The Fan

19

Bent over a legal pad in the windowless office she shared with Bernie and Norm, Jewel Stern worked on the list of questions she would put to Bobby Rayburn. She parceled them out in subgroups: “$,” “Lifestyle and Family,” “The Game,” “Misc.” “The Game” was further subdivided into “Mind” and “Body.” Thirty-seven questions, so far. Jewel reviewed them at random:

Who do you respect most in the game?

What’s given you the most satisfaction in your career?

If you could change anything, what would it be?

How does being on the road so much affect your family life?

Who’s your wife’s favorite player?

Do you miss California?

Do you feel under any special pressure because of the big contract?

Jewel hated every one. She had the feeling they were all the same question anyway, except perhaps the last, and she’d already asked him that in spring training, to no effect. Still, dumb questions didn’t always lead to dumb answers. Maybe Bobby would open up on his own, bubbling forth eye-popping quotes, exploding with inside stuff. Maybe, for example, when she asked him about his family life, he’d blurt something about all the girls he screwed on the road. Maybe she’d get lucky.

Jewel swept that hope aside. Hoping to get lucky was a step toward mediocrity, and mediocrity wasn’t what Jewel wanted. If she was fated to sit one day in some nursing home for husbandless, childless biddies, she wanted at least to be able to dazzle them with what she’d had instead. The Rayburn profile was her chance to rise to another level. Jewel squeezed the pencil tightly in her hand, as though physical intensity might somehow give birth to a good idea.

“The answer’s yes,” the editor at the New York Times Magazine had said of her proposal, and Jewel had been so thrilled she hadn’t paid much attention to what had come next: “But we still feel it needs a stronger hook.”

“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “I know it’ll come out of the material.”

But now she was a week from deadline, and worried. In her proposal the hook had been the question of money and pressure, weak in their eyes and now proven impotent. She knew that the Times Magazine liked to do profiles of sports figures, in the desperate hunt for the possibly extinct male reader, but why green-light hers if they didn’t like the hook? Jewel couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened to her proposal if she’d been a man. Were they favoring her to make some kind of statement, or was she still, after a generation of court cases and locker-room scenes, a novelty? Or was it just possible they realized she knew the game?

None of those questions arose at the station. They knew she knew the game; she also had the voice. They paid her well. She slept in nice hotels, ate in nice restaurants, lived in the buzz of a hectic schedule. The question that arose at the station was in her own mind, and attacked from another direction: Had she gone to journalism school, now more than twenty years ago, to spend the rest of her life covering a boys’ game? If asked what Janie was up to-Jewel was her nom de guerre, suggested by her first agent, the one who had discovered her, as he liked to put it, at that dinky three-thousand-watt station in Hartford-her mother would say, “She’s in the media,” and if pressed add, “working in radio,” and only if cornered admit: “baseball analyst.”

Jewel doodled a baseball bat wearing a bow tie and an angry face. Her mind drifted back to the image of career biddies in the nursing home. In some track-jumping way, that prompted a new question, one she liked, and wrote down: What kind of ballplayer do you think — she checked her notes for the name — Sean will be?

Bernie stuck his head in the room. He had an ink smudge on the tip of his nose. “When’s the Rayburn interview?”

“After the game.”

“Maybe I got something for you.”

“What?”

“Or it might be nothing.”

“That’s all the foreplay I need, Bernie. What is it?”

“Know Cleats?”

She knew Cleats.

“Where were they sitting?” Jewel asked, raising her voice over the howling dirt bikes on TV.

“Right there,” replied Leon. “Primo had a Coke, Rayburn had a beer.”

“What kind of beer?”

“Heineken. He didn’t finish it.”

Jewel walked into the alcove, glanced at the crossed bats of Aaron and Mays. Aaron’s bat looked authentic, but Mays had used an Adirondack 302 for most of his career, and this was a Louisville Slugger. Leon came up behind her, wiping his hands on his apron.

“And then what happened?” she said.

