Favorite Sons (32 page)

I squinted and zeroed in on the corner booth. Only his eyes told me it was Adrian. If I had passed him on the street, I wouldn't have recognized him; the old Adrian was gone. His chiseled, square jaw had been swallowed up by a soft, round face that was covered by a dishwater beard that ran down into the neck of his flannel shirt, which hung untucked, as though trying to hide the belly upon which he was resting a beer bottle. He had the red glow of an alcoholic. His face had grown ruddy across his cheeks and the redness extended across a nose that had spread out and was marred by tiny pit marks and dark blue veins that snaked along both sides.

Adrian Nash, the onetime pride of the Crystalton Royals, was huddled in a corner with two men wearing their ball caps backward and a woman whose teeth—they may have been dentures—were too big for her little mouth, giving the illusion of a deep-sea creature pursuing dinner every time she talked. I took a minute before approaching him, fearing the pity I was feeling would be flashing across my face. When I did approach, only the woman made eye contact. Adrian glanced up, but his eyes did not connect with mine. “Hi, Adrian.”

The heads of all three men turned at the same time, as though controlled by a puppeteer. He stared for a long moment before asking, “Am I supposed to know you?”

“Yeah, you know me.” He shook his head. I pointed across the bar and said, “Maybe if I pace off sixty feet, six inches, and squat down you'll recognize me.”

Sixty feet, six inches was the distance from the pitcher's rubber to the plate. I had caught nearly every game Adrian Nash had ever pitched. It was enough of a hint.

Before he spoke, there was a moment of painful recognition in his eyes, as the decades whirled in fast forward through his brain. From the time we first entered school, Adrian Nash had been the standard by which the rest of us were gauged. At early ages, boys begin comparing themselves to each other—in the classroom, on the field of athletic competition, even in the shower. They are not unlike a pack of wolves, constantly maneuvering to be the alpha male. However, one wolf ultimately separates himself from the pack and establishes supremacy, and that had been Adrian.

Adrian's problems arose after he left the security of the pack. Once he was removed from Crystalton, he was no longer the anointed one, and he learned a painful truth about himself: he had no heart and no taste for real competition. He couldn't take a punch in the nose. When he was no longer Adrian Nash, he lowered his head and went home.

In the ensuing thirty years he watched his brother succeed, and in large order. On the periphery, he knew I was succeeding. The alpha male had been surpassed by less gifted, but more determined members of the pack. And at the instant he recognized me standing at his booth, all those truths hit home.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. He made no move to get up and kept his right hand wrapped around his beer. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” I extended my hand and he shook it without conviction. “You're a hard man to track down.”

“I heard you were running for governor, or something.”

“Attorney general.”

The woman was suddenly more interested. “Attorney general for the state?” I nodded. She slapped Adrian's arm with a backhand. “You know him? He's famous. How do you know him?”

Her enthusiasm was making me uncomfortable. “We went to school together,” Adrian said. “He was the slowest receiver in the history of Crystalton High School.”

It was a lame joke, but it made the two men laugh.

“But he's famous now,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me?”

Adrian ignored her query and took a hit on his beer.

“Do you have a minute, Adrian? Maybe we could walk outside and talk?”

He frowned. “How long's it been since I've seen you?” I knew the answer. “Christmas break our sophomore years in college.”

“Oh, my God! You went to college?” the woman asked Adrian. “How come you never told me that?”

“How about shutting up for two minutes,” he said. It wasn't a request.

The woman with the big teeth and small mouth lowered her eyes.

“So, when was that, nineteen seventy-five? What could you possibly have to say that you can't say here?”

“We have a little personal issue we need to discuss.”

“What issue? These are my friends. You can talk in front of them.”

The two men looked up at me in anticipation. “Okay. How about this. One-Eyed Jack is breathing free air and he came to visit me the other day. Apparently, we had company on Chestnut Ridge and now he's anxious to tell the world all about it.”

The woman frowned and the man at the end of the booth belched and announced that he had to take a piss, and left. For a long moment Adrian looked like the words hadn't registered. He rolled his bottle of beer between his palms for several more seconds, then got up and walked to an empty booth near the door. The old alpha male was sending a tacit signal for me to follow. I did and slid into the booth across from him.

