Blue in Cream City

By Carole E. Barrowman

When the call about Bluebeard spiked across the scanner, Arch and I were the only ones left in the newsroom. Arch is a technology reporter, a champion cyclist, and a hacker with a conscience. He has a degree in philosophy and believes the web is evolving a consciousness. I’ve a degree in journalism and I’m still wondering if I have one. Arch’s cube and mine share a thin divider. We’re that close.

For days the city had been sweating through a heat wave, and yet the dead man had been dressed for ice fishing. He was wearing an orange insulated snowsuit, thigh-high outrigger boots, and his right hand clutched an eye patch. The police named him Bluebeard.

I noted the details on Bluebeard’s discovery, accepting the dispatcher’s moniker without much thought, then I logged off the Free Press’s network where I’d been checking the sports wire for updates on Drew Shelby’s status for tonight’s baseball game.

Shelby's hitting streak was the other big story in town. Since the middle of the season when the team chilled in last place, Shelby had been hot. Last night, though, he’d leapt to catch a ball in the seventh inning and smashed into the outfield wall.

Before his trade from Seattle, Shelby had been in and out of drug rehab. During the first part of this season, he was seeing only strikes, but he hadn't been arrested once. Rumors floated that Shelby needed the air lighter outside and inside his head in order to make contact with anything.

Then came the All-Star break and the change in Shelby’s game was dramatic. Before his collision with the wall, Shelby's hitting streak had tied Paul Molitor’s record of thirty-nine.

Arch balanced his keyboard on his lap, a position many women and a couple of men in the newsroom seriously envied. “You’ve got time, Remy. The police aren’t going to let reporters near the place for awhile.”

“Don’t underestimate my talents.” I winked, dropping my notebook into my backpack.

Arch set the keyboard on his uncluttered desk and stood up. “I’m still waiting to see what they are.”

When he moved next to me, the hard curve of his hip made contact with mine. I tried to step away, but Arch reached his arm around my waist and dropped a cyclist’s ozone mask into my backpack. His fingers grazed my hip as he withdrew. A kick of desire hit low in my gut.

Arch and I have a relationship based on intellectual sparring, a deep respect for irony, a shared appreciation for breakfast as the most civilized meal of the day, and a mutual love of baseball as the country’s most civilized game. Our friendship is electrified with occasional spikes of desire that, although arousing, scare me. I’m looking for the Big Story not the Big Commitment.

The Granite Towers was an ornate cream city brick building south of the university campus. Its ground floor housed the Chasse Family Deli, famous for its Rueben sandwiches and Mama Chasse’s tapioca pudding. On the sidewalk outside, the umbrella tables were at capacity, but inside only one table was occupied. The air was cloying and oppressive.

In the far corner of the deli, Mira Chasse, one of the owner’s granddaughters, was lazily cleaning shelves cluttered with cracked pickle jars. She brushed shards of glass off the shelves with a wide broom, letting the pieces drop carelessly into a wastebasket at her feet.

Mira was nineteen with short blonde hair styled in spiky tufts. When she tilted her head toward me, the silver rings piercing her eyebrows caught the light, making her eyes look electric.

Mira set the wastebasket down and wiped her hands on the bar towel that was her skirt.

“What happened?” I asked.

She shrugged. "They were like this when I got here.”

“I meant what happened upstairs.”

“Oh . . . One of the tenants died. The police are gonna talk to us when they’re done.” She arched her eyebrows. It was meant to look conspiratorial. Given the rings, it just looked painful.

The dead man’s apartment was directly above the deli. After Mira left me to carry an order outside, I sneaked up the emergency stairs to the second floor. About twenty feet from the apartment the smell hit me in a hot fetid blast. I gulped air through my mouth, thankful of Arch’s mask, but hesitant to be seen using it. I had a reputation to uphold. Closer to the apartment, the air was so putrid I had the mask on in seconds.

I slipped under the yellow tape, and two things halted my progress. The first was the sight of the body: all rubber and wrinkles like a Macy’s parade balloon had sprung a leak and deflated on the floor. The second was Finn Hastings, a homicide detective and occasional dance partner of mine.

