The Setup Man (3 page)

“This is Adcock.”

“Johnny, it’s Bil Chapman.”

Bil is the Bay Dogs’ clubhouse manager, a middle-aged man trapped in the body of a teenager. Though he must be over forty, his face is ravaged by acne and he sweats through his shirt most days by noon. Bil still lives with his mother, but he claims that it is the other way around, that his mother lives with him, in a house he owns. As though that makes any difference: Bil’s life is a series of small, almost unnoticeable rebellions,
for example leaving the last “l” off his first name. He tells me that’s edgy.

“You know what time it is, Bil?”

“Johnny, I have some bad news. Frankie Herrera died in a car accident last night.”

I wind up to tell him it’s too early to be fucking around, and then it occurs to me he’s serious.

“Skipper is asking everyone to report two hours early,” Bil says. “We’re going to have a meeting, and then there will be time with grief counselors—”

“Grief counselors. What happened?”

“It was a car accident.”

“Yeah, you said that. How? Where?”

“We got a call from the Highway Patrol at five this morning. They found Frankie’s car on the road to Half Moon Bay. Highway 92. He went over the edge.”

“Half Moon Bay? Frankie’s apartment is in Santa Clara.”

“Yeah, I know. Maybe he went for a drive? I mean, he went for a drive, obviously.”

“When did it happen?”

“They’re saying around three a.m.”

I go back in my head. We landed at SJC at twelve-thirty or one. Back at the stadium parking lot, one-thirty. It occurs to me that I may have been the last person to see Frankie Herrera alive.

“So there’s a meeting?”

“One-thirty sharp.”

“Yeah, I’ll be there.”

“I’m really sorry, Johnny. I know Frankie liked you a lot.”

By eight-thirty, I’m in San Mateo, teasing my bike through the gridlock on 101. The interchange with Highway 92 is a giant
flyover weaving between office buildings emblazoned with the names of Internet companies selling electronic real estate. This is the suburb where Barry Bonds grew up, where he was the only black kid in his high school. I bet even today he would be the only one. This is still mostly a white area, but it has been filling up lately with Indians and Chinese pushed north out of the deeper parts of Silicon Valley. I think about Barry’s childhood friend, a white guy, who went on to become his trainer and is currently serving time for refusing to testify in the steroid trial. I wonder if any Indians or Chinese would have done that for him. Not that I approve, of course.

As the road winds uphill into the Coast Range, I leave suburbia and plunge into the redwoods. The temperature drops ten degrees. It occurs to me that I do not know exactly where along the next ten miles the accident occurred. I don’t even know what I am looking for. I pass a peloton of cyclists in DayGlo Lycra—computer geeks and bankers who just remembered they have bodies. Every year at least a dozen of these guys go over the edge on this road. The county has installed guardrails on all the curves, but nothing like that is going to stop a cyclist careening downhill at sixty miles per hour. Might stop the bike, but not the rider.

I get plenty of nasty looks as I pass the cyclists. It makes me feel better to know that I could strike out any one of them on three pitches. Of course, a couple are probably rich enough to buy my contract. I think it must be better to be a pro ballplayer in Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, where the league minimum salary puts you near the top of the local pecking order. Here in the Bay Area, a million five a year makes me solidly middle class.

Three curves after Skyline Drive, I find the spot. There’s no mistaking it: a section of the guardrail has been replaced with yellow police tape, and three uniformed cops stand next
to their cruisers, shooting the shit. Two Highway Patrol and a San Mateo County sheriff. I ride past them, around the next bend, and hide my bike in the bushes. I lock up my helmet and open the goody box, a stash of Bay Dogs paraphernalia I take with me everywhere, because you never know when you might meet a fan.

When the sheriff’s deputy sees me walking toward the yellow tape, he comes over and shakes his head.

“You can’t be here,” he says.

Very politely I ask, “Is this where Frankie Herrera’s car went off the road?”

He looks at me like I just told his five-year-old daughter where babies come from. “No comment,” he says, waving his hand. “You have to leave.”

“Because he was my teammate,” I say. I put out my hand. “Johnny Adcock.”

“No shit.” The deputy loses himself for a minute. I wait while he regains his cop composure. “I’m really sorry about Mr. Herrera,” he says.

“Yeah, he was my wife’s favorite.” I smile like I’m embarrassed. “She liked ’em young.”

“My old lady likes Modigliani. But they all do, right?”

I pull a baseball from the pocket of my leather jacket. “Give her this.”

The cop turns the ball, finds Modigliani’s signature, smiles. “So, Mr. Adcock,” he says, “you want to see where it happened?”

