Change-up: Mystery at the World Series

22: BACK TO BOSTON

STEVIE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING about what had happened downstairs until everyone had written and filed their stories and they were on their way home in Kelleher’s car.

“So, now they’re resorting to blackmail,” Tamara said when Stevie had finished.

“But it can’t work,” Susan Carol said. “No one will believe a story like that.”

“As a matter of fact, there are people who will believe it,” Kelleher said. “But being accused of getting a little forward on a date isn’t that big a deal on today’s gossip meter. Stevie, you’re going to have to suck it up and just tell your side if it comes to that and not worry about what people think.”

“Great,” Stevie said. “My parents will be so proud.”

“Mine too, if it comes to that,” Susan Carol said.

Tamara’s cell phone rang. She looked at the number for a second and then answered.

“What’s up, Chico?” she said.

Stevie knew that Chico Harlan was the Post’s Nationals beat writer. Tamara listened for a minute, rolled her eyes, and said, “Hang on a sec.”

Holding her hand over the phone, she said, “According to Chico, several people went to talk to Doyle after the clubhouse incident. He said he had been telling you to stay away from his daughter, to stop calling her all the time.”

“That didn’t take long,” Stevie said.

“They can’t not write it,” Tamara said. “It’ll just be a note, but he wants to know if Stevie has any comment.”

Stevie looked at Kelleher, who looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Tell him that Stevie says, ‘This isn’t worthy of comment.’”

Tamara put the phone back to her ear and said, “ Chico, Stevie says, ‘This isn’t worthy of comment-for the moment.’”

After she hung up, Kelleher said, “That’s a better answer. Lets people know there will be some kind of response coming.”

Stevie felt a little bit better, but not much.

He called his parents the next day and filled them in. His dad had read a note in the Philadelphia Inquirer similar to Harlan’s except that it said he couldn’t be reached for comment.

“Maybe you should come home instead of going to Boston,” Bill Thomas said to his son. “It wouldn’t be awful if you got back to school a couple days sooner, you know.”

About the only thing Stevie was dreading more than Boston was going back to school. “No thanks, Dad, I’m going to go to Boston,” he said.

His dad didn’t argue. “Tell Bobby I expect him to keep an eye on you around the clock the rest of the way,” he said.

“I’ll tell him,” Stevie said, intending to do nothing of the sort.

The flight back to Boston went smoothly, but when Stevie turned his phone back on in the airport, there were thirty-four messages for him. People had gotten his number and were looking for a follow-up on his brief no-comment to Harlan. Kelleher rolled his eyes when Stevie told him.

“You can answer all of them at once when we get to the ballpark tomorrow,” he said. “Nothing before that. The clubhouses will be closed when we get there, and they’ll all probably come at you when you walk onto the field. You’ll deal with it then.”

“What am I going to say?” Stevie asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” Kelleher admitted.

The four of them were sitting in Tamara and Bobby’s room back at the Marriott Long Wharf, which had a wonderful view of Boston Harbor. Stevie found it hard to believe it was only six days ago that they had sat in this same hotel getting ready for the series to begin.

“The bigger question is, how do we nail down this story?” Susan Carol said. “We can’t write it without talking to Doyle, can we?”

“No, we can’t,” Kelleher said. “In fact, until we talk to Doyle, I’m not even sure there is a story.”

“What do you mean?” Stevie asked.

Kelleher shrugged. “I can understand why the cops didn’t go after him, and I’m not sure we should go after him either. His wife died-he has to live with that forever. If he admits he was drinking and tells us that the movie of his life isn’t going to make up a second car or make him out to be innocent…”

“If there’s a movie,” Tamara put in.

“Right,” Kelleher said. “If he admits it, I’m not sure we write it.”

“What if he keeps lying?”

“Then we have two cops on the record saying he was drinking that night. Maybe then we have to write it, I don’t know. But first we have to talk to him.”

