The SJ.Com 2006 Summer Novel

The ring of the hotel phone woke Evan out of his sleep coma.

"where the fuck have you been shithead?"  It was Moddy - Evan's SE.

"I've been paging you and calling  all morning"   "Did she kick you out again? She said you might be here when I called the house"

"Your suppose to be at Shea right now finishing up the Slawicki story to run this weekeend"



Evan looked at the hotel clock radio. "Shit its already 11am"

" I know Moddy but I am working on something bigger. I need to get down to Washington. Rogers is pitching tonight and I want to be there"

Moddy was old school . He could be gruff but in the end there was none better to work for. He had always given Evan the benifit of the doubt on things he was working on and it served him well. His real name was John Trooper but most called him "Moddy" now. It was a monicker he added in the last copule of years from a not too well kept secret that he was the moderator of a popular web site visiited by sport journalist-- SportsJournalists.com.

Moddy gave Evan the go ahead with the agreement that the Slawicki story would be in by Thursday.

They were just about to hang up when Moddy told Evan about the murder at the Train Whistle.

"Your kidding I was there till 1:30" "When did it happen?" "

"Morning paper has it at about 2am when they were cleaning up. Theory is that it was bungled robbery. Some old pallooka was shot while sitting at the bar. "

hmm evan thougt. It must have been that old black guy sitting in the corner.

"Who's working the story for Cityside?

"Cornwell "

 

Bump and possible story lines

Evan is on his way to Washington to talk to Rogers .

We now have a murder at the Train whistle
that is being investigated by cityside crime reporter Pat Cornwell. Corwell is also working the Mendel story

Neither writer at this point knows at this point the bombshell story they are both chasing from different diirections

 

Pat Cornwell had spent the last five hours packing for vacation….hadn’t had a vacation for three years, and this one was well-deserved and badly needed. Three years of bloody murders, drug addicted politicians, a referendum to dig up a cemetery and replace it with a shopping mall and bowling alley, and a school superintendent who was surgically transformed from an Edward into an Emma. Aruba was exactly what Cornwell needed.

If only the phone had never been invented.

‘CORNWELL!’ boomed the voice that tormented anyone unfortunate enough to recognize it. Spack. Ed Spack. City editor, and destroyer of dreams. Spack didn’t speak, he broadcasted. ‘NEED YOU ON THE DEAD DOCTOR STORY! HEAD IN THE TOILET, BALLS GONE! GOT A SPORTS GUY ON IT TOO, DOC HAD HARD-ON FOR BALLPLAYERS! GUESS HE DON’T NO MORE!” Cornwell could hear the phlegm in Spack’s cackle, and felt like puking.

‘Ed, I’m leaving town tonight on vacation, I think you know that,’ said the reporter.

‘FUCK THAT, I GOT A GUY WITH NO BALLS! GET YOURSELF SOME, AND GET ON THIS FUCKING STORY!” Slam. The line went dead.

Cornwell stared at the half-packed suitcase….and stared at the mirror. Are you a person or a schmuck, asked the reflection.

Story of my fucking life, answered the person, feeling like a schmuck. Pat Cromwell gazed longingly at the new bikinis she had bought for her vacation, and knew they’d have to wait.

 

bump

 

She could have walked the 102 blocks to the dead doc’s office faster than this, Cornwell thought, as the taxi slothed through the city from her tiny place in Tribeca to the quarantined medical center on the upper east side. She watched the meter tick…tick….tick….oh, for the days when you could just jump on the subway and the worst thing that could happen would be some drunk puking on your shoes. Now you had to worry about nerve gas and suicide bombers and all kinds of terrorist shit. She had worked on too many crime stories not to think about it.

She had been in the taxi for twenty minutes, and her cell phone had rung ten times…from the same number. It was a newspaper number, she knew, same prefix as hers, but she didn’t recognize it, so she hadn’t answered. Finally, she checked the messages.

‘Cornwell, Evan Seville in sports. Working on this Dr. Mendel murder, how it affects the athletes, his role in sports, that kind of angle. Thought maybe we could help each other out, gimme a call, okay? Thanks.’

Sports. She rolled her eyes….never mind that the guy’s severed head was in the freakin toilet, the SPORTS story was how the athletes would survive without their beloved doctor. Unbelievable.