“I do.”

He goes over to the two patrolmen, and they chat for a minute. Then he waves to me. “Sorry for your loss,” says the CHP captain, a middle-aged white man with a handlebar mustache and thighs that push the capacity of his golden uniform tights. I’ve always marveled at how much cops look like out-of-shape second basemen—or maybe how much second basemen (Jeff
Kent, for example) look like in-shape cops. “Tough luck yesterday,” he says. “One pitch.”

“Scouting report called for a fastball high and tight,” I explain. I shake my head to indicate (hopefully) that I would like to leave it at that.

“That Kelton is a killer,” says the captain.

“You’re telling me.”

“Guess they thought you might get him this time, huh?”

I bite my tongue. “Guess so, yeah.”

I give the captain and his partner autographed balls, and they walk me over to the guardrail. On the way, we cross a set of fresh-looking tire tracks cutting across the road from the east-bound lane to a point just a few feet from the rail. Looks like Frankie was on his way home when he died.

“These from Frankie’s car?” I ask the cops.

“Most likely,” the captain says. “Though, to be honest, those look a bit wide. What was the deceased driving, Cam?”

“BMW 328,” the partner replies.

“I guess you can get those with wide tires, right? Anyway”—he puts his gloved hand on the mangled steel rail—“here is where he went over.” This stretch of Highway 92 is set into a hillside that has been encased in concrete to halt erosion. Imagine a miniature Hoover Dam; add fog. The cop nods to a spot downhill a hundred yards, on the next curve, where two more police cruisers are parked, with their lights flashing soundlessly. “And that is where he ended up.”

“Can you take me down there?”

The captain rolls the baseball in his hand. “I don’t know, Mr. Adcock. That would be against our procedures.”

“Where are you from?” I say. “You want to see the Giants? I can comp you a pair of tickets.”

He smiles at his partner. “The real question is, will you win?”

“Is this about last night? With all due respect, officer, if you
want to try to throw a baseball past a hulk with a club, go right ahead. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

The cop retreats from his pose. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know how hard it is. I played ball in high school.”

“And?”

“And I joined the Highway Patrol the week after graduation.”

To save the guy’s pride, I look away.

As we pick our way down the hill, I hear the captain cursing me under his breath: “Fucking left-handed assholes.… One pitch! Fucking jerkoff thinks he’s such hot shit.…”

At the lower site, Frankie’s BMW is a mess of twisted, smoking steel. The air smells like gasoline, burning hair, and plastic. I try to breathe through my mouth.

The captain points to a gash in the roof where the metal has been pried open. “See that aperture? That’s where the crew removed the bodies. They sent the Jaws of Life, but this was no salvation job, I’m afraid. Sorry if that sounds insensitive, Mr. Adcock, but that’s just the truth.”

“Did you say ‘bodies’?”

“Two. Your friend Mr. Herrera and an unidentified female.”

I try to act cool, as though this is what I expected to hear.

“Actually, Captain,” the partner pipes in, “she had ID.”

The captain fixes him with a withering stare. “We can’t say her name,” he says slowly, “because she was a minor. Seventeen years old.”

“Oh yeah?” I say.

“Mr. Adcock, I could lose my job if I told you her name—”

“I understand.”

“—but because you were his friend, I will tell you this much: they weren’t family.”

Before the evening’s game, the stadium honors Frankie with a moment of silence. For us, though, the silence has been going on since the early afternoon. The grief counselors, two overweight librarian-looking women in cable-knit sweaters, sit for hours in the trainer’s room without any takers. No surprise there. I could have summarized the players’ sentiments like this: Number one, it wasn’t fair, the kid was only twenty-five. Number two, holy shit, it could have been me. And number three—but this is only my concern—who the hell was the girl in the car? Is there a connection with the video? I used to believe in coincidences, but that was before I started doing investigations and realized that “coincidence” is just another way to say “I give up.”

Ironically, our bats choose this somber occasion to explode with an orgy of runs. Fifteen, to be exact, on twenty-five hits, the highest totals of the season. Every man in the lineup scores. Modigliani has two homers and a double, for six RBIs. Skipper decides to air out the bullpen, giving all of us a little work in this rare glimpse of garbage time. I get the whole eighth inning, and our closer, Big Bob Schneider, pitches a perfect ninth. The closer normally does not pitch unless he has a chance
for a save, but we’ve been playing so badly that there haven’t been many games to save. Skipper figures Schneider needs work, so he brings him in anyway. I like a blowout win as much as the next guy, but it takes a long time to score fifteen runs. It is eleven-forty-five when Big Bob records the final out. Thanks to the continuing somber mood in the clubhouse, there is no chitchat tonight, and by twelve-thirty I am a free man. Donning a pair of Oakleys and a 49ers hat for cover, I take the light rail to Japantown. There is only one place I want to be, only one man who can help me sort out the events of the last twenty-four hours.

