“Well, I thought we should kick off our new start with a special father-daughter breakfast before school. Check it out.”
Jill lifted the plate covering the food and couldn’t resist a smile. Tom had made his famous Mickey Mouse pancakes for her. He blended three pancakes together to form the head and ears. He used whipped cream for the whites of the eyes, and three black raspberries, two for the pupils and one for the nose. The mouth was made of whipped cream, too, and he used a strawberry for the tongue.
“Oh, Dad, you shouldn’t have done that,” Jill said. But Tom could see that his daughter was touched by the effort, as well as the memory.
“I think you were six the last time I made this for you.”
“Every Sunday,” Jill said, remembering.
“Come. Sit. Eat.” Tom sauntered over to the table and pulled out her chair from underneath.
Jill smiled and bounded over to him. She brushed his cheek with one quick peck.
“Wow, this is so… sweet,” Jill said. “But I’m late for the bus. And I don’t really have time for breakfast… pretty much, ever.”
She handed him the empty yogurt container and descended the front stairs, seemingly without stepping on any of them.
“I’m going to make rosemary chicken for dinner tonight,” Tom called after her.
“Going over to Lindsey’s after practice,” Jill yelled back. “We have a math test already. Her mom will drive me home after dinner. Bye.”
“Well, call and let me know what time you’re coming home,” Tom said, though he knew his words had bounced, unheard, off the front door.
The phone rang moments after Jill departed. Tom answered it without checking caller ID and was glad to hear Marvin’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Hey! Called the hospital and heard you checked yourself out,” Marvin said.
“Yeah, long story. What’s up, Marvin?”
“What are you doing?”
“Ah, let’s see… recovering from a concussion, cleaning up from a reconciliation breakfast that nobody ate, and waiting for my lawyer to call with news that all charges against me have been dropped.”
Marvin made a slight chuckle. “Well, no can do on the last item on your list. But I do have something. Pretty interesting stuff, too. When can you get over here?”
“Not many people want to hang with an alleged sex offender. I’d say my calendar is wide open today, tomorrow… and, well, for the foreseeable future.”
“Well, get over here right away,” Marvin said. “You really need to see this for yourself.”
Chapter 60
Marvin didn’t pick up his head when Tom entered his office. The lawyer remained hunched over his conference table, where he appeared to be reading from a baseball almanac. A coffee mug and a hefty law journal kept the thick tome pried open. Stacks of papers set upon the floor created a mini obstacle course for Tom to navigate.
“Have I inspired you into a new career as a private investigator?” Tom asked in a voice loud enough to get Marvin’s attention. “Hope you do better than the guys you hired to watch Jill.”
Marvin looked up and impatiently waved Tom over. “I was going to call back and see if you’re even allowed to drive with your head all banged up,” Marvin said, “but I figured a guy who leaves the hospital against medical advice isn’t going to follow any prescribed driving restrictions, either.”
“I’m fine to drive. My head hurts pretty much all the time, so it’s become sort of normal now.”
“Well, that’s one way to cure a headache. Make it the norm. Okay, I’m going to tell you a story.”
“Oh, good,” Tom said. “For a second there I thought you had something really important and useful to show me.”
“Patience, my good man. Patience.”
Tom worked his way over to the conference table. Marvin flipped his dangling tie over his shoulder so that Tom had a clear view of the page in the almanac he’d been reading.
“What do you know about the nineteen eighty-eight Los Angeles Dodgers?” asked Marvin.
“They played baseball,” Tom said. “And got paid a lot of money to do it.”
“Kirk Gibson signed a three-year four-point-five-million-dollar free agent contract to play for the team,” Marvin said. “You couldn’t afford a utility player for that kind of cash today.”
“I wouldn’t sneeze at it,” Tom said.
“Before Gibson signed with the team, the Dodgers typically finished around the middle of their division. Fred Claire, the team GM at the time, brought in Gibson because he knew the guy was a game changer. Real workhorse-type player.”
“So Kirk Gibson framed me?” Tom said.
“Cute. No. He didn’t. But he did impart the fear of failure to his teammates and got them into first place at the end of May.”
“Go, Kirk,” Tom said.
“Well, nobody picked them to win at the start of the season. And nobody thought they were going to beat the Mets, but that’s just what they did to win the NLCS. Next up, the World Series against the Oakland A’s—Canseco, McGwire, and Henderson, the big bad three. Don Baylor went and made the egregious mistake of expressing his disappointment that the A’s wouldn’t be facing the best team in the National League. The Dodgers, huge underdogs, were more than a little fired up. Gibson was pretty much tapped out, though. He’d strained his knee and torn a hamstring in the NLCS.”
Tom had been training to become a SEAL that year, but even he saw the most memorable moment from that Series.
“Gibson smacked a home run, then hobbled around the bases,” Tom said.
“Game one, bottom of the ninth, the crowd went crazy when Gibson took the field. Eckersley was on the mound. Three-two count. Gibson’s swing looked to be one-handed, but he made enough contact to win the game with a home run to right. Dodgers went on to win the series in five games.”
Tom gave Marvin his best “I’m still waiting for the punch line” look.
“A lot of people say that home run was the greatest in World Series history. I’m one of them.”
“Marvin, this is all very interesting, but what does any of this have to do with my case?” Tom tried to keep his frustration from showing.
“Take a look at this.”
Tom followed Marvin over to his computer, where he had a Web page open with a picture of the Los Angeles Dodgers 1988 World Series championship ring on display. Marvin held up his cell phone to show Tom the image he’d taken of the injury to his cheek. Tom didn’t need long to see a matching pattern.
“I knew I’d seen that shape before,” Marvin said. “It’s a baseball diamond, of course. But when I first saw your injury, I thought, if it is a World Series ring, those other markings could be the bottom part of the letters D,O,D,G,E,R,S. I remembered that their ring had the team name on it. I got kind of obsessed over that team after their big underdog win.”
“Outliers,” Tom said.
“But I didn’t want to say anything until I checked it out. So I put on my investigator’s hat and cross-referenced the employees of the restaurant where somebody slipped you a Mickey with people on the Dodger team payroll.”
Tom looked dubious.
“I was assaulted by a former major league baseball player?” he asked.
“Players aren’t the only ones to get rings,” Marvin said. “Anybody on the Dodgers’ payroll that year would have gotten a ring—personal trainers, batting practice pitchers, and such.”
Tom’s face lit up. “Marvin, you are a beautiful, beautiful man,” Tom said. “What did you find?”
Marvin couldn’t keep from smiling. “A ring from eighty-eight could have been pawned or sold on eBay. It was a long shot I knew, but I got a hit.”
“Who?”