“What makes you think anything happened?”

“We have our sources.”

“Tanya?”

“Who’s she?”

“One of the waitresses.”

“Can’t answer that,” Jewel said.

Because the tip had been anonymous. But Leon, as she hoped, inferred a zealous concern with protecting confidentiality, and nodded with approval. “They went to the can.” He pointed it out.

“Together?” Jewel moved toward it. Leon followed.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Primo went in first, I guess. But Rayburn was right behind him.”

“Chasing him, you mean?”

“Nothing like that. This is a classy place.”

Jewel stood outside the men’s-room door. The sign read: DUDES. “And then?”

“They were in there for a while.”

“What’s a while? ”

Leon shrugged. “Five minutes.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“I’m not an eavesdropper.”

“Of course not. But you did see them come out.”

“I was right there,” Leon said, indicating the beer taps behind the bar, about twenty feet away. “I keep a low profile, that’s my style, but I don’t miss much.”

“Despite your aversion to eavesdropping,” Jewel said, trying to remember how much money she had in her purse.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “And then?”

“And then?”

“Did it look like they’d been fighting?”

“Who told you that?”

“Sources. Didn’t I mention that already?”

There was a pause. Jewel could almost see Leon fishing through his thoughts, just beneath the surface of his eyes. She waited. “Was it one of those news tips?” he asked. Subtler than most.

She smiled. “News tips?”

“You know. Fifty bucks for the best news tip of the week.”

“We don’t do that,” Jewel said. “I wish I could offer you an inducement but it’s against station policy.”

“Oh.”

Silence. Jewel resisted the impulse to glance at her watch. “But I can reimburse for reasonable expenses,” she said.

“Expenses?”

“Like travel.”

Leon blinked. Subtle, perhaps, but not in her league.

“Suppose we took a little trip, for example.”

“Where to?” said Leon.

“How about Federico’s?”

“But that’s just down the block.”

“It meets the definition,” Jewel said.

Five minutes later, they were sitting at a tiny wrought-iron table at Federico’s. Drinks came: a latte with double cream and cinnamon for Jewel, a split of Cordon Rouge for Leon. Jewel took out a twenty, laid it on the table, safely under her hand. “So,” she resumed, “it looked like they’d been fighting.”

Eyes on the twenty, Leon said, “What about the return trip?”

“Now you’re getting into the spirit.”

Leon laughed.

Jewel laughed with him, took out another twenty, slid it on top of the first. “Let’s have it,” she said.

He stopped laughing. “It’s like you say. Looked like they’d been fighting.”

“How so?”

“Primo’s nose was bleeding.”

“He came out first?”

“And left in a hurry.”

“What about Rayburn?”

“Not a mark on him. What would you expect, a little guy like Primo going up against him?”

“I don’t know,” Jewel said. “What else happened?”

“Nothing else. Rayburn signed a couple of autographs and split.”

“No idea what it was about?”

Leon shook his head.

“What did they act like?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Their mood. Expression on their faces.”

“On the way out of the can, you mean?”

“Sure. On the way out of the can.”

“That’s a funny thing.”

“Funny?”

“Now that you mention it. Primo was the loser, right? But he went out smiling.”

“And?”

“Rayburn looked grim.”

Jewel thought about that. Leon finished his champagne.

“Trip over?” he said.

Jewel checked her watch. Game time. Unable to think of anything else, she started to hand him the money. He almost had his fingers on it when she paused. “Did anyone actually see what happened in there?”

“I told you. They were in the can.”

“Alone?”

“Alone?”

Jewel withdrew the money. “Or was anyone else in there?”

Leon sat back. “Come to think of it.”

“Who?”

“A guy.”

“You know him?”

Leon licked his lips. “This feels like a detour.”

“Detour?”

“On our trip.”

“Jesus Christ. Do you know him or not?” She could see in his eyes that he did.

Leon raised thumb and index finger to his mouth, zipped it shut. Jewel wanted to smack him. She took out another twenty instead.

