Gone to Glory Read online

  GONE TO GLORY

  by

  R. R. IRVINE

  To Albert and Angela Prata, the greatest in-laws in the world

  1

  Foreign money is ruining our town.

  The graffiti, three-foot letters sprayed in orange Day-Glo, ran along a temporary wall surrounding Salt Lake’s latest construction site. The message dazzled Moroni Traveler’s eyes but not his senses. He knew better than to believe everything he read, especially in a state like Utah.

  On occasion, he’d been called a foreigner himself for having once lived in California.

  Traveler started the car and drove east on South Temple Street. Directly ahead stood the bronze statue of Brigham Young, one part of the landscape that would never change. He saluted the Mormon prophet and turned right, proceeding down Main Street. He had a 10 a.m. appointment with a boyhood idol by the name of Hap Kilgore. On the phone Kilgore had sounded old and weary, a far cry from Traveler’s memory of him. But then Salt Lake wasn’t what it used to be either.

  On the left, a stone’s throw from the statue, all that remained of the original Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution—ZCMI to the faithful—was a salvaged façade. Behind it stood an air-conditioned mall larger than the Mormon Choir’s tabernacle.

  A block farther on, there was no sign at all of the old Studio Theatre, where Traveler and his teenage chum, Willis Tanner, had finally screwed up enough courage to buy tickets to their first French film, Manon.

  The First National Bank Building had given way to First Security. But the name didn’t change the way he felt about the place. There, on the fifth floor, Grandfather Ned Payson had practiced novocaine-free dentistry. Traveler’s teeth clenched against the memory, against the old-fashioned drill, the crushing smell of ethyl chloride, and the clicking testament of Ned’s own dentures.

  To escape, Traveler peered into the rearview mirror. Brigham Young waved good-bye to him. It was a trick of light.

  Traveler failed to make the traffic light at Second South and brought the Ford to a stop. On that corner, Second and Main, the sixteen-story Walker Bank Building had dominated the town since 1912, as had the Walker Brothers bankers in pioneer times. But while their building remained, the brothers’ bastion of Gentile (non­Mormon) commerce had disappeared into the corporate shell of First Interstate. The old Owl Drug Store, a ground-floor tenant for decades, had surrendered its cigar counter and eternal flame to progress that went by the name Dean Witter.

  Traveler rolled down the window. Exhaust fumes failed to hide the smell of a Utah spring: mountain sage, cottonwoods coming to leaf, the taste of promised rain in a morning sky that was still cloudless.

  The light changed. Pulling out into the intersection he caught a glimpse of the Wasatch Mountains to the east. Each time he saw them they surprised him, snowcapped and deadly blue, a ten thousand-foot reminder of winter no matter what the time of year in the valley below.

  Eleven blocks to go, he thought. Brigham Young’s blocks, seven to a mile. Part of the Mormon prophet’s master plan, his town laid out according to holy logic, with all streets and avenues radiating out from its spiritual hub, the temple. Go south, as Traveler was doing, and the arteries progressed in numerical order. Go north and the same thing happened, as it did to the east and west. The only thing you had to remember was that the numbering system began at the temple itself, where adjacent streets had been baptized East Temple, North Temple, West Temple, and South Temple. Beyond them came First East, First North, First West, and First South. Farther out were the avenues and lettered streets, a rational progression all the way to the city limits. After that came the secular chaos of postwar growth. Greater Salt Lake it was called now, with over a million people and everything that went with them.

  By Fifth South Traveler gave up looking for landmarks that no longer existed and switched on the radio. Normally it would have been pretuned to KBYU, the church station that played classical music. But his father had driven the Ford last, leaving behind one of those call-in talk shows.

  “We have Howard on the line from Sugar House.”

  “I’ve got a joke I’d like to tell. It’s about the pope in Rome, who gets a phone call from God.”

  “Remember where you are, Howard,” the host said. “This is Mormon country, the land of Zion.”

  “It’s not dirty.”

  “There’s such a thing as sacrilege.”

  “Like I was saying, the pope gets this phone call from God.”

  “Would God have to use a phone, Howard?”