She loved talking to her female colleagues who worked in sports…biggest whiners on earth. Oh, poor gals had to go into stinky locker rooms with naked guys who might be rude to them! Wah! A rough week at the Super Bowl in Miami! Too many parties, no good stories! Sure, sister….maybe you would have preferred riding shotgun last week on that double homicide, 80-year-old grandma shoots and kills 45-year-old son because he won’t get a job and move out with his Pokemon collection, then puts the gun in her own mouth and finishes off the family tree. Neighbor found them a week later. Chunks of green bloody brains everywhere….the son had weighed about 3 bills and had swollen to the size of a small whale from the heat…one whiff could make you blind and bald.. Not the same thrill as Yankees-Red Sox in September, but hey, some of us work for a living.

She scribbled down ‘Seville sports Mendel’ and figured if she called him back by the end of the week, it would be too soon.

 

Groove could've taken a cab like Cornwell, but he wasn't a cab guy. Didn't pay much attention to terrorist threats, and the trains were still dirt cheap, even to Manhattan. His suit and briefcase blended right in with the strap-hangers heading to Wall Street, and the ride downtown was as uneventful as he had hoped. He climbed the steps to the street and came up just four blocks from the condo where Darius “Drifteye” Lucas lived. Drifteye couldn't stand driving and couldn't do it legally anyway - courtesy of multiple DUIs -- so he lived in Manhattan and most days called a limo service to take him to the Garden.

Drifteye was a Mendel client, and Groove, who had decided that he was going to milk the good doctor's demise by accepting gratuities for his continued silence, opted to make him the second stop on the Huevos de Mendel East Coast Tour because Drifteye was the wealthiest of Mendel's athletes in need.

At first, it had been a knee injury for which the drugs Groove was delivering aided in the recovery. But Lucas soon discovered that added strength in the low post meant other players bounced off of him and he was able to bull his way to more points, bigger contracts and, the kicker of it all, endorsement nirvana. Drifteye, who got his name because his right eye would not face straight ahead, which made him a perfect spokesathlete for Focal Freedom, an over-the-counter product that supposedly corrected drifting eyes. Truth was, it didn't work for shit, with the notable exception of padding Drifteye's bank account. And he had no intention of letting that gravy train dry up, so the most important relationship in his life - exceeding even the one with his mother - became the one with Dr. Mendel.

Groove had picked up on all of this in his eight months muling for Mendel, during which time he had made this trek to Drifteye's condo every two weeks like clockwork. It was now his intention to bring New York's baddest pro basketball player into the fold of his own newly created client list.

As he passed a newsstand, one of the tabloids caught his eye. There was a fullpage picture of Mendel's head wedged firmly in the hotel room toilet, with 250-point type: “Hey Doc! It's 0-2!” At the bottom of the page: “Physician found murdered, mutilated in hotel.”

Shit, Groove thought. He hadn't had much experience with media. There weren't exactly paper boxes on every corner in the hood where he grew up, and his reading skills weren't all that strong. He knew what that headline meant, though. Reporters were now working to figure out what and who had happened to Mendel. And so were cops. He'd thought about his little scheme to con Drifteye out of big money, and he'd arrived at a nice round figure: $100,000 a month, and Groove would not tell a soul. Drifteye knew Mendel's courier could be discreet and on three or four occasions he had tipped the man $10,000 just for showing up on time. Now, though, both men had more to lose, and Groove wasn't going to accept that risk without profit.

With the newspaper headline in play, he decided to demand $150 grand. Small price to pay for Drifteye, who had a $40 million endorsement deal with Focal Freedom and several smaller deals with other companies, all on top of his basketball contract. Oh, yeah, he would pay. A coupla DUIs these days weren't enough to scare off endorsements, but a steroids scandal would make them dry up and blow away faster than Drifteye's trademark drop-step move. Cha-ching, Groove though.

The security guard in Drifteye's building knew Groove on sight, and didn't ask questions. He buzzed him in, taking little notice of Groove's briefcase; the bald guy always had one with him, and today was no different. It was the offseason, and Drifteye kept wild hours when he wasn't playing ball, but that mattered little to Groove, who would make himself at home and wait for him to come back if need be.

He didn't have to wait. Drifteye came to the door dressed in a silk robe tied loosely at the waist.

“Groove, my man! Hey, aren't you early?” He smiled with perfectly straight white teeth, the product of the best orthodontics money could buy. No gold caps for the Drifter. Had to appeal to the affluent white over-the-counter drug-buying public. The smile was uneasy, though. Groove wasn't due for another three days.

“I've got a proposition for you,” Groove said.

“No shit?” Drifteye rolled his eyes, an expression that looked almost comical with the odd directions his irises pointed.

Groove sat down and laid the case on Drifteye's coffee table, topped with green Italian marble and polished to an immaculate shine. He clicked the case open and flipped the top up. He looked at Drifteye, whose hands had gone to his crotch like a soccer player lining up for a free kick. His mouth hung wide open. Yes, he would pay.