He shook his head. “This is one of those side trips that’s worth the whole voyage,” he said.

She showed him another twenty.

“How about one more?” he said.

“Fuck off,” she told him.

He grinned. “Gil,” he said.

“That’s it? Gil? That’s worth the trip?”

“He’s sort of a regular.”

“What’s his last name if he’s sort of a regular?”

“Don’t go in for a lot of last names here.”

“Where do I find him, then? What does he do? Where does he work? Et cetera.”

“He works for that knife company.”

“What knife company?”

“Or he used to.”

“What knife company?”

Leon stared down his empty champagne flute for a moment or two, then brightened. “It’s on the Survivor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll show you.”

They returned to Cleats. Leon ducked behind the bar, came up with a knife. It had a red-and-white-checked handle, and a blade that ended in a long, jagged point because the underside of the tip was broken off. He handed it to her.

Jewel put on her reading glasses. “R. G. Renard?” she said.

“Right. It’s all coming back to me now.”

“What is?”

“Renard is the company. But it’s his last name too.”

Jewel handed over the money.

“How about a bonus?” Leon said.

“You’ll get a turkey at Christmas,” Jewel told him.

Jewel, driving late to the ballpark, called R. G. Renard and asked for Gil.

“No longer with us,” said a woman with some sort of attitude, Jewel didn’t know what or why.

“Can you tell me how to reach him?”

“No.”

Jewel waited for elaboration. None came. “It’s important,” she said.

Silence. Jewel heard a phone buzz at the R. G. Renard office, then another. She had maybe five seconds, and nothing to go on but the woman’s seeming antipathy toward Gil Renard. “He owes me money,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“A lot?”

“You could say that.”

Half a minute later, Jewel had Gil Renard’s address and phone number. She dialed it, listened to a few rings, and then, “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

She checked the time-2:17-switched on the radio: “top of the third, one out, nobody-” The ballpark was ten or fifteen minutes away, Gil Renard’s address in the northern suburbs at least half an hour farther than that, maybe more. She knew she should go to the ballpark-how could she interview Rayburn in the evening without having watched him play in the afternoon? — but she drove north instead.

The radio was tuned to the game, but Jewel wasn’t really listening. Questions for Bobby Rayburn, half formed, unsatisfactory, rose and fell in her mind. She was parking in front of the worn three-decker in a working-class district off the ring road before she realized he wasn’t playing.

Jewel mounted the steps to the open porch. There were five buzzers. She pressed number four, Renard. She waited ten or fifteen seconds and pressed it again, listening this time for a buzzing sound inside and hearing none. She tried it again, and once more. Then, on the chance that the buzzer wasn’t working, she knocked, first lightly, then harder.

No response.

Jewel stepped back from the door, looked around. A few plastic garbage bags stood in one corner of the porch, next to a cardboard box marked IWO JIMA: THE SURVIVOR, NEW FROM R. G. RENARD FINE KNIVES. She looked in the box. There was nothing inside but an empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold and five or six yellow neckties. She picked one out, saw nothing wrong with it.

Jewel walked around the house. There was an alley at the back with a squat apartment building on the other side, its bricks sooty from the pollution of decades. Parked outside the back door of the three-decker was a rusted-out pickup with Maine plates. Jewel went a little closer. A big bearded man sat in the passenger seat, head against the window, eyes closed.

“Excuse me,” Jewel said.

He didn’t respond. Was there any point in waking him, any chance he lived in the building, or knew someone who did? Jewel tapped on the glass.

Still no reaction. “Excuse me,” she said again, a little louder, and tapped a little louder too. The sounds she made had no effect on the bearded man, but they did mask a crunch in the gravel behind her. Jewel was just starting to turn when something hard and heavy struck the back of her head. The blow rang changes through her senses, making her taste bile, feel sick, see nothing but cloud, black and quivering around the edges.

Jewel got up on her hands and knees in time to see the pickup round a corner at the end of the alley and disappear.