“And they kept coming?”
She nodded.
“And Marty kept doing what they said to do?”
She nodded again.
“How often?” I said.
“The letters? Not often. Marty gets about thirty-five starts a year. There were maybe five or six letters last year, three so far this year.”
“Smart,” I said. “Didn’t get greedy. Do you have any idea who it is?”
“No.”
“It’s a hell of a hustle,” I said. “Blackmail is dangerous if the victim knows you or at the point when the money is exchanged. This is perfect. There is no money exchanged. You render a service, and he gets the money elsewhere. He never has to reveal himself. There are probably one hundred thousand people who’ve seen that film, and you can’t know who they are. He mails his instructions, bets his money, and who’s to know?”
“Yes.”
“And furthermore, the act of payment is itself a blackmailable offense so that the more you comply with his requests, the more he’s got to blackmail you for.”
“I know that too,” she said. “If there was a hint of gambling influence, Marty would be out of baseball forever.”
“If you look at it by itself, it’s almost beautiful.”
“I’ve never looked at it by itself.”
“Yeah, I guess not.” I said, “Is it killing Marty?”
“A little, I think. He says you get used to anything-maybe he’s right.”
“How are you?”
“It’s not me that has to cheat at my job.”
“It’s you that has to feel guilty about it,” I said. “He can say he’s doing it for you. What do you say?”
Tears formed in her eyes and began to run down her face. “I say it’s what he gets for marrying a whore.”
“See what I mean?” I said. “Wouldn’t you rather be him?”
She didn’t answer me. She sat still with her hands clenched in her lap, and the tears ran down her face without sound.
I got up and walked around the living room with my hands in my hip pockets. I’d found out what I was supposed to find out, and I’d earned the pay I’d hired on at.
“Did you call your husband?” I said.
She shook her head. “He’s pitching today,” she said, and her voice was steady but without inflection. “I don’t like to bother him on the days he’s pitching. I don’t want to break his concentration. He should be thinking about the Oakland hitters.”
“Mrs. Rabb, it’s not a goddamned religion,” I said.
“He’s not out there in Oakland building a temple to the Lord or a stairway to paradise. He’s throwing a ball and the other guys are trying to hit it. Kids do it every day in schoolyards all over the land.”
“It’s Marty’s religion,” she said. “It’s what he does.”
“How about you?”
“We’re part of it too, me and the boy—the game and the family. It’s all he cares about. That’s why it’s killing him because he has to screw us or screw the game. Which is like screwing himself.”
I should be gone. I should be in Harold Erskine’s office, laying it all out for him and getting a bonus and maybe a plaque: OFFICIAL MAJOR LEAGUE PRIVATE EYE. Gumshoe of the stars. But I knew I wasn’t going to be gone. I knew that I was here, and I probably knew it back in Redford, Illinois, when I went to her house and met her mom and dad.
“I’m going to get you out of this,” I said.
She didn’t look at me.
“I know who’s blackmailing you.”
This time she looked.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I TOLD HER what I knew and what I thought.
“Maybe you can scare him off,” she said. “Maybe when he realizes you know who he is, he’ll stop.”
“If he’s wearing Frank Doerr’s harness, I’d say no.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s got to be more scared of Frank Doerr than I can make him of me.”
