“Lord have mercy, Harry-damn-Nautilus. Whoops, is that blasphemous? I see your name in the paper now and then, Harry. Ain’t you something.”
Harry introduced us. We were bustled into an office, desk and chair and lots of shelves. Ms. Baker thundered down the hall for coffee. I studied the surroundings: upbeat posters on the walls, stacks of handouts advising people to get tested for AIDS, avoid alcohol during pregnancy, obtain a GED, and so forth. There was a colorful rug in one corner, toys on it; where kids could play while she counseled parents, I supposed.
Ms. Baker returned with a carafe of coffee on a tray, creamers, sugar packets. She leaned against the wall and studied Harry.
“What brings you here, Harry? Just in the neighborhood?”
“I was talking to Carson a few days back, the old ball field project came up. We were nearby, so I thought I’d show him. I can’t seem to find it.”
Ms. Baker blew out a breath.
“Maybe because it’s under a warehouse.”
Harry’s shoulders fell. “After all that work, equipment, the improvements? What the hell happened?”
Mardy Baker turned to the window and looked out over the streetscape. “My recollection of those days might not be precise, Harry. Biased maybe. Not for public consumption.” Her voice seemed to balance resignation and resentment.
“We look like the public to you?” Harry said.
She went to her desk and sat, both hands clasping her coffee cup. “Things went along great for the first year. Money arrived as promised, the teams grew, maybe seventy kids. The next season came close to rolling around…”
Harry turned my way. “I had to bow out after things got cruising. I’d just moved from Vice to Homicide. It was a bloody summer, new gangs springing up, gunning and running. I was working three drive-bys at once.”
Ms. Baker continued. “Harry’d set everything in motion, made the connections.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“I went back to the well, drew up a formal budget request, called Mr. Kincannon. I could never get him on the phone: on vacation, out of town, in a meeting. One day a lawyer type showed up, buttery smooth, polite as Miss Manners. He had some suggestions for the upcoming season.”
“Like?”
“The teams had names like Panthers and Gators and Bears, names picked by the kids.” Ms. Baker smiled. “Of course, they really wanted names like Stone Killers, Bloody Warriors, and Ninja Mutants, but we gave them a list to pick from, a bit less extreme.”
“The lawyer guy wanted Stone Bloody Ninjas?” I wondered.
“He suggested company names like Panorama Advertising, Magnitude Construction, Clarity Broadcasting.”
I nodded. “All names of Kincannon investments, I assume. Still, if they’re fronting the money…”
“Sure, corporate sponsorships. I said, fine, we’ll rename the teams. A few days later, there was another suggestion.” She paused. “This one a bit more…intrusive.”
I raised an eyebrow.
Ms. Baker looked at Harry. “Remember when the city wanted to put the industrial waste transfer point over by the Saylor Street projects?”
“Bitter fight. The company handling it didn’t have a rep for integrity. Chem-Tron?”
“Chemitrol. The lawyer guy showed up with charts and graphs suggesting the transfer station was a great opportunity for the neighborhood: jobs, training, education…money spreading out like a tsunami.”
Ms. Baker took a sip of her coffee and frowned. I didn’t think the frown came from the taste of the coffee. She continued.
“I dug around. Discovered the specifications we weren’t given. The projections. The amounts of chemicals traveling our streets. I read up on the industry itself, similar installations. Guess what?”
“Facts were slanted a bit?” I suggested.
“A dozen people could handle the duties of the station, four being folks with degrees in chemical engineering. The others answered the phone and filed.”
“Eight minimum-wage jobs,” I said.
“It was the usual bullshit: all frosting, no cake.”
Harry leaned forward. “What went down from there, Mardy?”
“Mr. Lawyer showed up with all these fancy-ass flyers in favor of the transfer station, wanted the kids to distribute them in the community.”
“Warm and fuzzy,” I noted. “A good photo op.”
“Mr. Lawyer suggested organizing a parade for the transfer station. All we had to do was show up, moms and dads and kids and aunts and uncles, get the cleanest people we knew to come-”
“The cleanest people?” Harry said.
“Not a second thought about what he was saying.”
“Scumbucket,” Harry whispered.
Ms. Baker said, “All parade permits would be handled, all news media in place. Mr. Lawyer even had scripts. ‘A step ahead for our children,’ ‘Children are the future when parents have jobs,’ ‘Chemitrol Means Community Control.’ Our clean people were to chant this lying shit like fucking parrots-pardon my French. I told the guy he could wrap his flyers with barbwire and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine. A little more politely than that, maybe. Not a lot.”
“The money dried up?” I said.
“The field got padlocked. Within a week it was all over.”
“You never heard from Kincannon?” Harry’s voice was a rasp.
“I thought about making a stink. But then I realized they could point to a bunch of bats and gloves and uniforms and we’d come off like whining ingrates. Of course, the uniforms got dirty and torn, the equipment fell apart. And without a decent place to play, the kids lost interest.”
Mardy Baker closed her eyes, rubbed them with her fingertips.
“I thanked God a thousand times for sending such good-hearted people here. The next year they were at the door with their hands out, our payback time.”
“I understand something,” I said to Harry. “Clair said few of the truly wealthy give with both hands. I thought she meant the Kincannons were exceptions, using both hands to ladle out the lucre. She really meant one hand passes out the goodies, because the other one’s busy grabbing something back.”
Ms. Baker looked at me over her coffee.
“One hand gives, the other hand takes,” she said. “Damn if that don’t sum it right up.”
A deflated Harry retraced our route in, passing by the warehouse, a cheap frame and metal structure squatting on two acres of asphalt, the cyclone-fenced lot now home to industrial equipment-trailers, crane assemblies, scaffolding. He stared as an equipment truck pulled from the building, a small dozer trailered behind, MAGNOLIA INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENTS painted on the truck’s door.
Harry pointed. “There’s where it was, the field. Know who owns Magnolia Industrial Developments?”
“The Kincannons,” I ventured.
“Bastards.”
Harry drove down the street where the meth head had stood, doing ten miles an hour, looking back and forth, stopping to scan down alleys.
“Looking for something in particular?” I asked.
“The meth head, the kid with the mouth like cancer. Haaa-i-eee. I figured out he was trying to say my name. He must have been one of the ballplayers from back then, one of the kids. It’s the only way he could have known me.”
“I’m sorry, bro,” I said.
“I swear if Buck Kincannon was in front of me right now, cop or no cop, I’d nail that son of a bitch to the side of a barn, stand a hundred feet away, and teach myself how to shoot a bow and arrow.”
I’d been trying to figure when and how to tell Harry about Dani. This seemed appropriate.