Finn comes from a family of Minnesota hockey players, a trait evident in his build and his personality. He’s six feet with shaggy brown hair; a scar laces through his eyebrow, and his nose sports a bump at its bridge. He’s a fast thinker, a tough negotiator, and although he’s a sore loser, he always plays by the rules. For Finn, cross the line and you’re off sides. Do it too many times, and you can’t play anymore.

Finn believes the hierarchies embedded in every profession are natural and necessary. Police solve crimes. Journalists write about them. His ordered worldview is one of the reasons we don’t shimmy together anymore. Situations shape my rules and too much authority gives me hives.

In a flash, Finn charged out of the kitchen, reached up, tore off my mask, and checked me against the wall.

“How’d you get up here?” he hissed.

Finn was so in my face I could smell his Juicy Fruit. But I didn’t blink. While he was insisting I leave, I carefully maneuvered my right hand, slipping a tiny key into my pocket from a phone table behind me. I faked a serious pout and left.

Taking the stairs three at a time, I ducked into the foyer and scanned the residents' mailboxes. I unlocked the box for apartment 202. Three sports magazines and a utilities bill. The subscription labels said B. D. O'Connell, but the bill was addressed to Edgar Keller, the Granite Towers. I wiped the key and dropped it into the mail slot.

I returned to the deli, ate a Rueben, and interviewed Alice Chasse. According to her, B.D. O'Connell had moved into the Towers in June.

"Did he have a job?"

"I don't know if it was a job exactly, but I think he volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club.”

“How do you know that?”

Alice rested her hands on the table. They were thick and pink and had crumbs of bread and splotches of mustard caught in their crevices. “Some days a minivan with their logo picked him up."

"Do you know if he had any family?"

"I know that one," Gene Chasse interrupted, as if this was a contest to see who could answer more of my questions. "He’s a widower. No children."

Alice looked at her husband skeptically. "Now how exactly would you know that, father?" She looked at me and rolled her eyes. "If you're not asking for it grilled or fried, he doesn't listen."

Gene leaned toward me. "Well–" he whispered. “One day he’s staring at Mira kinda . . . kinda funny, you know.”

Alice "tsked” angrily. Gene ignored her. "He saw me watching him and when he paid his bill, he apologized.”

Later, when I returned to the newsroom, I called the Boys and Girls Club. They’d never heard of B.D. O’Connell. I called Finn's office. I knew he had.

“What do you want?" he growled.

As if he didn't know. I just had to ask. In my sweetest politest voice even. "Do you have anything more on B. D. O'Connell, Detective Hastings, sir?”

"O'Connell?" he paused. “Not sure who you mean.”

"Give me a break, Finn.”

He hesitated for another beat before answering. "Bluebeard was an accidental death.”

"What! You don't think it's a homicide? The guy was dressed for ice fishing."

Finn snapped his gum noisily before replying. “Listen to me, Remy, I’ve had more damn murders this past week than I’ve had for the entire year. If this heat doesn’t break soon, I’ll kill myself. Now leave this one alone. It’s a simple accident.”

I heard him shuffle some papers. “We found a prescription for Thorazine in the bathroom cabinet, which could explain the snow suit. The guy probably had a stroke, was disoriented enough to think he was on Pewaukee Lake with his tip-up and died with his boots on.”

I snorted. "Then why the eye patch?”

Arch and I were slumped in our seats at the stadium, watching batting practice and enjoying the antics of the team mascot who looked like a giant Gepetto after too many beers. During the games, the mascot sits high above the outfield, popping out every time the home team scores.

Arch sipped a beer. We both ate brats. I told him about B. D. O'Connell.

“So now you think Bluebeard was murdered.”

"What else would put you over the edge in your living room in the middle of a heat wave so you think you’re ice-fishing?"

“An urge for walleye?" he retorted, pulling a hand-held TV from his backpack.

With the television resting in his outstretched left hand, his beer in the same position in his right, Arch looked as if he was meditating to a postmillennial Bacchus. Beads of moisture trickled from his plastic cup onto his bare leg. I squelched the thought of licking the drops. Arch caught me staring.

“Okay,” he grinned, setting his beer on the sticky ground. “What else makes you so suspicious?”