Tamara said, “May be easier said than done. Doyle may have wanted to confront Stevie last night, but I’m sure Felkoff will advise him not to talk to us about the night of the accident. Too much to lose, not a lot to gain. Felkoff-jerk that he is-should be smart enough to know there’s no story unless we talk to him again.”

“Felkoff may be talking to Norbert about all this, but he’s probably not talking to David and Morra much,” Susan Carol said. “What if I talked to David again?”

“Have you two still been talking?” Tamara asked, an instant before Stevie could ask the same question.

“No,” she said. “Not since Saturday. He sent me a text yesterday saying he knew I had gone with Stevie to Lynchburg and that he was very disappointed in me. I wrote back that I had not broken my word to him. That’s the last I’ve heard from him.”

“So, what do you propose?” Bobby said.

“I could ask for a meeting. Just the two of us. Try to make him understand we aren’t out to get his dad or him or Morra, but we need to talk, we need to know the truth.”

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Bobby said. “With all due respect to your ability to charm people, Susan Carol, even if he thinks it’s a good idea, Felkoff won’t.”

“So, what do we do then?” Susan Carol asked.

Stevie had been quiet throughout the conversation. Now he sat up straight. “How about if we bluff them?” he said.

“What do you mean?” Bobby said.

“What if we sit down and write the story-everything we know. Then Susan Carol calls David and asks for a meeting with him and Morra. We present the story to them and say it’s going in the paper on Thursday and that his dad has until Wednesday to tell us his side.”

Stevie looked at Tamara.

“It might work,” she said.

“We still have to try to call Doyle first,” Kelleher said. “Just straight-out say we need to talk to him.”

“What if he says no or doesn’t respond?” Stevie asked.

“Then maybe we go with your plan,” Kelleher said.

“Do you think Doyle and Felkoff would know it’s a bluff?” Stevie said.

“I don’t think they can afford to take the chance, do you?” Tamara said.

Kelleher nodded. “You might be right.”

He picked up the phone, called the Ritz-Carlton, and left a message for Doyle. He looked at Susan Carol. “In the meantime,” he said, “why don’t you give David a call.”

She took out her phone and began punching buttons. Even though he completely believed her when she said nothing had happened that day on the Freedom Trail, Stevie was very relieved to see that David Doyle was not on Susan Carol’s speed dial.

Not surprisingly, Susan Carol got his voice mail. She left a message telling David, “It’s very important that you call me about the story Stevie and I are writing right now.”

“That should get a response,” she said.

Only it didn’t. The afternoon passed with no answer from either Norbert Doyle or David Doyle. Kelleher called John Dever to ask him to please pass a message to Doyle. An hour later Dever called him back. “Norbert says he’s got no interest in talking to you guys,” Dever said. “I’m sorry, I did try.”

Shortly before they left for dinner, Susan Carol sent David a text saying the same thing as the phone message. They ate at a very crowded, very loud-but very good-restaurant called Grill 23.

There were lots of baseball people in the restaurant-writers, TV people, and folks who worked for Major League Baseball.

Stevie saw Phyllis Merhige and Rich Levin, the two PR people whom Bobby and Tamara were friendly with, walking toward the table. Right behind them was a familiar figure: Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball.

“You all know the commissioner, don’t you?” Merhige asked as they walked up.

“No, we’ve never met,” Kelleher said, clearly joking as he stood up to shake hands.

“Tamara, when are you going to explain how you ended up with this one?” Selig said, moving on to give Mearns a kiss.

“He promised he could get me into baseball games,” Tamara said.

“And this must be young Mr. Thomas and young Miss Anderson,” Selig said as both Stevie and Susan Carol stood to shake his hand.

“I guess the good news for us is that you two are covering the World Series and no one has been kidnapped or blackmailed or covered up a drug test,” Selig said with a smile.

“As far as you know, Commissioner,” Kelleher said.

“Don’t even joke about that, Bobby,” Selig said.

He waved his goodbyes and followed Levin to the front door.

Merhige lingered for a moment. “Everything okay?” she said, mostly to Kelleher but clearly to the whole table.

