John Feinstein - Change-up - Mystery at the World Series

“Felkoff may not like you, Stevie, but he hates me,” Kelleher said. “And I think Doyle will be less antagonistic to the two of you than to Tamara and me.”

“Do you think we can ask all the right questions?” Susan Carol asked.

“I know you can ask all the right questions,” Kelleher answered.

The four of them met for breakfast at eight-fifteen. If there was one thing Stevie would miss about Boston, it was eating breakfast looking out at Boston Harbor. Just before nine, he and Susan Carol walked out the back door of the hotel to the picturesque little park that separated the Marriott from the residential section of Boston ’s North End. They left Kelleher and Mearns just inside the door.

“We’re on your speed dial, right?” Kelleher said to Susan Carol. “Any trouble at all, hit that button and we’re there in about sixty seconds.”

“Got it,” Susan Carol said.

It was a brisk, breezy morning. It would be cold in the ballpark that night, but at the moment it was cool and, with sweaters on, quite comfortable.

Doyle and Felkoff were standing by a bench that looked out at the water-a slightly incongruous pair, with Felkoff in an expensive suit and Doyle in sweats and a baseball cap.

“Good morning,” Susan Carol said as they walked up. The response was a curt nod from Felkoff and a halfhearted wave from Doyle.

“Maybe we should sit down,” Stevie said.

“No need, we won’t be here long,” Felkoff said.

Even in sneakers Susan Carol was a couple of inches taller than Felkoff. She walked over to him, looked down, and said, “Mr. Felkoff, we need to ask our questions, and we need to tape-record Mr. Doyle’s answers so we get this story exactly right. So the three of us are going to sit down on the bench and talk. What you do while we talk doesn’t really matter; you’re free to stand if you like.”

Felkoff stared at her for a second, then snapped, “Now look, we can just call this off right now if you’re going to cop an attitude-”

“It’s okay, David,” Doyle said, finally speaking up. “Where do you want me to sit, Susan Carol?”

She pointed to a spot on the bench, and he sat. She sat next to him, with Stevie next to her. She produced a tape recorder and put it on the bench between them. Felkoff stood behind the bench, arms folded, looking extremely unhappy.

“If you’re going to record, I’m going to record too,” he said, pulling a tape recorder out of his suit pocket.

“That’s fine,” Susan Carol said.

Susan Carol looked at Stevie, who nodded that she should begin.

“We didn’t want it to come to this,” she said to Doyle.

“Then why has it?” Doyle said. “What did I do to deserve having the two of you digging into my past?”

“You weren’t honest about your past,” Stevie said, leaning around Susan Carol to make sure Doyle could look him in the eye. “If you had told the truth about the accident from the beginning, we wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

“And Disney, DreamWorks, and Universal might not be in a bidding war for his story either,” Felkoff said angrily.

“I guess they won’t be after tomorrow, will they?” Doyle said.

“I don’t know,” Susan Carol said. “Sometimes the truth makes a better story than a fantasy. I know you feel terribly guilty about what happened, I understand-”

“No, you don’t!” Doyle shouted. “How can you know what it feels like to be responsible for the fact that the mother of your children died when they were two years old! Do you know how that feels!?”

No, they didn’t.

Susan Carol took a deep breath. “I apologize. Bad choice of words.”

Stevie stepped in now. “Would you tell us what happened that night? Can you help us to understand?”

For a moment Stevie thought Doyle wasn’t going to answer. Finally he nodded and started to talk very slowly.

“We’d gone out to dinner,” he said. “We needed to talk about… things. It was a long night, a difficult one. I don’t think, to tell the truth, I could tell you how much I had to drink. At that point I had a pretty high capacity.”

“Did the conversation end well?” Susan Carol asked. “I mean, did you resolve things?”

“I don’t want to get into that,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the accident.”

“It might,” Stevie said. “It might explain why the accident happened.”

“The accident happened because I was an alcoholic,” Doyle said flatly.

“Did it also happen,” Susan Carol said, speaking very slowly, “because of Joe Molloy?”

He stiffened and gave them a funny look. “Why would you ask about Joe?”

“We heard that you suspected there was something between Joe and your wife…”

“Oh-that.”

“Is it true? Is that what you were arguing about at dinner?”

“No. I might have thought that once or twice, when I’d been drinking, but it wasn’t true. We weren’t talking about Joe.” Doyle paused a moment and then let out a breath he’d been holding.

“Analise told me in April, right at the start of the season, that she was giving me until her birthday-August twelfth-to get sober, even if it meant going to rehab and missing part of the season,” he said. “That night at dinner she told me she was done, she was going to leave me. You’d think that’d be enough for me to set my glass down, but no. Instead I got drunker. It was a terrible night. Analise was drinking too-which was unusual for her.”

He stopped, and Stevie wondered if he was going to keep telling the story, but after a bit he continued.

“When we were leaving, the manager tried to take the keys from me, but I wouldn’t let him. He said he’d call someone to take us home…”

Tears suddenly appeared in Doyle’s eyes. He put his hand up to wipe them away, then buried his head in his shoulder.

“Come on, Norbert, let’s go,” Felkoff said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Enough is enough.”

“No!” Doyle said fiercely, pushing Felkoff’s hand away. “I’ve had enough of slippery half-truths…”

They gave him a while to compose himself, before Stevie prompted, “So, the restaurant manager said he’d call someone to drive you home…”

“Yeah. Jim Hatley’s always felt that if he’d gotten there sooner, he could have prevented the accident, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t give up my keys to the manager, and I might not have given them to Jim either.”

“But it wasn’t Jim the manager called,” said Susan Carol. “It was Joe Molloy.”

“Who told you that ?” Doyle seemed genuinely surprised.

“He did. And Jim Hatley confirmed it. But Jim said that Joe called him instead of going to the restaurant himself.”

Doyle was silent for a moment. “Huh,” he said. “Well, there are parts to the story even I didn’t know, I guess. But that would explain why Joe was there later.”

“At the accident scene, you mean?” asked Stevie.

“No, before then.”

Now Stevie was completely confused. But Doyle pressed on with his story.

“I insisted I was okay to drive home, which, believe it or not, I probably was. I knew how to drive slow and careful when I was drunk. I’d had a lot of experience.”

“Only this time you weren’t okay,” Susan Carol said.

“I don’t know,” Doyle said. “I never got to find out.”

“What do you mean?” Stevie said, struggling to keep up.

“We got about a mile down the road,” he said. “I was driving carefully, but all of a sudden a police car came up behind me and pulled me over. I couldn’t figure it out. I really thought I was driving fine.”

“And?” Stevie said, hoping he didn’t sound as impatient as he was.

“It was Joe Molloy,” Doyle said. “He asked how much I’d had to drink. I told him not that much, and he asked if I’d take a sobriety test. I really didn’t want to do that, but I bluffed and said, ‘Sure, fine.’ Then Molloy said, ’Tell you what, since we’re old teammates, I’ll cut you a break. Let Analise drive home, and I won’t test you.”