"According to state records, O'Connell lost his driver's license because of vision problems. Finn figures that explains the patch. But if you’ve got a bad eye, why isn't the patch on it?"

Before I could finish speculating, Tommy Morton, a sports reporter for the Free Press, threw himself into an empty seat in front of us. Tommy looked so disturbed that the woman sitting next to him locked her purse tightly between her knees.

"Drew Shelby isn't going to play tonight," he declared.

A loud chorus of "What!" erupted from fans near us who maneuvered in their seats to hear Tommy.

Drew Shelby had increased attendance at the ballpark despite his past sins because this is a Catholic city at heart. We love redemption stories. And this season, Drew Shelby was working to save himself.

Off the playing field, he’d put all his personal time into raising money for an organization renovating playgrounds in the city. Play Ball had successfully refurbished ten of them already.

Shelby's Rotary Club speech was "sports can save the youth of America and instill in them the values of hard work and competitiveness." Hearty applause.

Of course, the irony was that professional sports had made Drew Shelby a junkie. But that was beside the point and all behind him now. To the public, Shelby's message was heartfelt.

"How can he not be playing?” said the man sitting next to me, tearing his baseball cap from his head and slapping his thigh in disgust. “The paper said his fingers weren't even broken."

Tommy ignored the fans and lowered his voice. "Remy, I need your help.” He grabbed my arm, and dragged me into the bowels of the stadium.

We finally stopped in front of a crowded concession stand. “The team isn’t releasing any details about why Shelby can’t play, which is weird. I talked to one of the trainers last night and he assured me Shelby’s hands would be fine for tonight.”

Tommy leaned closer. “I can’t reach anyone at the sports desk. Will you cover Shelby’s condo in case he shows up there?”

Tommy glanced around warily. “Something stinks, Remy, and it ain’t just the sauerkraut.”

As I drove to Shelby’s condo, every discussion along the AM dial was hinting at it, but no one was saying it aloud. Had the pressure of trying to break the batting record finally broken Shelby? Was the hitting streak the end of his clean streak?

A local TV crew and a handful of journalists had also driven over from the ballpark to Shelby's building. I parked across the street away from my peers.

After about twenty minutes, a cab pulled in front of the building. All the car doors slammed at once, and reporters dashed to the entrance. I stayed put. It was too hot to dash anywhere.

A woman carrying a small leather suitcase stepped out of the foyer and into the cab. Disappointed, the reporters slouched back to their cars.

I counted a full sixty seconds before pulling slowly away from the curb. I caught up to the cab at the second stoplight and confirmed what I’d just seen. Mira Chasse, the waitress from the deli, sat in the cab’s back seat.

On my way home, I listened to the end of the game. It was clear to all that Shelby wouldn’t play and the hitting streak was over. I called Tommy and told him I hadn't seen Shelby. I never mentioned Mira. Or Bluebeard. This was my story now.

Late night is the fastest time on the net. By 2 a.m. Arch had hacked his way across America and discovered that B.D. O'Connell had coached baseball at Gig Harbor Senior High School, located on the southwest tip of Puget Sound in Washington. I already knew Drew Shelby had been the star hitter on Gig Harbor's varsity baseball team.

"Maybe Shelby witnessed Bluebeard's death and is hiding from the killers," Arch said as he downloaded a video clip of Shelby’s collision at the ballpark.

"Maybe," I replied, but then I remembered Gene Chasse’s description of O’Connell leering at Mira. "But what if Shelby was actually protecting Mira?"

"From whom?"

"From Bluebeard."

Arch played the clip and we watched as the final batter of the inning rocketed a ball high into left field.

"Freeze it," I said, dragging a lawn chair up to the desk. Arch owns nothing other than his computers, walls of books, a bed, and three bikes. I mean what else would a philosopher need?

We peered at the image of Shelby caught mid-leap to the wall. After about twenty rewinds, all we saw was what we already knew. Drew Shelby had hit the wall trying to catch the ball.

"We need a different angle," I said, tapping my forehead against the desk in frustration.

"The only person with a better angle would’ve been lederhosen man up in the stilt house," quipped Arch.