Cha-ching!

 

Evan dialed the number again, heard the recording again (‘It’s Cornwell, leave a message’), and hung up again. Arrogant bitch, he thought to himself as he lit the Cohiba. Too good to play with the toy department.

He wondered how fast she’d call him back if she knew he had five used syringes and the names of the famous people who had used them.

The syringes….for all he knew, they were just worthless plastic and this whole thing was a prank or the demented work of a delusional fan. He needed to know more about those syringes, and where they had been.

He needed someone who knew about sports and drugs and testing…he needed someone he could trust to be thorough and discreet.

He needed Bob Corey.

 

If Bob Corey hadn’t been a genius, he could have had a stellar Hollywood career. At 6’6”, 160 pounds, with ash white skin and thin scraggly hair that crept around his shoulders like cobwebs, Corey was born to play the Grim Reaper.  On Halloween kids went to his house to see if it was true that a dead guy lived there. He gave out bandaids and unwrapped pretzel rods, which the mothers threw away immediately.

Evan Seville had met Bob Corey at Michigan, when they both lived in the athletic dorms.  Corey played baseball for two years, until he got drilled in the face by a wild pitch, requiring fifteen stitches above his left eye. Although the University would have paid for the procedure, Corey opted to have the work done for free at the UM Medical School, and the result contributed tremendously to the Halloween legend.   The doctors had said he could still play ball, but every inside pitch sent him sprawling to the dirt in sheer terror. He quit at the end of his sophomore year.

Having lost his first love—baseball—he turned his grief and frustration to his other passion: chemistry.  With a 35 on his ACTs, Corey could have gone to any school in the nation, but he chose Michigan because of its world-reknowned chemistry program. It was like music to him…a symphony of formulas, theories, experiments, tests. He spent two years trying to develop a cream that could remove the fingerprints right off the tips of the fingers, because he once read that Nolan Ryan used to shave the surface right off his fingertips. He would wake in the middle of the night, madly scribbling down ideas for a kind of rubber skin that bonded to real skin…football players could hit the turf and never feel the sting.  He had a million ideas, a million projects, a million dreams. What he needed was a few million dollars, and he had yet to develop a formula that could make that happen.

By the time graduation arrived, he had offers from five top drug companies, three international chemical manufacturers, and four other major corporations in need of a genius, each offering six figure starting salaries.

There was one other offer on the table, with a starting salary of $30,000. He took that one, and started his new career at Major League Baseball.

 

I have tomorrow and Friday off; I'll develop the Lionel and Nick storylines, and try to tie them to the main plot.

 

Evan stood in Bob Corey’s small laboratory, and tried not to breathe. The smell was impossible to identify; sometimes it smelled like fudge, a moment later it smelled like burning monkey brains. He had actually never smelled burning monkey brains, but Evan was sure that’s what they would smell like. He could also detect the faint aroma of feet.

Corey had been with MLB for a dozen years, and no one actually knew what he did in the windowless building in Passaic. If he was asked, sometimes he would say, ‘Research.’ Sometimes he said, ‘Testing.’ Sometimes he just shrugged and changed the subject. He always worked alone.

When Evan Seville called him and asked what he was working on these days, and could he help him with a very private matter regarding used syringes, he said, ‘How soon can you get here?’

Evan had brought the syringes, explaining as little as possible except that he had found them in the trash and wondered what they had contained. Corey had taken them immediately to his lab, and retuned an hour later.

‘Wellllll,’ frowned Corey, and Evan wished he would stop frowning, it made the eyebrow scar wiggle like a crazy worm, ‘I can’t quite say.’ He looked directly at Evan, who had to look away. ‘You got some basic growth hormone here, so I KNOW you didn’t get these from our guys, right?’ He rolled his eyes and waited for Evan’s response. Evan just stared…growth hormone…steroids….big story….interrupted by Corey’s maniacal laughter.

‘HAH, gotcha, buddy….nothing in these. At least nothing I can find, and I can find anything. Someone’s playin’ with you. Sorry, champ…I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sure??’ asked Evan, getting a big accidental whiff of mildew….or gardenia…impossible to tell. There was nothing in the syringes? Was that possible?

‘Sorry,’ Corey repeated. ‘You found garbage. That’s it.’

A few minutes later, Evan was in his car and wondering what the hell was going on.

At that same moment, Bob Corey was on the phone, whispering: ‘We have a problem.”

 

I'll write something tonight, I think.