“Everything’s going to be fine, Phyllis,” Kelleher said.

“I hope so,” Phyllis said. “If you need me…”

“Thanks, Phyllis, we know,” Kelleher said.

She followed Selig and Levin to the door.

“You like Selig?” Susan Carol asked.

“I like him a lot,” Kelleher said. “I don’t always agree with him-in fact, I disagree with him often. But I definitely like him.”

They decided to walk back to the hotel. It was a brisk night, but it wasn’t windy and it wasn’t that far. They were about halfway back when Susan Carol’s phone began playing the Duke fight song. She pulled it out of her pocket, looked at the number, and said, “It’s him.”

They all knew who “him” was without asking.

“David, I didn’t think you were ever going to call me,” she said, picking up, not in a Scarlett voice but in a pleasant one. After Doyle had talked for a few seconds, she responded.

“I think you probably have a good idea what’s in the story,” she said. “But you should see it so you understand exactly what’s at stake.”

She listened for another moment. “As long as we give your dad the chance to answer our questions, we’ve done our job. Bobby Kelleher tried to contact him today, and he said he wouldn’t talk to us. If he won’t meet with us alone, then we’ll try to talk in the clubhouse tomorrow night. And if he ducks that, we’ll try one more time. But if all we get is ‘No comment,’ we’ve still done all we need to do.”

She pulled the phone away from her ear suddenly and Stevie could hear shouting coming from the other end.

“How about one o’clock tomorrow in Faneuil Hall?” she said. “We’ll get pizza and meet you in the dining area.”

“Crowded is what we want, David,” she said in response to his next comment.

She listened one more time. “Of course I’m bringing Stevie. You should bring Morra. Maybe she can apologize for those lies your dad was telling about Stevie last night.”

She looked at the phone and smiled. “He hung up.”

“You think they’ll show?” Stevie said.

“They’ll show,” Susan Carol said. “The question is, will they take our bait?”

“Well, as of this moment we have no bait,” Kelleher said. “You guys need to get to bed so you can get an early start on writing this ‘story.’”

Stevie and Susan Carol agreed to meet for breakfast at eight o’clock so they would have plenty of time to work on the story before the one o’clock meeting. Stevie picked at his French toast while staring out at the harbor. It was a crisp, gorgeous New England fall day.

“I think I could live here,” he said to Susan Carol.

“Come back in January and tell me if you still feel that way,” she said.

He knew she was right, although Philadelphia wasn’t exactly Fort Lauderdale that time of year either.

They went to her room after breakfast and by eleven o’clock had a story they were ready to show Kelleher and Mearns. It was long-way long, close to three thousand words-but it seemed impossible to Stevie to explain everything without writing that long. Since they didn’t have a printer available, Kelleher sat with their laptop, with Tamara reading over his shoulder.

“Well?” Susan Carol said when they were done.

“To be honest, you haven’t got it,” Tamara said. “This would never get in the paper because it’s completely unclear if Doyle is anything more than someone who made a horrible mistake and paid a huge price for it. It’s also not clear if Molloy is the bad guy or if no one is the bad guy. You can’t say for sure whether or not the accident happened because he was drinking. It seems clear there was some kind of police cover-up, but not what they were covering up or why.”

“All of which doesn’t matter right now,” Kelleher said. “Tamara’s right, of course, but we aren’t selling this to editors or lawyers, we’re selling it to Morra and David. If they believe we’re prepared to print this, they might convince their dad to talk to you before it goes in the paper.”

“In fact,” Mearns said, “you should add a sentence saying he refused to comment, to show them that’s how it will look if he doesn’t talk.”

Kelleher and Mearns made a few more changes: they wanted to pump up the notion that Doyle had lied on some level when he told Stevie the week before that his wife had been killed by a drunk driver.

Then Kelleher also added:

If there is one thing clear in the police report, it is that only one driver was involved in the accident that killed Analise Doyle. If, as Doyle said a week ago, she was killed by a drunk driver, was he saying that he was the drunk driver responsible for his wife’s death?