It took us another hour to find the mascot. Actually, to find the phone number for the woman who played the mascot, but it was too early in the morning to call. Instead, Arch turned his investigative skills on Edgar Keller, the name listed on the utility bill.

Arch accessed deeds and records, DOT files, three private credit services, two HMOs, four subscription lists and two sites I pretended not to see. He discovered that Edgar Keller owned apartment 202 at Granite Towers, a house in River Hills, and one in Lake Geneva. Keller carried three maxed out credit cards, had knee surgery over a year ago, was married with three teenage children, all in private schools, had two DUIs, and a pending civil suit against a neighbor. He was also a major investor in Play Ball, Drew Shelby's company that was saving our city’s children.

Mira wasn't working the breakfast crowd at the deli the next morning. I ordered a large coffee and a plain bagel. I had slept for three hours. I was running on the adrenaline rush of a big story whose edges I’d hooked. I wasn't ready to reel it in, but I could sense its presence.

I sat at the table next to the pickle shelves. They were clean and empty. I recognized a couple of the same faces from yesterday, including the man who’d been the lone customer inside the diner. Alice marched over to bus my table.

"Who's the man sitting near the door?" I asked.

"That's Mr. Stein. He’s here every morning.” Alice wiped the table. “Although yesterday, he almost left. It was so hot in here."

"Why?” I asked, remembering the cloying atmosphere inside the diner. “Was something wrong with your air-conditioning?"

Alice scooped up an empty plate and glared in the general direction of her husband. “The air-conditioning wasn’t even on when we opened yesterday. It took hours to get the place cool again.”

She snapped her rag across the table, knocking the crumbs senseless. It was easy to imagine who she blamed for the air conditioning failure.

On my way to Mira’s apartment, I called Gig Harbor's high school principal. She resented me digging for dirt on her hometown hero. I assured her I wasn't that kind of reporter, but I stifled a reminder that Shelby wasn't that kind of hero.

The Victorian where Mira lived had been divided into two flats up and one down. I played taps on the bell until I heard someone bound down the stairs.

Mira threw open the door. She was dressed in a tight ribbed undershirt, and black lacy panties. In an instant, her expression morphed from a smile to a frown. She was expecting someone else.

She tried to slam the door, but I blocked it with my knee and pushed my way inside. She turned and darted back up the stairs. Without really thinking, I pounced on her. I figured she was in too much trouble to call me on my journalistic ethics.

But Mira wasn’t giving up so easily. She clawed and scratched at me as she scrambled backwards up the stairs. When I tried to grab her hands, she whipped her head forward and clamped her teeth onto my wrist.

Pain shot up my arm and rage blinded me. I reached across her face and ripped a ring from her eyebrow. Blood sprayed from the tear. I shoved her against the stairs and used my knees to restrain her. She was yelling loudly now. I had to make this fast before someone heard us.

"I know about your relationship with Shelby."

"How do you know?” she cried. “No one knows."

"I saw you leave his apartment.” I leaned close. “A stupid move, Mira."

"Oh God! Oh my God,” she wailed, thrashing her shoulders against my hold.

"Where is he?" I hissed, pressing my weight down harder on her.

"I don’t know . . . Please, you’re hurting me.” She stopped squirming, and began to sob. I let up a little. “I swear I don’t know where he is.”

“What were you doing at his place?”

Her body shuddered with every sob. I shifted my weight to my heels.

“I was picking up some of my stuff,” she cried. “But he wasn’t there. Honest.”

I left Mira curled in a ball on her stairs, and walked quickly back to my car. I was drenched with sweat and my legs felt weak. As I edged the car from its tight parking space, I stared at my hands on the wheel. Mira's blood-stained my fingertips. My stomach pitched and I swallowed bile. I felt sick. I had crossed into foul territory for a story.

Grace Carver, the team’s mascot, was scared to talk to me. Even after I laid out my theory about Shelby and O’Connell, emphasizing that Mira had likely been seduced by fame and fortune, Grace was still afraid that anything she said would reflect badly on the team. She sat stiffly on her couch, a fan blowing directly at her from a glass coffee table.

