“Come on,” Snickers whispered to wake me from Hoffmann’s dream.
Snickers first, me second, and Ames last, we moved past a door to our right to a second door at the end of the room. Snickers opened it slowly and we heard a man’s voice, clear, distinct, several rooms away.
“He’s gonna have some trouble living that one down,” the man said.
“He’s been through it before. We all were. They’ll be cheering him with the next home run.”
The voices were coming from a radio or television. We moved slowly through a hardwood-floored dining room to an open door. The sound of the baseball announcers came from our right. There was a spiral staircase just to our left. Up we went. When we were almost at the top, I looked down into the room where the voice from the television set said, “A hit here could tie it up.”
I could see Kevin Hoffmann below, sitting with his back to me. He was wearing a pair of tan shorts and a baggy short-sleeved shirt with black-and-white vertical stripes. In his left hand was a glass of dark liquid. On his lap was a large pistol. I nudged Ames, who looked where I was pointing and he nodded.
Stanley was around somewhere but either out of sight in the room where Hoffmann sat, reading a book of poetry in the room next to the one where William Trasker lay, or roaming the house with a gun in his hands.
There was a small landing, not big enough for all three of us, at the top of the staircase. And there was a closed door. Snickers opened it slowly. The hinges made no sound. Light flooded in from the hallway beyond.
We moved through the door, Ames with shotgun held at hip level, aimed down the hallway. The door to Stanley’s room was open. The light was on. I moved forward and led the way to the room where I had seen Trasker. That door was closed. I opened it very slowly and stepped into darkness, with Snickers behind me and Ames turning his gun toward the now partially open door.
Snickers’s flashlight came on, circled the room, and hit the bed.
The covers were pulled down and rumpled. There was an indentation where someone’s head had been, but there was no William Trasker.
The overhead light suddenly came on and Stanley, in the doorway, a very large Magnum in his right hand, stood looking at us with an amused smile. He adjusted his glasses with his free hand and concentrated on Ames.
“We play gunfight in the streets of Laredo or do we go downstairs and pretend we’re civilized? I’m up for either,” Stanley said. “Old Wyatt Earp goes first and if he doesn’t put me down hard, you’re next. Fonesca?”
“Put the gun away, Ames,” I said.
“I can do him,” Ames said.
“We’d be murdering him in his own house,” I said.
“And you didn’t come to kill,” said Stanley. “You came for William Trasker. I’ll take you to him.”
Stanley stepped forward carefully, right hand out.
“Turn it around,” he said amiably.
Ames turned the shotgun holding it by the barrel. Stanley took it and motioned for us to walk ahead of him out the door. We did.
“Sorry,” I said to Snickers as Stanley marched us to the stairway and we started down.
“Not your fault,” Snickers said. “Not the money. The challenge got me. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I know.”
Stanley marched us into the baseball collection room where Kevin Hoffmann sat drinking with a pistol in his lap. I could tell now he was wearing a New York Yankees shirt.
A color television sat on a shelf between two trophy cases. Someone was sliding into second base trying to steal. He was out by a yard.
Hoffmann pushed a button on the remote and the game disappeared.
Below the television set, in an armchair, sat a haggard man in a blue robe dotted with little white fleurs-de-lis. There was a blue terry cloth sash around William Trasker’s robe and he was wearing blue leather slippers. His skin was dead pale white. His eyes were dead blue. His mouth was partly open and his hair flopped over his forehead, probably getting in the way of his vision.
The good news was that he was alive and somewhat awake. The bad news was that he looked like he was going to fall over.
“You know what we’re going to do?” Hoffmann asked pleasantly, turning his head toward me and motioning to chairs in the room in front of him with the glass in his hand. “We’re going to sit here, maybe talk a little, maybe watch a little baseball, White Sox and Yankees, maybe have a drink until we’re sure the commission meeting is over. Then you are going to leave and Bill is going back to bed. Maybe Stanley has an appropriate poetic quotation for the occasion.”
“‘In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor sewing a shroud for a journey,’” Stanley said.
“Shakespeare?” Hoffmann guessed, a distinctly slightly alcoholic smile on his face.
“Dylan Thomas,” said Stanley, gun in hand, standing next to the dazed Trasker.
“I can give you the best of Casey Stengel, Bill Veeck, and Yogi Berra, and tell you the real ones from the ones the reporters made up, but poetry and literature…Stanley can’t be beat. Right, Stanley?”
Stanley didn’t answer. Hoffmann drank.
“Any of this getting through to you, Bill?” Hoffmann asked his brother-in-law.
“You know, after tonight and a few more little bases on balls, Stanley is going to be very rich. Not as rich as you and me, Bill, not as rich as me particularly when you quietly pass away and I inherit your total earthly assets.”
Hoffmann turned his head toward me.
“You understand what I’m telling you, Fonesca? You’re reasonably smart. Dumb too, but reasonably smart.”
“No,” I said. “Mr. Trasker here dies and his money which would go to his wife if she were alive goes to his kids.”
“My nieces and nephews,” Hoffmann concurred. “Not a ballplayer in the lot. They don’t even like the game. Bill and my sister believed their children have been ungrateful and should make it on their own. They made me the beneficiary of the Trasker millions, about twenty-two million including the house here and the apartment in New York. In fairness, I made them the beneficiary of my not inconsiderable holdings,” said Hoffmann.
“You got anything to eat?” asked Snickers.
“Baby Ruth candy bars, the little ones they give out on Halloween along with little packets of Cracker Jacks,” said Hoffmann. “In the bowl over there. Stanley?”
Stanley reached for the bowl and passed it to Snickers.
Bill Trasker blinked his eyes and tried not to keel over. He said something I couldn’t make out.
“Sorry?” I said.
“He killed Roberta,” Trasker said, more clearly looking at his brother-in-law.
“No,” said Hoffmann, taking another drink. “I did not. Bill, I did not kill my sister. I loved only three people in the world. My sister, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio. I wouldn’t kill them. Disease got Gehrig. Age got Joe and Stanley’s greed got my sister. He was afraid she would give Fonesca here permission to bring in a doctor to look at you. And knowing my sister, if she decided to go that way, she’d bring in Drs. Shelbourne and Kauffman who would have you out of here in two heartbeats. A Shelbourne and a Kauffman are good for a double play when the batter is an alcoholic quack like Jim Obermeyer.”
“He speaks highly of you too,” I said. “He says you have no backstroke.”
“Backhand,” Hoffmann corrected. “Baseball’s my game, not tennis.”
“So you told Stanley to kill her,” Trasker managed with a cough.
“No,” said Hoffmann, finishing his drink. “I expressly told him not to touch her. Killing her was his idea. He’s a very good shot. I didn’t ask for details but I’ll bet he shot her between the eyes. I, on the other hand, am only a fair shot, so to be safe I’d fire at the stomach and chest from a close distance like this.”
Hoffmann raised the gun in his lap toward Trasker, who didn’t seem to notice.