A Face in the Crowd Read online

  He put away his groceries and settled onto the sofa. The Coben was terrific, and he got into it right away. Evers was so immersed that he didn’t realize he’d picked up the TV remote, but when he got to the end of chapter six and decided to break for a small piece of Pepperidge Farm lemon cake, the gadget was right there in his hand.

  Won’t hurt to check the score, he thought. Just a quick peek, and off it goes.

  The Rays were up one to nothing in the eighth, and Dewayne Staats was so excited he was burbling. “Don’t want to talk about what’s going on with Matt Moore tonight, folks—I’m old-school—but let’s just say that the bases have been devoid of Crimson Hose.”

  No-hitter, Evers thought. Moore’s pitching a damn no-hitter and I’ve been missing it.

  Close-up on Moore. He was sweating, even in the Trop’s constant 72 degrees. He went into his motion, the picture changed to the home plate shot, and there in the third row was Dean Evers’s dead wife, wearing the same tennis whites she’d had on the day of her first stroke. He would have recognized that blue piping anywhere.

  Ellie was deeply tanned, as she always was by this time of summer, and as was the case more often than not at the ballpark, she was ignoring the game entirely, poking at her iPhone instead. For an unfocused moment, Evers wondered who she was texting—someone here, or someone in the afterlife?—when, in his pocket, his cell phone buzzed.

  She raised the phone to her ear and gave him a little wave.

  Pick up, she mouthed, and pointed to her phone.

  Evers shook his head no slowly.

  His phone vibrated again, like a mild shock applied to his thigh.

  “No,” he said to the TV, and thought, logically: She can just leave a message.

  Ellie shook her phone at him.

  “This is wrong,” he said. Because Ellie wasn’t like Soupy Embree or Lennie Wheeler or Young Dr. Young. She loved him—of that Evers was sure—and he loved her. Forty-six years meant something, especially nowadays.

  He searched her face. She seemed to be smiling, and while he didn’t have a speech prepared, he guessed he did want to tell her how much he missed her, and what his days were like, and how he wished he was closer to Pat and Sue and the grandkids, because, really, there was no one else he could talk to.

  He dug the phone from his pocket. Though he’d deactivated her account months ago, the number that came up was hers.

  On TV, Moore was pacing behind the mound, juggling the rosin bag on the back of his pitching hand.

  And then there she was, right behind David Ortiz, holding up her phone.

  He pressed TALK.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Finally,” she said. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”

  “What’s weird?”

  “I don’t know. You not being here and all.”

  “Dead, you mean. Me being dead.”

  “That.”

  “So you don’t want to talk to me because I’m dead.”

  “No,” he said. “I always want to talk to you.” He smiled—at least, he thought he was smiling. He’d have to check the mirror to be sure, because his face felt frozen. “You’re wanted, sweetheart, dead or alive.”

  “You’re such a liar. That’s one thing I always hated about you. And fucking Martha, of course. I wasn’t a big fan of that either.”

  What could he say to that? Nothing. So he sat silent.

  “Did you think I didn’t know?” she said. “That’s another thing I hated about you, thinking I didn’t know what was going on. It was so obvious. A couple of times you came home still stinking of her perfume. Juicy Couture. Not the most subtle of scents. But then, you were never the most subtle guy, Dean.”

  “I miss you, El.”

  “Okay, yes, I miss you too. That’s not the point.”

  “I love you.”

  “Stop trying to press my buttons, all right? I need to do this. I didn’t say anything before because I needed to keep everything together and make everything work. That’s who I am. Or was, anyway. And I did. But you hurt me. You cut me.”

  “I’m sorr—”

  “Please, Dean. I only have a couple minutes left, so for once in your life shut up and listen. You hurt me, and it wasn’t just with Martha. And although I’m pretty sure Martha was the only one you slept with—”

  That stung. “Of course she wa—”

  “—don’t expect any brownie points for that. You didn’t have time to cheat on me with anyone outside the company because you were always there. Even when you were here you were there. I understood that, and maybe that was my fault for not sticking up for myself, but the one it really wasn’t fair to was Patrick. You wonder why you never see him, it’s because you were never there for him. You were always off in Denver or Seattle at some sales meeting or something. Selfishness is learned behavior, you know.”