I stood up and headed for the door. I wasn't getting anywhere and I wasn't going to push. This morning's confrontation with Mira had scared me. I was afraid of the passions this story had aroused.

"The team pays well, you know,” Grace chided, following me out to the landing. “I could be doing worse things."

I thought of what she might have seen and was keeping to herself. I thought of my own actions in pursuit of this story.

"Maybe we both already have."

She caught up to me at my car, grabbing my arm as I opened the door. "That was a cheap shot. You don't know me, and you’ve no right to make me feel guilty."

"You're right,” I replied, feeling thoroughly chastened. “I'm really sorry.” I climbed into my car and opened the window. “Don’t worry about it. I'll find another way to check my hunch."

She watched in silence as I squirmed on the hot seat. "You know your hunch is right,” she said quietly, backing away from the car. “Shelby wasn't even looking at the ball when he slammed into the wall."

After Grace Carver confirmed that Shelby had faked his injury, my editor smelled Big Story, too. I didn't need to work very hard to convince her that I should fly to Gig Harbor. It seemed beyond coincidence that B.D. O'Connell had arrived in town about the same time Shelby's professional baseball fortunes began to change.

I needed to know more about O’Connell’s connection to Shelby. On the drive from the SeaTac airport I imagined a number of possible scenarios. I hoped Murray Temple, a retired English teacher from Gig Harbor High School and a friend of O’Connell’s, would enlighten me.

Temple was in his sixties with coifed white hair and a cropped snowy beard. A small dog bounced madly at his feet as we talked. His conversation alternated between addressing me and addressing the dog. After a while I’d have chased a chew toy if he’d thrown one.

Despite the distraction, I learned that the high school had forced O'Connell into an early retirement. Temple admitted it was because of O’Connell’s “deteriorating mental health.” As a widower, his only option was to move to a nursing home, which he’d refused to do.

According to Temple, O’Connell had followed Shelby’s career closely and had been saddened by his slump into drugs and debauchery.

"When Drew first played varsity, everyone knew he was going to make it,” explained Temple. “He had a raw talent, but he never took the game so seriously that he lost pleasure in playing. He was an expressive player, always leaping for the high catch, always sliding home, even when it wasn’t necessary."

Temple chuckled as if Drew Shelby had risen into the air in front of him and snagged a fly ball.

"But during Drew's junior year,” continued Temple, “he hit a slump. Couldn’t hit a soft ball if my grandmother had lobbed it. B.D. suggested Drew get his eyes checked."

"Did he need glasses?"

"He had what's called a 'lazy eye.'” Temple closed his left eye for effect. “Essentially the muscle was weak in one eye, so to focus clearly his other eye’s muscles had to compensate. By high school, both eyes were weakening. Contacts helped, but they completely threw off Shelby’s swing. He lost his rhythm."

“How did O'Connell help?" I asked, sure that I already knew the answer.

"He treated the weak eye like any other muscle,” Temple replied. “He made Drew wear a patch on the stronger eye."

Arch met me at the airport. On the drive across town, I told him what I’d figured out, that B. D. O’Connell had come to the city to escape the horrors of a nursing home, and to help Shelby improve his hitting game. With a fast pitch and a dark patch.

“The van that picked up O’Connell every morning outside the deli was likely from Shelby's company, Play Ball,” I explained. “I think Alice Chasse confused its logo with the Boys and Girls Club.”

“But why would Shelby bring O’Connell here to help him and then kill him?”

“I don’t know that yet, but the reason has something to do with Mira.”

Back at Arch’s place, we did some pharmaceutical research. The virtual kind. He logged into the Medical College’s library where we discovered that if a person's body temperature rises high enough and if that person’s on Thorazine, the results can be deadly.

And if you wanted to speed up that reaction, dress your victim for ice fishing and turn off the air. Who would care about the heat related death of an elderly man during a heat wave?

Later than night, I foraged in the dumpster at the back of Chasse’s deli in search of broken glass and putrid pickle waste, evidence that extreme heat in the deli had exploded the bottles. Wearing thick rubber gloves, I retrieved the garbage. I started to pull myself over the edge of the dumpster when I heard a loud thump followed by a long anguished wail coming from O’Connell’s apartment directly above me.

