Killed in Fringe Time Read online

  That left Marcie Nast among the Network people, who, I learned, spent every summer Monday night playing softball in a mixed league in Central Park. Central Park is even harder to find people in than the Village, assuming she wasn’t in seclusion mourning Bentyne’s death somewhere.

  I knew where Barbara Anapole was, but I didn’t think I could learn much more from her, and I didn’t really want to see what state her delusions had gotten to by now, anyway. Francis Yarmy was undoubtedly up in Stamford, maybe calling people on his waiting list to inform them that now he had a hole in his schedule, and would they like to fill it.

  Clement Bates, whom no one knew what the hell to do with, was staying at Network expense at the New York Hilton, just down the road a little and across the street from Network Headquarters. It tells you all you need to know about my state of mind to say that I was considering dropping in on him.

  The thing was, even without Falzet’s request for a miracle, I was eager to get something moving on this case. I hadn’t developed any deep emotions over Richard Bentyne, but as a human being, I felt it ought to be worth at least as much outrage to wantonly kill one of us as it was to kill a rhino.

  I said as much to Spot, a stupid habit people who live alone with animals frequently acquire. He recognized my tone of voice and made his sympathetic noise, “Moooooort,” with a sort of rising inflection on the last three o’s.

  “Of course,” I added, “if it turns out he was killed by a rhinoceros, we could just call the whole thing even and forget it.”

  But no one was going to forget, and that meant it was time to find Marcie Nast. I’d talked to an ex-roommate who said that Marcie spent every summer Monday night playing softball in Central Park. Not the long day-lit August evenings, nights.

  Of course that made sense. Bentyne taped his show at five-thirty each weekday, it ran an hour, it was very unlikely anybody on the production staff would get out of the building before seven.

  That was on a normal day, of course, and this was far from that. But it wouldn’t affect the softball schedule, would it?

  So the game wasn’t very likely to start before eight o’clock. And though there is a virtually infinite number of places to play softball in Central Park, there are only a very few lighted diamonds. I could check those out in no time, and if Marcie wasn’t there, I would have lost nothing but time.

  I looked at my watch. Hell, I even had time to feed and water Spot and get something to eat (I suddenly realized I’d had nothing since breakfast, and discovered myself to be starving) before I started looking.

  And change my clothes. That was imperative, that I change my clothes. For someone like me, six foot two a little over two hundred pounds, Central Park at night is not the horror zone it might be for a kid or a senior citizen. But there’s no need to be foolhardy, either. I could enter the park wearing the Brooks Brothers three-piece suit I had on, or I could hang a sign around my neck saying RICH GUY—MUG ME FOR BIG BUCK$.

  So I had my evening planned. I stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and picked up dinner. I know it’s sick, but I’d had the urge for it all day. Then I went home, shed the suit, put on some light sweats, white socks, and sneakers, fed Spot and myself.

  I checked my answering machine, but I hardly ever got any messages at all anymore, not since I was assigned the damn cellular phone.

  Then I got the leash again, and watched Spot’s black eyes light up in doggy delight. If it were up to him, he’d never come indoors. Off we went, back to the park.

  I found a game at the diamond up near Eighty-Ninth Street; the game hadn’t started yet. The sodium vapor lamps distorted color a little, but I could have sworn one of the teams was wearing pink shirts.

  So they were. Pink shirts with the words Coif You! written on them in exquisite script. I asked somebody on the other team (pastel green shirts labeled Mr. Leonard of Soho) who the game was between.

  “Hairdressers’ League,” he said matter-of-factly. “Staff and customers, you know. Are you in the profession?”

  “No, I’m trying to catch up to a woman I thought might be here.”

  He looked me up and down and gave me a twisted smile.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, help yourself.”

  “That’s awfully magnanimous of you,” I said.

  “This is a mixed league, after all.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I looked around for a while, and for a minute I thought my big deduction was a bust.

