“Braves?” Harry said. “You a fan?”
Haley nodded. “I played ball in college, outfield. How about you?”
Harry pushed up from the chair, juiced. “Love the game. But my experience is Little League, kind of. Know that ball field on the west side of Pritchard? I helped get it running about three years back.”
Oh Jeez, not that story again…
Haley shook his head. “Don’t know the field. But I’m not usually in that direction. Hey, you want copies of Teesh’s notes? Just to have them?”
“Sure,” Harry said. “We’ll add them to the case file. Hey, you ever at a game when Aaron was playing?”
“Let’s go, bro,” I said, grabbing him by the elbow.
“The kids were hoping for a scoreboard, Carson, nothing fancy, slap up numbered cards for runs, outs. Be nice if that happened.”
“Umph,” I said.
Harry slid the cruiser across three lanes, oblivious to the angry horns behind us. He glanced in the rearview and waved, Thanks for letting us in. The baseball conversation with Lincoln Haley had restarted my partner’s soliloquy about creating a ball field with Buck Kincannon.
“Hey, Cars, let’s take a detour, check it out.”
“Check what out?”
“The ball field. I never get over this way. Take ten minutes.”
I can leap from the car, I thought as Harry cut the wheel toward his field of dreams. Open the door, scream, “Geronimo”…
Harry drove a few miles, slowed, craning his head side to side. Modular buildings surrounded by fences and barbwire, a metals-processing operation, a school bus graveyard. Even with windows tight and the AC on recirculate, a hard chemical smell seeped into the car.
“It’s been so long I don’t remember where it was. Things changed. I’m all turned around.”
Harry pulled up in front of a bone-skinny guy wearing nothing but a loose pair of raggedy jeans. His face was patchy, like he had mange, and he looked in his forties.
Harry rolled down his window. “Say, bro, you know if there’s a little ball field nearby?”
The guy stumbled toward us. His face grinned with something like recognition and I saw the guy had meth mouth: gums dissolved away, blackened teeth showing to the bleeding roots.
“Haa-i-eeee,” the guy keened, grabbing at Harry’s elbow. “Haaa-i-eeeee.”
Up close, looking past the ravaged mouth, the guy was maybe eighteen. Smoking crystal methedrine was like gargling with muriatic acid. Plus users scratched their skin apart trying to get at the bugs crawling in their veins. Weight loss left skin hanging like wet cloth.
“Uh, thanks anyway.” Harry drove away, shooting glances into the rearview. The guy kept yelling, “Haaa-ieeee.”
“That was instructional,” I said.
“It was around here. I know it was.”
“Maybe Buckie airlifts the field to Minnesota this time of year, where it’s cooler.”
“What?”
“If you can’t find it, you can’t find it. Let’s head back.”
He tapped his fingers on the wheel, thought. “One more stop.”
“Harry…”
We pulled into a rough neighborhood of decaying buildings and dead-eyed people. We passed a school, windows grated. The businesses were typical for the neighborhood: check-cashing outlets, bars, pawnshops, bunkerized groceries where clerks cowered behind bulletproof glass.
Harry stopped in front of the only festive storefront on the block, a hanging sign proclaiming DREAMCENTER SOCIAL SERVICES. The facade was a colorful mural, faces of white and brown, tree-lined streets, a man grilling hot dogs, children swimming in a pool, a friendly yellow sun watching over everything. It was as incongruous as Oz in downtown Nagasaki, 1946.
We checked twice to assure the car was locked, and headed in the door.
A woman’s voice trumpeted our entrance. “Harry Nautilus? Harry-damn-Nautilus!”
Mardy Baker was a big woman, taller than my six-one but shorter than Harry’s six-four. She wore baggy khakis and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words JOIN THE COMMUNI — TEAM! Improbably, she wore pink high heels, backless and toeless. Her nails, up and down, were painted with gold glitter.
Ms. Baker’s ebullience seemed proportionate to her size. She wrapped Harry in a hug the size of a truck tire, then stared at his bemused face.
“Lord have mercy, Harry-damn-Nautilus. Whoops, is that blasphemous? I see your name in the paper now and then, Harry. Ain’t you something.”
Harry introduced us. We were bustled into an office, desk and chair and lots of shelves. Ms. Baker thundered down the hall for coffee. I studied the surroundings: upbeat posters on the walls, stacks of handouts advising people to get tested for AIDS, avoid alcohol during pregnancy, obtain a GED, and so forth. There was a colorful rug in one corner, toys on it; where kids could play while she counseled parents, I supposed.
Ms. Baker returned with a carafe of coffee on a tray, creamers, sugar packets. She leaned against the wall and studied Harry.
“What brings you here, Harry? Just in the neighborhood?”
“I was talking to Carson a few days back, the old ball field project came up. We were nearby, so I thought I’d show him. I can’t seem to find it.”
Ms. Baker blew out a breath.
“Maybe because it’s under a warehouse.”
Harry’s shoulders fell. “After all that work, equipment, the improvements? What the hell happened?”
Mardy Baker turned to the window and looked out over the streetscape. “My recollection of those days might not be precise, Harry. Biased maybe. Not for public consumption.” Her voice seemed to balance resignation and resentment.
“We look like the public to you?” Harry said.
She went to her desk and sat, both hands clasping her coffee cup. “Things went along great for the first year. Money arrived as promised, the teams grew, maybe seventy kids. The next season came close to rolling around…”
Harry turned my way. “I had to bow out after things got cruising. I’d just moved from Vice to Homicide. It was a bloody summer, new gangs springing up, gunning and running. I was working three drive-bys at once.”
Ms. Baker continued. “Harry’d set everything in motion, made the connections.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“I went back to the well, drew up a formal budget request, called Mr. Kincannon. I could never get him on the phone: on vacation, out of town, in a meeting. One day a lawyer type showed up, buttery smooth, polite as Miss Manners. He had some suggestions for the upcoming season.”
“Like?”
“The teams had names like Panthers and Gators and Bears, names picked by the kids.” Ms. Baker smiled. “Of course, they really wanted names like Stone Killers, Bloody Warriors, and Ninja Mutants, but we gave them a list to pick from, a bit less extreme.”
“The lawyer guy wanted Stone Bloody Ninjas?” I wondered.
“He suggested company names like Panorama Advertising, Magnitude Construction, Clarity Broadcasting.”
I nodded. “All names of Kincannon investments, I assume. Still, if they’re fronting the money…”
“Sure, corporate sponsorships. I said, fine, we’ll rename the teams. A few days later, there was another suggestion.” She paused. “This one a bit more…intrusive.”
I raised an eyebrow.
Ms. Baker looked at Harry. “Remember when the city wanted to put the industrial waste transfer point over by the Saylor Street projects?”
“Bitter fight. The company handling it didn’t have a rep for integrity. Chem-Tron?”
“Chemitrol. The lawyer guy showed up with charts and graphs suggesting the transfer station was a great opportunity for the neighborhood: jobs, training, education…money spreading out like a tsunami.”
Ms. Baker took a sip of her coffee and frowned. I didn’t think the frown came from the taste of the coffee. She continued.
“I dug around. Discovered the specifications we weren’t given. The projections. The amounts of chemicals traveling our streets. I read up on the industry itself, similar installations. Guess what?”