I climbed up on the dumpster and broke the glass surrounding the exhaust fan in the deli's window. I pried the fan out. Although I was careful, I still toppled head first into a huge stainless steel sink. I knew I shouldn't be doing this, but the thin taut line of this story had wound around my gut and it was reeling me toward that noise.

The thumping was less pronounced inside, but its rhythms still echoed through the walls. When I reached the second floor, panicked screams burst from inside O'Connell's apartment and merged with the thumping like some kind of demented call and response.

I eased through the unlocked front door and into an empty living room, the chalk outline still visible on the floor. The howls were coming from a bedroom down the hall. They were long and deep and definitely pain induced.

I turned toward the noise, but as I passed the bathroom I glimpsed a man hauling himself up into the attic storage space. When he'd completely disappeared, I stood on the toilet and hooked the trap door closed. Then I followed the screams to the bedroom.

Through a crack in the partially opened door, I could see Mira Chasse bouncing on the bed, a pile of baseballs bobbing at her feet. Every few seconds, she’d lean back and send a ball out of my line of vision toward the bedroom wall. The pitch was followed by the same sickening howl.

Without thinking, I charged into the room and threw myself across the bed, sending Mira flying. Her head smacked the wall and she slumped to the floor unconscious.

A wrenching sob erupted behind me. I rolled off the bed and faced Drew Shelby crucified against the bedroom wall.

His arms were wide apart and his hands were tied to matching wall lamps. His feet were crossed and bound together with a jock strap. The left side of his face was raw and his eyes were swollen shut. His arms and abdomen were covered in wet pink baseball size welts.

The police didn't get much out of Drew Shelby that night or the three after that. He was taken to a local hospital, and isolated from the press. Mira, on the other hand, regained consciousness when the paramedics arrived and seized the opportunity to become a victim.

As she was escorted to an ambulance, she sobbed dramatically for the cameras that met her on the pavement.

The act wouldn’t last, though, because I'd seen her face as she'd pitched at Shelby. A few days later police matched her fingerprints with partials on the inside panel of the building’s thermostat. Through all of this, Mira had been the one controlling the heat.

Edgar Keller had crawled aimlessly in the attic until he passed out from heat exhaustion. When the police found him, he was clutching two duffel bags filled with cash. Money, Shelby later admitted, they had siphoned from Play Ball, the company he owned with Keller.

Shelby claimed the embezzlement was Keller’s idea and Keller claimed it was Shelby’s. As it turned out, both men were in serious debt to an individual who didn’t accept checks or offer low monthly payments, and both were in serious love with a woman whose needs were equally demanding.

I was the only reporter to whom Shelby finally granted an interview. He felt he owed me. He told me he had brought O'Connell to Milwaukee after the school forced the coach’s retirement. Shelby’s sudden summer fame had increased his market value, but Shelby knew it couldn't last. His contract was for only one more season and he’d inhaled or gambled most of his retirement.

But Shelby insisted he had loved Coach O’Connell and had nothing to do with what happened to him.

Keller and Mira were what happened to him. The day of his death O’Connell had climbed into the attic to open the roof vents because of the heat wave. He discovered the cash. O’Connell confronted Keller and Shelby with his find, forcing Shelby to fake his baseball injury in an attempt to get out of town fast.

Murray Temple had told me Shelby always looked for the big finish. Hitting the wall as his final play had been a choir of fat ladies singing.

Unfortunately, Keller and Mira had planned a different finale: kill O’Connell, flee the city together, and leave a dead ballplayer to take the blame.

Even after Mira and Edgar Keller were arraigned, Shelby still wouldn’t believe that Mira had crossed him. Shelby’s physical wounds may have been only skin deep, but Mira's betrayal had been fathomless. He confessed he would’ve done anything for her. I told him he had.

Last night, Arch and I went to a ball game. The team’s hot. The weather’s considerably cooler. During the bottom of the seventh, a pop-up shot back into our seats. I ducked and let the guy behind me glove it instead.

[Copyright © 2005, Carole E. Barrowman. All rights reserved. This story may not be copied in whole or in part without permission of the author]