  Then I saw her. I never would have spotted her if she hadn’t been wearing the California Angels cap. In her glasses and shapeless sweatsuit she’d looked like a nerd out to make life tedious for everybody she met. Acted that way, too. In a pink T-shirt and shorts, she was unbelievable.

  Vivian Pike certainly hadn’t lied—that was a bitchin’ bod. Not fashion model slim, but curvy and robust, like a fifties’ pinup. The face that the spectacles had made pinched and owlish was now, if not conventionally beautiful, aware and challenging.

  There were two facts, one about me and one about her, that I was glad I already knew. First, I was already in love; second she was a royal pain-in-the-ass at work. If I were unattached and just laying eyes on her for the first time, I might have launched myself headlong into another of the fiascos with which my romantic past and psyche are littered.

  I walked up to her. “Marcie Nast? Matt Cobb. You saw me this morning; I was talking with Vivian Pike.”

  She eyed me with something other than pleasure. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’d like to talk to you, if you’ve got a minute.”

  “I spent the whole day talking. The Network doesn’t own me, you know.”

  “I wasn’t planning to sell you to an Arab sheikh, I wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “I’ve got no answers. Get lost.” She dropped to the turf and started doing stretching exercises.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” I bowed. “Do I have to leave just the park, for which I pay taxes, or the whole City of New York?”

  “It’s all the same to me,” she said.

  I was about to take matters up one level of nastiness and ask if she’d told the cops about her little dressing-room rendezvous with Bentyne (I knew she hadn’t, because the lieutenant had heard it from me, and they were saving it for a later date), when a young man with eyes every bit as intense as Marcie’s came up to us. He was wearing glasses. He was a little smaller than I was, but he was plenty wiry, and besides he was holding an aluminum baseball bat in his hands.

  He looked at me, but addressed her. “Is he bothering you, sis?”

  His voice wasn’t loud, but it was peculiarly intense. I had no doubt that if she said yes, her brother would have beaten my head in without another word.

  Marcie must have, too. It certainly wasn’t love that led her to say, “No, Peter, everything’s fine. This is Matt Cobb, somebody I know from work. He came up to watch the game.”

  With that, all hostility was gone. He smiled, and took one hand off the bat to shake. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Peter Nast.”

  He told me it was a horrible thing that happened at the Network, and I agreed with him.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s going to be a game.”

  “What’s the matter, Pete?” his sister asked.

  “I just checked my machine. Wendell left a message. He was chopping apples for a Waldorf salad, and cut his left thumb. He was calling from the emergency room. Seven stitches. No way he can play.”

  “Can he work?” Marcie demanded.

  Peter thought so. It turned out that Wendell was a hairdresser at Coif You!, one of the top feather-cut men in New York. The left thumb could be compensated for while cutting hair, or so Peter, the owner of Coif You! thought, but not for playing softball, especially for a catcher, which was Wendell’s position on the team.

  “Can’t somebody else catch?” Marcie demanded angrily.

  “Sure, I could do it myself, I’ve got the mitt and the mask, and let Sammi pitch
. But we’ve still only got nine people.”

  “We can beat them with nine. We’ll go without a short fielder.”

  “I already thought of that. Leonard is willing to go along, but Wolf is being a bastard about the rules. You know Wolf.”

  Leonard was Mr. Leonard of Soho. Wolf was as big as Cass Le Boudlier only even more muscular. He looked like a statue of Zeus, except that Zeus is usually depicted as having hair and a beard, while Wolf didn’t have so much as a follicle visible anywhere on his body, except eyelashes. He was Leonard’s partner, it seemed, both in life and in the salon. He, apparently, was the slickest and smoothest head-shaver in the Northeast, not a skill I would have thought was in great commercial demand, but you live and learn.

  “He says if we field only nine players, our best hitters will get up more often over the course of the game. He wants us to forfeit,” Peter concluded.

  “Of course he does.” Marcie could have been a spitting cobra. “That will put them a full game ahead of us with a clear run to the championship.”

  “I can catch,” I said.