The soft yellow glow of the parking lot light sifted through the red neon of the beer sign in the window and fell across the prematurely aged face of Adrian Nash that held a familiar look of resignation. His jaw had gone slack and there was a hint of moisture building in his eyes. I had seen the look hundreds of times during my years as a prosecutor. It had appeared on the face of every man I had ever questioned the instant they realized the overwhelming weight of evidence against them offered no escape from conviction. He looked like a man who had just run his last race.

I have questioned men I was going to prosecute who had been on the run for a decade or more before being captured. They talked about never being able to relax, never getting a full night's sleep. The slightest of noises awoke them at night. Every time there was a knock at the door or the phone rang, their guts would tighten. They couldn't make friends because they couldn't trust anyone. They never let down their guard. To a man, they told me they knew there would come a day when the phone would ring and the game would be over. Come out with your hands up.

For Adrian, the clock had been ticking for thirty-three years. Like those convicts, I assume that he believed there would come a day when the death on Chestnut Ridge would be known to the world. Tick-tock. He had known it was coming, but didn't know when. For his entire adult life, it had been a point somewhere on a nebulous horizon that never disappeared.

Adrian was not about to admit he was scared. That was not Adrian Nash, even under these circumstances. In his mind, he was still the alpha male and my superior. He did not want to show weakness, but sometimes a person's eyes give him away. “What the hell's he want?” he asked. “Money?”

“No, at least not yet. He seems to have plenty of money. He's living in my county; he's been molesting a mentally retarded boy and the cops are on to him. If I agree to look the other way, he agrees to keep his mouth shut about what he knows about Chestnut Ridge.”

“So, is that why you're here? You're going to arrest him and the shit is going to hit the fan?”

“I don't know what I'm going to do, Adrian. I found out some things today that are making this a lot more complicated. Right now there's not enough evidence to indict him. I'm not too confident that we'll ever get the evidence we need and this may go away. But I know guys like Vukovich. If he dodges this bullet, he'll be back again, and again, and again. He's already called a reporter at the
Beacon Journal
and dropped the name of Petey Sanchez just to screw with me. It's only a matter of time until he leaks something and it gets out.”

He shrugged and took a drink of his beer. “I don't give a shit anymore.”

“You ought to. You and I aren't the only ones with skin in the game, Adrian. Your brother is a successful businessman. Deak has built up a nice ministry. And . . .” I hesitated for several seconds. “There's another problem and it involves your dad.”

“What's he got to do with anything?”

“He's been paying off the Jefferson County prosecutor for the past thirty-three years. I've got the documentation.”

“Why would he do that?” Little frown lines appeared across his forehead and I was struck by his naiveté.

“Are you kidding me? The problem didn't disappear for free, Adrian. Your dad made some deal to keep you on the football field and not in the juvenile detention center. At least, that's how it began. Now, who the hell knows. He's probably being blackmailed the way Vukovich is blackmailing me. Making a payoff to the Botticellis is like getting in bed with the mob. Once you're in, you're never getting out.”

“So, who's Botticelli going to tell? The prosecutor isn't going to investigate himself, is he?”

“Of course not. But the attorney general will. The A.G.'s office has an investigative unit called the Main Street Task Force. It has the authority to cross county lines and go anywhere in the state to conduct investigations. They've been in Summit County looking into payments made to Vukovich, who has a hell of a lot of money for an ex-con with no job. My guess is the payments are either coming from the prosecutor's office to buy his silence, which I think is unlikely, or from your dad, which I think is highly likely. If that's the case, the only reason the task force would be interested is because they believe the money isn't coming out of your dad's pocket. If he's cooking the books to funnel blackmail payments to the prosecutor, then he could be sending hush money to Vukovich, as well.”

He didn't look the least bit surprised. “If this comes out, can I still go to prison?”

And there it was, I thought. The reason he moved to the far booth to talk was to get the answer to that single question. Buried under a scraggly beard and body odor, the old Adrian Nash was alive and well. How does this affect me? “There's no statute of limitations on murder, but you were only fifteen years old and it was self-defense.
No one is going to pursue this from a criminal standpoint. That's one of the reasons I'm here. Regardless of what happens in this particular instance, Vukovich will eventually go to the press. He'll try to make a case for a wrongful conviction and get the state to give him a settlement. If he does, we can't waver from our stories.”