  This criticism Evers had heard many times before, in many forms, and his attention waned. Moore had gone 3–2 on Papi. Devoid, Staats had said. Was Matt Moore really throwing a perfect game?

  “You were always too worried about what you were doing, and not enough about the rest of us. You thought bringing home the bacon was enough.”

  I did, he almost told her. I did bring home the bacon. Just tonight.

  “Dean? Are you hearing me? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Yes,” Evers said, just as the pitch from Moore caught the outside corner and the ump rang up Ortiz. “Yes!”

  “I know that yes! God damn you, are you watching the stupid game?”

  “Of course I’m watching the game.” Though now it was a truck commercial. A grinning man—one who undoubtedly knew how to get things done—was driving through mud at a suicidal speed.

  “I don’t know why I called. You’re hopeless.”

  “I’m not,” Evers said. “I miss you.”

  “Jesus, why do I even bother? Forget it. Good-bye.”

  “Don’t!” he said.

  “I tried to be nice—that’s the story of my life. I tried to be nice and look where it got me. People like you eat nice. Good-bye, Dean.”

  “I love you,” he repeated, but she was gone, and when the game came back on, the woman with the sparkly top was in Ellie’s seat. The woman with the sparkly top was a Tropicana Field regular. Sometimes the top was blue and sometimes it was green, but it was always sparkly. Probably so the folks at home could pick her out. As if she’d caught the thought, she waved. Evers waved back. “Yeah, bitch, I see you. You’re on TV, bitch, good fucking job.”

  He got up and poured himself a scotch.

  In the ninth Ellsbury snuck a seeing-eye single through the right side, and the crowd rose and applauded Moore for his effort. Evers turned the game off and sat before the dark screen, mulling what Ellie had said.

  Unlike Soupy Embree’s accusation, Ellie’s was true. Mostly true, he amended, then changed it to at least partly true. She knew him better than anyone in the world—this world or any other—but she’d never been willing to give him the credit he deserved. He was, after all, the one who’d put groceries in the refrigerator all those years, some pretty high-grade bacon. He was also the one who’d paid for the refrigerator—a top-of-the-line Sub-Zero, thank you very much. He’d paid for her Audi. And her tennis club dues. And her massage therapist. And all the stuff she bought from the catalogs. And hey, let’s not forget Patrick’s college tuition! Evers had had to put together a jackleg combination of scholarships, loan packages, and shit summer jobs to get through school, but Patrick had gotten a full boat from his old man. The old man he was too busy to call these days.

  She comes back from the dead, and why? To complain. And to do it on the goddamn iPhone I paid for.

  He thought of an old saying and wished he’d quoted it to Ellie while he still had the chance: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it allows one to endure unhappiness in relative comfort.”

  That might ha
ve shut her up.

  The more he considered their life together—and there was nothing like talking to your dead spouse while you looked at her in a club seat to make you consider such things—the more he thought that while he hadn’t been perfect, he’d still been all right. He did love her and Patrick, and had always tried to be kind to them. He’d worked hard to give them everything he never had, thinking he was doing the right thing. If it wasn’t enough, there was nothing he could do about it now. As for the thing with Martha… some kinds of fucking were meaningless. Men understood that—Kaz certainly would have understood it—but women did not.

  In bed, dropping into a blissful oblivion that was three parts Ambien and two parts scotch, it came to him that Ellie’s rant was strangely freeing. Who else could they (whoever they were) send to bedevil him? Who could make him feel any worse? His mother? His father? He’d loved them, but not as he’d loved Ellie. Miss Pritchett? His uncle Elmer who used to tickle him till he wet his pants?

  Snuggling deeper into the covers, Evers actually snickered at that. No, the worst had happened. And although there would be another great match-up tomorrow night at the Trop—Josh Beckett squaring off against James Shields—he didn’t have to watch. His last thought was that from now on, he’d have more time to read. Lee Child, maybe. He’d been meaning to get to those Lee Child books.