  Peter was glaring at me again. It was occurring to me that being mercurial, tense, and touchy were genetic in this family. “Look, Cobb. Don’t get the idea because a lot of us are gay that you’re going to lord it up over a bunch of fairies. We play hard, and we’re good at the game. Don’t try to sign on if you can’t pull your weight.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “I can catch.”

  “Can you hit?”

  “Not for power. I don’t strike out much. I can bunt and hit behind the runner. In fact, I hit best to the opposite field.”

  I think it was the realistic assessment of my abilities that sold him. If I’d told him I was the second coming of Reggie Jackson, he would have laughed me off.

  Peter screwed up his mouth. He turned to Marcie, who had stopped stretching and was standing beside him.

  “What do you think, sis?”

  She looked me over as if she were planning to sell me to an Arab sheikh.

  “Fuck it,” she said at last. “Bat him eighth, after me, and ahead of Hernando and Tiffany. If that bastard Wolf will go for it.”

  I smiled brightly. “If he does, and if we win, I’d like to buy you a drink after the game, Marcie.”

  She thought that one over, too. If she said no, it would confirm her brother’s original assessment of my motives. If she said yes, she knew she’d wind up alone with me hearing the questions she was trying to avoid.

  But I don’t think either of those two things decided it. I think it was the fact that if she said no, I might not play; if I didn’t play, she couldn’t play; and if she couldn’t play, she couldn’t win.

  Marcie, I was learning, was a woman hungry to win. At everything.

  Wolf sneered at the idea. He had a slight accent—not the German that his name suggested. Something I couldn’t place. “Bringing in a ringer, Peter? I am disappointed in you. The rules say staff and customers only.”

  Peter was steaming up. I cut in before he could explode. “Hey, I need a haircut, anyway. I promise tomorrow I’ll go to Peter’s place and have him coif me.”

  Wolf didn’t shoot down the suggestion right away. Leonard, who looked like a young Richard Chamberlain, except with platinum blond hair, put a hand on his partner’s bicep and said, “Come on, Wolf, we’ve all come out to the park, we’ve got to pay the umpire anyway, let’s get the game in.”

  “Here’s the deal. If you win you let Peter cut your hair tomorrow. If you lose, you let me cut your hair, right here on the field before we leave. I always carry my stuff with me.”

  Marcie said, “You really are a bastard, Wolf,” investing the word bastard with all sorts of new shades of meaning. She seemed to want to go on, but I cut her off.

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  “In some secluded rendezvous ...”

  —TONY RANDALL

  The Odd Couple, ABC

  13

  PETER NAST HAD NOT BEEN whistling Dixie.

  I didn’t know whose sexual preference was what, and I didn’t care a damn. As far as softball was concerned, these were my kind of people.

  A lot of people play sports to socialize and work up a sweat, and I suppose for them, it’s fine. For me, if I want to socialize, I’ll go to a party, and if I want to sweat, I’ll take up (yuck) jogging.

  But to get the most out of a sport, you have to stretch yourself, to test yourself, to get the absolute best out of yourself that’s there, with no compromises—not with the rules, not with the opposition, not with the demands of the game itself.

  That was the way Coif You! and Mr. Leonard of Soho played softball. I think some professional athletes could have learned from them. We slid hard to break up double plays. We went for the extra base. We knew how many outs there were, and we knew where the runners were on base. The infielders (Marcie was the shortstop—she threw like a girl, but then so did Tony Kubek. She got the ball there.) planted themselves directly in front of the grounders, and were always in position to take relays and cutoffs.

  I never enjoyed a game more in my life.

  We took a four-two lead into the ninth. I’d been part of two of the runs, scoring ahead of Sammi’s single in the fourth, then moving Marcie from the first to third with a sacrifice bunt-and-run, after which she scored on Hernando’s sacrifice fly.

  Coif You! was the visiting team, so Leonard’s team was batting to end the game.