He shrugged. “No problem.”

“I want to get everyone together and talk about this. I've already talked to Pepper. He's in. I'm going to get ahold of Deak and try to set something up for tomorrow night. How about it?”

“I'll check my social calendar and see if I can work you in.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

“Deak knows how.”

I stood to shake his hand, but he walked past me and went back to his friends. The meeting had been anticlimactic. I'm not sure what I had been expecting. I certainly didn't think that Adrian would jump up and hug me and tell me how great it was to see me after so many years. That wasn't Adrian. Truth be told, I had been curious to see just how far Adrian had tumbled. It was the same instinct that causes people to slow down to stare at traffic accidents. As a boy I would sometimes buy a Coke at the Kresge's lunch counter just so I could stare at the gnarled face of Mr. Kilpatrick. I was repulsed, but I couldn't not look.

The parking lot was full of pickup trucks and rusting clunkers when I walked out of the Crazy Horse. Night had overtaken the eastern Ohio hills, silhouetting the trees surrounding the bar against a sky lit by a sliver of moon. In the corner of the lot a couple sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck and passed a joint back and forth. I made a few verbal notes of my meeting with Adrian into my recorder before pulling away. As I eased out of the gravel lot onto a barely two-lane asphalt road, for the first time I was struck by Adrian's reaction to the news. Although scared, he hadn't seemed surprised. Pepper had been genuinely shocked that Jack Vukovich was still alive. Both reactions seemed genuine. A pair of headlights pulled out behind me and I adjusted my rearview mirror to night vision to block the glare.

The headlights of the car stayed behind me as I turned onto Route 151. I wondered if I was being followed or just paranoid. I
gunned the Pacifica and moved well ahead and the headlights faded in the distance, making no move to close the gap.

As I crossed over the hill from Hopedale—boyhood home of Clark Gable—it dawned on me that I had not eaten since breakfast. I decided to go to Naples Spaghetti House, a wonderful restaurant on North Street in Steubenville. My mother had taken me to Naples for special nights when I was a kid and it had always been a favorite. I hadn't been there in years. The parking along the street was full, so I drove down the alley behind the restaurant and parked. As soon as I walked into the restaurant, I patted all my pockets and discovered that I had left my cell phone in the car. I didn't want to miss a call from Deak.

The phone was on the passenger seat. I unlocked the door and fetched it. The events that occurred in the minutes that followed are still a bit hazy. When I turned away from the car, standing in the lee of the open door, a figure of considerable size emerged from the shadows of a garage. There was momentary panic as I realized I was about to become a victim. One hand was returning my keys to a pocket; the other was slack at my side, my fingers wrapped around my cell phone. I was defenseless against a fist that was already heading toward my face. I might have tried to dodge the blow by jerking my head to the left. I think I remember doing that. If I did, it was a futile gesture. In the next instant, a set of knuckles found their target.

In late April of 1964, my mother went up to the Sears & Roebuck store in Steubenville and bought me my first new baseball glove, which had Ted Williams's signature branded on the little finger. I had been using a battered glove that I found in the basement, which had belonged to my uncle. I was thrilled to have a new glove and was out in the side yard throwing pop-ups to myself. Mr. Regula, who lived across Ohio Avenue, saw me out in the yard and invited me over to join in a game of catch with him and his son, Del, who was three years my senior. During the game, a ball tipped off Del's glove and went over the chain-link fence into Bertha Lewis's yard. As Del hopped the fence to retrieve the ball, my attention fell back to my new glove. I was enamored with it—golden brown, stiff, and smelling of rawhide. I was still looking down at it, patting the webbing with the fist of my right hand, when Del threw the ball to his dad, who
threw it at me, probably a little harder than he should have and without first looking to make sure the nine-year-old across the yard was paying attention. The ball had left his hand before he realized my eyes were focused on the glove. “Hutch,” he yelled. I looked up and as the ball was about six inches from my face. It is astonishing how much of a third-grader's face a baseball will cover. It hit me square on the side of the nose near my left eye and took me cleanly off my feet. In all of the years I had played football and baseball, fallen out of trees, endured boxing lessons, and gone over the handlebars of my bike when Petey Sanchez shoved his stick in my spokes, I never felt such an incredible impact as I did the day that baseball hit me in the face.