  But first he had the Harlan Coben to finish. He spent the afternoon lost in the green, pitiless suburbs. As the sun went down on another St. Petersburg Sunday, he was into the last fifty pages or so, and racing along. That was when his phone buzzed. He picked it up gingerly—the way a man might pick up a loaded mousetrap—and looked at the readout. What he saw there was a relief. The call was from Kaz, and unless his old pal had suffered a fatal heart attack (not entirely out of the question; he was a good thirty pounds overweight), he was calling from Punta Gorda rather than the afterlife.

  Still, Evers was cautious; given recent events, he had every reason to be. “Kaz, is that you?”

  “Who the hell else would it be?” Kaz boomed. Evers winced and held the phone away from his ear. “Barack fucking Obama?”

  Evers laughed feebly. “No, I just—”

  “Fuckin’ Dino Martino! You suck, buddy! Front-row seats, and you didn’t even call me?”

  From far away, Evers heard himself say: “I only had one ticket.” He looked at his watch. Twenty past eight. It should have been the second inning by now--unless the Rays and Red Sox were the 8:00 Sunday-night game on ESPN.

  He reached for the remote.

  Kaz, meanwhile, was laughing. The way he’d laughed that day in the schoolyard. It had been higher-pitched then, but otherwise it was just the same. He was just the same. It was a depressing thought. “Yeah, yeah, I’m just yankin’ your ballsack. How’s the view from there?”

  “Great,” Evers said, pushing the power button on the remote. Fox 13 was showing some old movie with Bruce Willis blowing things up. He punched 29 and ESPN came on. Shields was dealing to Dustin Pedroia, second in the Sox lineup. The game had just started.

  I’m doomed to baseball, Evers thought.

  “Dino? Earth to Dino Martino! You still there?”

  “I’m here,” he said, and turned up the volume. Pedroia flailed and missed. The crowd roared; those irritating cowbells the Rays fans favored clanged with maniacal fervor. “Pedie just struck out.”

  “No shit. I ain’t blind, Stevie Wonder. The Rays Rooters are pumped up, huh?”

  “Totally pumped,” Evers said hollowly. “Great night for a ball game.”

  Now Adrian Gonzalez was stepping in. And there, sitting in the first row right behind the screen, doing a fair impersonation of a craggy old snowbird playing out his golden years in the Sunshine State, was Dean Patrick Evers.

  He was wearing a ridiculous foam finger, and although he couldn’t read it, not even in HD, he knew what it said: RAYS ARE #1. Evers at home stared at Evers behind home with the phone against his ear. Evers at the park stared back, holding the selfsame phone in the hand that wasn’t wearing the foam finger. With a sense of outrage that not even his stunned amazement could completely smother, he saw that Ballpark Evers was wearing a Rays jersey. Never, he thought. Those are traitor colors.

  “There you are!” Kaz shouted exultantly. “Shake me a wave, buddy!”

  Evers at the ballpark raised the foam finger and waved it solemnly, like an oversize windshield wiper. Evers at home, on autopilot, did the same with his free hand.

  “Love the shirt, Dino,” Kaz said. “Seeing you in Rays colors is like seeing Doris Day topless.” He snickered.

  “I had to wear it,” Evers said. “The guy who gave me the ticket insisted. Listen, I’ve gotta go. Want to grab a beer and a d—ohmygod, there it goes!”

  Gonzo had launched a long drive, high and deep.

  “Drink one for me!” Kaz shouted.

  On Evers’s expensive TV, Gonzalez was lumbering around the bases. As he watched, Evers suddenly understood what he had to do. There was only one way to put an end to this cosmic joke. On a Sunday night, downtown St. Pete would be deserted. If he took a taxi, he could be at the Trop by the end of the second inning. Maybe even sooner.

  “Kaz?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “We should either have been nicer to Lester Embree, or left him alone.”

  He pushed END before Kaz could reply. He turned off the TV. Then he went into his bedroom, rooted through the folded shirts in his bureau, and found his beloved Curt Schilling jersey, the one with the bloody sock on the front and WHY NOT US? on the back. Schilling had been The Man, afraid of nothing. When the Evers in the Rays shirt saw him in this one, he’d fade away like the bad dream he was and all of this would end.