  With two outs and a man on, Wolf came to bat. As always, the bat looked like a twig when he held it. We’d managed to walk him every previous time he’d come up before this. It was a good strategy. He was strong enough to hit the ball out of any park in the country, Central included. Hell; he could have hit one out of Yellowstone, if he got a tail wind.

  Wolf was not happy. The lights gleamed on the sweat of his muscles and the gold of his earring. “Just give me one to hit, you pussies,” he said under his breath.

  Fat chance, I thought, but with a count of two balls and no strikes on him, Peter made his one really bad pitch of the night, a little high, on the outside part of the plate.

  Wolf crushed it.

  As soon as I heard it hit, I thought, here we go, extra innings. Jono, the left fielder, was running dead away from me as though a flying saucer had landed just behind second base. The runner from first scored before he even caught up with the ball, but Wolf had just gotten to second, and I began to have some hope. I got rid of my mask and awaited developments.

  Jono would have needed a howitzer to get the ball back to the infield from where he was, but he hit Hernando, the short fielder, with a perfect throw, who in turn pegged it to Marcie, who’d come out to get the relay.

  Wolf, representing the tying run, was rounding third as Marcie was wheeling. I watched him from the corner of my eye, but my attention was on the ball.

  “Home it!” I yelled. “Home it!”

  Marcie never had any intention of doing anything else. She threw me a perfect strike that smacked into my mitt with Wolf still about fifteen feet away.

  He’d seen me catch the ball. I could tell from his eyes he wasn’t going to slide, wasn’t going to try to avoid the tag. Wolf probably had never slid in his life. He was going to try to bowl me over and knock the ball loose.

  For a split second, I felt a cold prickle on my scalp, probably a foreshadowing of my head being shaved.

  Then I got very calm, remembered my training. Ball in fist, fist in glove, glove against chest with the fist inside.

  I braced myself, but that was only temporary. If all you do is brace yourself when somebody like Wolf is bearing down on you, you’re likely to wake up in the hospital with footprints on your face.

  It’s counterintuitive, but the best thing to do is jump into the runner with all your might, make sure he soaks up some of the impact, too.

  I jumped, chest first.

  It was like being run over by a truck.

  We both went down. Wolf recovered first
, scrambled off me, and crossed the plate, screaming “Yes!”

  The umpire was standing over me. Groggily, I unfolded my hands and showed him the ball. “You’re out!” he hollered, pumping his hand in the air to emphasize it.

  Wolf said, “What?” so hard his voice cracked, and he came over to see for himself.

  “Son of a bitch!” he cried, pulling me to my feet. “Who would have believed you could hang on to that ball?”

  The news finally sank in to my pink-shirted teammates, and they rushed in from the field to congratulate me, led by Spot, who had spent the game sitting like a good boy by the bench while everybody told him how beautiful he was, and especially admired his hair.

  I was mobbed. There were nine other members of the Coif You! team, five of them women, but I swear I got at least seven kisses. I didn’t care, I was on another plane, and I loved them all.

  “Nobody blocks the plate on Wolf,” Peter was saying. “They just play bullfighter and try to tag him as he goes by.”

  “Good way to break an arm,” I told him.

  “What you did,” Marcie said, “was a good way to break your head.” Then she kissed me again, going out of her way this time to make it memorable.

  Peter contented himself with shaking my hand, which made me just as glad. “Don’t forget to show up for the haircut tomorrow. I’ll handle you personally. On the house. No. You pay, like a dollar. Or even full price, it’ll be worth it—I’m the best. You’ll never go anywhere else. Then you’ll be a legit customer, and we can add you to the team for the rest of the season.”

  I held up a hand.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Thanks, I’m honored, but I don’t know if I could commit to the rest of the season.”

  “It’s only five more weeks,” somebody said.

  “Well, seven if we go all the way,” another voice added.

  I was beginning to feel like some high-priced free agent.

  “Maybe little sister can persuade him, eh?”

  “I’ve warned you before about your filthy mouth, Hernando,” Marcie said. She sounded bored.