And while Doyle has said he missed the rest of that season due to injuries suffered in the accident, two police officers said this week that he went directly to an alcohol rehabilitation clinic after the accident.

Doyle refused comment when asked for further details this week.

Mearns shook her head reading that. “You know that wouldn’t make it past a lawyer in a million years,” she said.

“Yes,” Kelleher said. “I know. But I doubt that the Doyle kids do. Felkoff might advise Doyle that it’s libel, but we’ve got both Hatley and Molloy on the record, so it’s not so cut-and-dried.”

Stevie and Susan Carol went downstairs to the hotel’s business center to print out some copies of the story. They gave copies to Kelleher and Mearns and left the hotel at about twelve-thirty, wanting time to eat and be ready before the Doyles arrived. Stevie was both nervous and hungry. He was also wishing they were just taking a walk on this beautiful fall day.

“It’s such a nice day, I’d even go for a walk on the Freedom Trail with you.”

“You know, you might actually enjoy it,” Susan Carol said. “Wouldn’t you at least like to see the church where Paul Revere told them, ‘One if by land, and two if by sea’?”

“I think I’d rather go see Harvard Stadium,” he said. “Oldest in the country, you know.”

She groaned. They ordered their pizza and walked to the dining area. Stevie was considering going back for a third slice when he saw David and Morra approach. Neither was carrying any kind of food. Clearly, they were here strictly for business.

“Make this fast,” David said by way of a greeting.

“Nice to see you too,” Stevie said, going very quickly from nervous to annoyed.

“Have you got the story?” Morra asked.

Susan Carol reached into her purse and pulled out two copies of the story.

David’s and Morra’s eyes narrowed as they read. At one point David said, “How can you say my dad had no comment when you haven’t asked him about any of this?”

“Bobby Kelleher left him a message yesterday and called John Dever, who said he wouldn’t talk to us,” Susan Carol said. “Obviously, if he talks to us, we’ll change that. We can change anything. Right now these are the facts as we know them.”

“This is so unfair!” Morra screamed.

“Then tell your dad to talk to us so we can make it fair,” Stevie said. “He started all of this by saying a drunk driver killed your mom.”

“You’re nothing but a self-righteous asshole, Thomas!” David Doyle said, leaning close to Stevie so he wasn’t heard by everyone around them. He appeared to be about eleven feet tall at that moment, but Stevie wasn’t going to back down.

Stevie said, “You’re just pissed because you’ve tried every dirty trick to keep us from getting this story, and we got it anyway.”

“No you didn’t. You’ve got nothing!” David said, shoving Stevie so hard that he tumbled backward and fell into someone at the next table.

“Hey!” Stevie heard the person shout. Jumping up, Stevie ran straight at David, and the two of them went flying, landing on the ground with Stevie on top. Doyle was stronger than he was, and he could feel him rolling over to get on top of him. That would not be good. He pulled a hand free and swung a fist at David, catching him on the side of the head. He felt a stinging sensation in his hand and then heard loud voices saying, “Break this up, break this up!”

A security guard was pulling David away, and another was pulling Stevie to his feet. David struggled briefly, but the beefy guard was holding on tight. Stevie didn’t struggle. He was relieved someone had intervened. The fight, he suspected, would not have gone well for him if it had continued.

“You want to fight, you take it someplace else,” the security guard holding David said. “You got that?”

David didn’t answer. “Hey, kid, you got that?” the guard repeated. “Start in again and we’ll call the cops and let them deal with you. Understand?”

Stevie nodded that he understood.

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” David said.

The two guards let the boys go, then stood there to make sure no one lunged for anyone.

Stevie pointed a finger at both Doyles. “The story runs Thursday,” he said, aware that people were still watching and listening. “One way or the other.”

He turned to Susan Carol. “Let’s go,” he said.

“This isn’t over, Thomas,” he heard David shout as he turned to walk away. “I promise you it’s not over.”

Stevie knew that David Doyle was right. This was far from over.