Marcus Washington pitched sixteen years in the bigs, the last four in San José when I was new to the league. He comes from a bygone era when all pitchers trained to be starters. The guys in the bullpen—especially the long relievers and setup men—were either failed starters or starters whose prime had come and gone. The pen was a kind of back pasture where old horses were put out to graze. By the time I met Marcus, he had not started a game in eight years. “The game is changing,” he told me. “Soon there will be seventh-inning specialists, eighth-inning specialists, first-out-of-the-ninth specialists.” I told him that had already happened. “Look at me,” I said. “This is my first year, and already I’ve got my slot. I’m destined to pitch the eighth for my entire career.” Marcus leaned back on his folding chair and said if that was so then he was finished.

Marcus’s retirement plan had always been to open a bar. (The writers of
Cheers
were right to make Sam Malone a relief pitcher—bartending is a pretty common dream in the bullpen.) But after the Bay Dogs cut him loose, he realized that he was not quite ready to retire and accepted an offer to play in Japan for the Kintetsu Buffaloes. Thus our man Makasu (Japanglish for “Marcus”) enjoyed a second career in Japan,
where, in addition to several years’ worth of top-quality Asian trim, he gained an important grain of inspiration: it was not just a bar he was supposed to open, but a sushi bar.

Sushi Makasu opened right after the dot-com bust in a storefront on Jackson Street once occupied by Kozmo.com. Marcus pulled out all the stops in infusing the vibe of his native West Oakland into the neat order of San José’s Japantown. The lighting is subdued, even dark, and the sushi bar is a long zinc-topped number with rotating stools. All the waitresses are African American: Marcus calls them his “Afro-geishas.” They wear black Lycra tube dresses, platform heels, and cat-eye mascara. Hair pulled tight in a bun. Marcus trains the girls on what he calls “properness.” Properness means no talking back to a customer, no matter what he said, or what you think he said. It means apologizing if the food takes too long, or if the order was incorrect. Marcus told me these notions of service were foreign to the girls he had grown up with in Oakland—girls whose daughters he now hires. At first Marcus rolled all the sushi himself, but that got to be a bottleneck as the restaurant’s popularity grew. Eventually, he hired his brother Rich, a recent parolee, and showed him the ropes. Rich brought in another old boy, and so on. Marcus joked that the state should make him a parole officer. These days, with the restaurant humming along, Marcus mostly sits in his office, a windowless cell next to the restrooms, behind a door marked with a framed, autographed photo of his idol, the pitcher Vida Blue.

I wave to Rich as I walk through the restaurant. He nods, no smile. On the stereo, Bill Withers laments that there “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” All night I have been thinking of Frankie’s wife, how the problem of the porn film is still unsolved, and how I should be the one to solve it now that
Frankie is gone. But when I think of calling her up—especially now that I know Frankie had a secret of his own—I start to smell tar. Maybe I don’t want to touch this baby. (“I know, I know, I know, I know, I know,” wails Withers.)

I rap on the office door. Vida shivers in his Oakland A’s cap with his hard stare. Marcus opens the door all smiles, as jocular as his brother is dour. He has the classic pitcher’s physique—tall and lanky, wide shoulders, long legs. Marcus was famous for his herky-jerky delivery on the mound: the extra-high kick, limbs flailing out in all directions, before the ball shot forth like a rocket from a cloud. In retirement, he still moves that way. I see his motion as he swivels his desk chair and rises to greet me. His close-cropped natural and Cab Calloway mustache are shot through with silver, but his personal gravity is undiminished. He has been retired from baseball for ten years, and you would think his appeal would dim, but Marcus’s appeal was never just about baseball. He is one of a handful of players I have known over the years who would have gotten just as much action if he had never touched a baseball. Dark skin, bright eyes, a voice like Lou Rawls’s: Marcus was the original hound dog. He never married—says he never needed to. Even now his orbit is thick with impossibly young women. When I was new in the league, he showed me the ropes both on and off the field. He partied hard. Like a lot of ballplayers who came of age in the eighties, Marcus developed a weakness for coke, but unlike Doc Gooden (to name just one of his contemporaries), he never let it ruin him. By the time we met, his days of dissipation were largely behind him. He speaks of the late eighties like a veteran recalling combat. And he keeps his nose clean, mostly.