” She got up, took a bottle of shelf-stable formula mix from the cupboard. I handed her the child. It settled into her arms and nursed.
I took this new flash drive with the video on it to Duncan at the office. This too was password-protected.
He had hooked the phone up to the computer with a device that I didn’t begin to understand. When I left he was muttering and cursing at the screen.
I spent the early afternoon trying to talk to hospital administrators who had to be colluding if Skeen’s murder was to be covered up. The issue of protecting Frank Ericson, Murray’s contact on the hospital staff, didn’t come up because I didn’t get past the front desk.
I tried Bill Rohden, the local doctor Skeen had been seeing. I didn’t get past the receptionist.
I tried the local pharmacist. He refused to discuss the medicines of anyone in or out of the community.
I stopped to talk with Bunny Fitzwilliams, the local dowager that Hopper had mentioned. The butler didn’t let me in the front door.
Some days are like that.
I got hold of Skeen’s cleaning service who turned out to be a seventy-five-year-old woman supplementing her Social Security by cleaning at Skeen’s place three days a week. She knew nothing about drugs, pills, or his lifestyle other than to say he lived like a pig.
The mid-afternoon heat was being its unbearable self as I made my way to Jamie McDaniels’. Using a hose and nozzle he was watering a garden of scraggly plants. He wore white shower clogs and white athletic shorts. When the bright sunlight hit them right, they were transparent enough to reveal he wore no underwear. A fine sight indeed.
I decided to push him. “You’ve been taking performance enhancing drugs supplied by Charlie Hopper.”
“Who says?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I’m winning on talent.”
“I won’t deny you have a lot of that.”
“Who told you I was?”
“I’m not trying to get you in trouble. I’m trying to solve several murders.”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
“I don’t think you did, but I’d really like to know who your source was and how the drug distribution worked in town. My guess is the whole issue of drugs and the team is going to explode and Charlie Hopper is going to jail.” I spoke with more confidence than was justified.
“You won’t tell?”
“I’m trying to solve a murder.”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
He turned off the hose and walked to the back of his car. He leaned against the trunk. His shorts clung tightly, revealing he was cut.
I asked, “How did it work?”
“It was Charlie Hopper. Since Tyler Skeen got to town a lot of guys tried stuff. Sure a few of them were using Charlie Hopper’s drugs, but…” He shook his head.
I said, “If it was performance-enhancing drugs, nobody’s performance was being enhanced.”
“Some guys said it was.” He shrugged. “But when Skeen got to town, he had the real thing. It was easier to get drugs, at least in this town, maybe more so than others. Supposedly the stuff I’m taking won’t show up in drug tests. Gotta be true. I’ve had a couple of tests and not one has come up positive.”
I looked at his lanky frame. “And no evidence of body size change?”
“No wild emotional swings. None of the usual crap.”
“That’s because they were fake.”
“Fake? You sure?”
“Pretty much.”
He laughed. “We were such dumb fucks. We were the distributors. What fools.”
“Distributors?”
“Yeah, on the team bus. We had guys pick up supplies from Charlie Hopper, and we’d sell them in the towns we went to. They were really fake?”
“They were really fake.”
“But Skeen’s weren’t?”
“I’m not sure yet. I suspect Hopper was selling both fake stuff and real stuff. He could charge Skeen a fortune and be making real money.”
“Yeah, we couldn’t afford much. We were so stupid. I only took what I thought was the real stuff a couple times. That’s what the fight was about between me and Skeen at his condo. He wanted more money. He was a shit.”