  Evers yanked the shirt on and called a cab. There was one nearby that had just dropped off a fare, and the streets were as deserted as Evers had expected. The cabbie had the game on the radio. The Sox were still batting in the top half of the second when he pulled up to the main gate.

  “You’ll have to settle for nosebleeds,” the cabbie said. “Sox–Rays, that’s a hot ticket.”

  “I’ve got one right behind home plate,” Evers said. “Stop somewhere they’ve got the game on, you might see me. Look for the shirt with the bloody sock on it.”

  “I heard that fuckin’ hoser’s video game business went broke,” the cabbie said as Evers handed him a ten. He looked, saw Evers still sitting in the backseat with the door open, and reluctantly made change. From it, Evers handed him a single rumpled simoleon.

  “Guy with a front-row seat should be able to do better’n that for a tip,” the cabbie grumbled.

  “Guy with half a brain in his head should keep his mouth shut about the Big Schill,” Evers said. “If he wants a better tip, that is.” He slipped out, slammed the door and headed for the entrance.

  “Fuck you, Boston!” the cabbie shouted.

  Without turning around, Evers hoisted a middle finger—real, not foam.

  The concourse with its palm trees lit like Christmas in Hawaii was all but empty, the sound of the crowd inside the stadium a hollow surf-boom. It was a sellout, the LED signs above the shuttered ticket windows bragged. There was only one window still open, all the way down at the end, the WILL CALL.

  Yes, Evers thought, because they will call, won’t they? He headed for it like a man on rails.

  “Help you, sir?” the pretty ticket agent asked, and was that Juicy Couture she was wearing? Surely not. He remembered Martha saying, It’s my slut perfume. I only wear it for you. She’d been willing to do things Ellie wouldn’t dream of, things he remembered at all the wrong times.

  “Help you, sir?”

  “Sorry,” Evers said. “Had a little senior moment there.”

  She smiled dutifully.

  “Do you happen to have a ticket for Evers? Dean Evers?”

  There was no hesitation, no thumbing through a whole box of envelopes, because there was only one left. It had his name on it. She slid it through
the gap in the glass. “Enjoy the game.”

  “We’ll see,” Evers said.

  He made for Gate A, opening the envelope and taking out the ticket. A piece of paper was clipped to it, just four words below the Rays logo: COMPLIMENTS OF THE MANAGEMENT. He strode briskly up the ramp and handed the ticket to a crusty usher who was standing there and watching as Elliot Johnson dug in against Josh Beckett. At the very least, the geezer was a good half century older than his employers. Like so many of his kind, he was in no hurry. It was one reason Evers no longer drove.

  “Nice seat,” the usher said, raising his eyebrows. “Just about the best in the house. And you show up late.” He gave a disapproving head shake.

  “I would have been here sooner,” Evers said, “but my wife died.”

  The usher froze in the act of turning away, Evers’s ticket in hand.

  “Gotcha,” Evers said, smiling and pointing a playful finger-gun. “That one never fails.”

  The usher didn’t look amused. “Follow me, sir.”

  Down and down the steep steps they went. The usher was in worse shape than Evers, all wattle and liver spots, and by the time they reached the front row, Johnson was headed back to the dugout, a strikeout victim. Evers’s seat was the only empty one—or not quite empty. Leaning against the back was a large blue foam finger that blasphemed: RAYS ARE #1.

  My seat, Evers thought, and as he picked the offending finger up and sat down he saw, with only the slightest surprise, that he was no longer wearing his treasured Schilling jersey. Somewhere between the cab and this ridiculous, padded Captain Kirk perch, it had been replaced by a turquoise Rays shirt. And although he couldn’t see the back, he knew what it said: MATT YOUNG.

  “Young Matt Young,” he said, a crack that his neighbors—neither of whom he recognized—pointedly ignored. He craned around, searching the section for Ellie and Soupy Embree and Lennie Wheeler, but it was just a mix of anonymous Rays and Sox fans. He didn’t even see the sparkly-top lady.