Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m engrossed in the correspondence from the homeowners’ association.” She showed me a stack of yellow papers, all of which bore the telltale sign of an angry group of residents: a propensity to overuse capital letters.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Uncut grass,” she said. “One letter says that every blade of grass over three inches in height is subject to a fine. Really, Michael, who chooses to live among these people? Why not just move into a gulag?”

“Anything we can use?” I asked Fiona.

“He let his beer-of-the-month-club membership slide,” she said quietly and then tilted her head in Brent’s direction. He was looking at an invoice with more attention than I’d been aware he could muster.

“It was a gift from my mother,” Brent said. He handed me the invoice. His membership had lapsed three months ago. “He always made sure it was paid. Always. Each month, it came with a greeting card from my mother, or not my mother, but my mother’s name. It was a gift. He didn’t even drink that much.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sure if he pays his bill, they’ll start it back up.”

“That’s not the point, Michael,” Fiona said. I knew she was right, but I was just hoping to reel things in, if possible. I’d forgotten, again, that I was essentially dealing with a child.

I handed the invoice back to Brent. “It’s silly, really,” Brent said. “It’s not like they got along when she was alive.”

“It’s hard to tell with parents,” I said. “I thought my mom and dad hated each other, and, maybe after a while, they did. But what I think of as the worst years of my life, my mother tends to remember differently. Maybe it’s the same with your father, Brent.”

“He once told me that he gambled because it was the closest thing to feeling normal that he had,” Brent said. “Does that make any sense?”

I told him it did. One thing I’d learned all of these years, and why I’ve struggled so long to get my name back and clear my burn notice, was that I never felt more like who I was supposed to be than when I was a spy. It was the most natural state of calm and being I’d ever possessed. And then one day it was gone. Helping people like Brent salved the wound some, but nothing was the same.

Sam came into the living room and plopped down in a caramel-colored recliner that was positioned about four feet from one of the ubiquitous flat-screen televisions. He attempted to turn on the television using one of the four remotes that were tucked in the recliner’s pocket, but none of them worked.

“Life was easier when there were only thirteen channels,” Sam said. “I’m telling you, if Reagan were still in office, there would be one remote control in every house and it would operate every television in the universe.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t find anything,” I said.

“He had software on that computer from the nineties,” Sam said. “And judging from the amount of music he downloaded from Napster in 1999, I’m going to say he’s lucky he didn’t get thrown into record-industry prison.”

“That was my mom’s computer,” Brent said. “He didn’t want to change anything on it.”

“Your mom,” I said, “how did she die?”

“Car accident,” Brent said. “Dad fell asleep at the wheel. They were driving home from the Keys. They’d gone down there for their anniversary and left me with my nana.” The way Brent recited the information was robotic. He’d given the answer so many times in his life that it was now just a series of simple, declarative facts. He’d boiled down the worst part of his life into three mundane sentences.

“Jesus,” Fiona said. “How old were you?”

“Nine,” Brent said.

The problem in dealing with teenagers is that they sometimes leave out salient bits of personal information.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do you know if your dad gambled when your mom was alive?”

“No, no, never,” he said. “He was a completely different person.”

“Grief will do that,” I said.

“No, I mean he was actually a different person,” Brent said. “He got thrown out of the car in the accident and his brain, it was like it got rewired. He was in the hospital for three months and when he got out, he had a different personality pretty much. I mean, you know, he was a notary. And now he’s like this… dirtbag.”

Traumatic brain injuries resulting in changes in personality aren’t uncommon. In Henry’s case, married with the inadvertent death of his wife, it was pretty much textbook. That he was ready and able to risk everything on the outcome of a sporting match spoke to a larger mental instability, certainly, but in light of everything else I’d learned about Henry subsequent to his disappearance, there was a strong sense of paranoia at work here, too, and a certain fatalistic streak. He’d left his son to fend for himself, but also left him with a fortune in life insurance. Nothing about Henry made sense, because nothing in Henry made sense. I had a sinking feeling that when we found Henry, he wasn’t going to be in a good mental state.

“When did your dad start collecting plasma TVs?” Sam asked.

“That was a recent obsession,” Brent said. “For a long time he was just really into Star Wars. ”

“How recent?” I asked.

“He started stockpiling them a few months before he skipped town,” Brent said.

“Any idea why?”

“He watched a lot of sports,” Brent said. He then shrugged for maybe the thousandth time in the last two days. I was empathetic toward Brent for the odd life he’d been forced into, but I wondered if his shoulders ached from the amount of shrugging he did. “He’s a hoarder when he puts his mind to something.”

I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Ten plasma televisions was obsessive even for an obsessive. There had to be something else.

“Your father’s gambling,” I said. “He ever think about turning the tables?”

“What do you mean?” Brent said.

“Going into business,” I said. “Starting his own sportsbook.” I remembered what Sam had said about his insurance coverage: You don’t hoard plasma televisions and then remember to add them to your home insurance. It spoke to a stability that seemed curious in light of everything else.

“I don’t think so,” Brent said.

“Your pop hoard any of those beers of the month I heard you mention?” Sam asked.

“Probably,” he said.

“You mind if I find out?”

Brent shrugged, which was all the permission Sam needed to pop out of the recliner and head to the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later with cold beers for all of us, even Brent.

“I’m not twenty-one,” Brent said.

“It’s all right, kid,” Sam said. “Your uncle Sammy is.”

I sat there in the comfortable living room of Brent Grayson’s childhood home and pondered what it must have been like to grow up within these four walls. They weren’t so different from the walls I’d grown up around and crazy parents are crazy parents. The difference is that I had Nate and Brent had to be with his father on his own. I coped by becoming a spy. Brent coped by becoming the kind of nineteen-year-old who was smart enough to dupe a man like Yuri Drubich.

I had no idea where Henry Grayson was. I thought I could take Big Lumpy at his word, but in light of the men on the street that Fi had dispatched, it seemed Henry had more people after him than could reasonably be accounted for, and that was a problem.

I took a sip of my beer. It was ice-cold. The logo on the side of the bottle showed a cresting wave and so for a moment I imagined what life would be like if I were one of those people who actually was able to spend the majority of their Miami time beachside covered in suntan lotion versus constantly running into and out of trouble, mine and other people’s, in well-ventilated homes, hotels and secure government locations.