  “Are you going to let me tell my story or not?”

  I’m listening.”

  “God calls the pope and says, ‘I’ve got good and bad news. Which would you like first?’ ‘The good news, of course,’ says the pope. ‘All right,’ God tells him, ‘here’s the deal. I’ve decided to end religious strife on earth by merging all churches into one, Jews, Christians, Muslims, everybody. No more bickering.’ ‘That’s wonderful,’ says the pope. ‘But what’s the bad news?’ ‘I’m calling from Salt Lake City,’ God says.”

  Traveler sought relief on KBYU, where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir kept his mind occupied until he reached Thirteenth South and turned right. Half a block ahead stood Derks Field, home of the Salt Lake City Saints baseball team. This time of the morning he had no trouble parking directly across the street from the concrete stadium.

  As soon as he got out of the car, he heard lawn mowers in the outfield and smelled freshly cut grass. The scent carried memories of the old Pioneer League when Salt Lake’s team had been called the Bees. It was the manager of those Bees, Hap Kilgore, who needed Traveler’s kind of help.

  The stadium’s ticket windows were closed, but a gate on the left field side stood open. Traveler went in, half expecting to be challenged by some kind of security. Nobody paid any attention to him until a groundskeeper, riding a lawn-mowing tractor, waved him out of the way in order to maneuver the machine into a space under the bleachers. In his wake he left a perfectly manicured outfield where uniformed ball players were running wind sprints and shagging fly balls.

  Once the man switched off the engine and dismounted, he trotted over to Traveler and shook hands. “Hap Kilgore told me to keep an eye out for you. He’s over there.” He pointed across the diamond, just beyond first base where two men in uniform were hitting fungoes to the outfielders.

  “I didn’t realize he was still coaching,” Traveler said.

  The groundskeeper, who had the deeply lined face and neck of a man who worked in the sun, tugged at the bill of his Saints cap as if he were flashing signals to a base runner…The old boy is a fixture around here. A kind of honorary coach, if you know what I mean.”

  Traveler kept quiet, hoping for elaboration.

  “I used to watch you play when you were linebacking for LA You were something, you were.” He shoved his cap back on his head and grinned. “Hap says you’re a private detective now.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I hope the old man’s not in trouble.”

  Traveler answered with a noncommittal shrug. “Come on. I’ll let you into the grandstand. They don’t like outsiders walking on the field, so you’ll have to go around.”

  He pulled a wad of keys from a spring-loaded reel attached to his belt. One of them opened a green metal door set into the stadium’s concrete base. He gave Traveler a gentle push. “There’s another door on the right field side just like this one. It’s never locked from the inside.”

  Underneath the grandstand the temperature was a good ten degrees cooler than outside. Sixty-five, Traveler guessed, compared with the seventy-five degrees of spring for which he’d d
ressed that morning. Blue denim workshirt, Levis, and what he still called tennis shoes, though Reebok had a more exotic name for them.

  Whatever happened to Keds? he was wondering as he exited the grandstand a couple of minutes later. Halfway down the right field line the fungoe hitters were taking turns. While one hit, the other fielded throws from the outfielders with a catcher’s mitt. From behind, their uniforms made them look interchangeable. Both wore the number 42. Both had the name Hoot Collins stitched across the shoulders.

  A waist-high metal fence, fitted with a narrow gate, separated the playing field from foul ground where Traveler was now standing. He stepped to the chain-link and said, “I’m looking for Hap Kilgore.”

  Both men turned around. The one with the mitt had a chipmunk-cheek full of tobacco and a gut that sagged over his tightly cinched belt. He spit juice to clear his mouth. “Damn, it’s good to see you again, Mo.” Traveler fought against surprise, tried to smile naturally. But his face felt tight and unyielding. All that remained of the Hap Kilgore he remembered, the boyhood icon, was his famous red-faced, blushing complexion. Everything else had weathered away.

  “I’m taking a breather, Hooty,” Kilgore told his companion.

  Hooty, who carried the same weight but a lot fewer years, shrugged indifferently and went back to hitting fly balls with a metal bat.

  Kilgore fired a shot of tobacco across Hooty’s bow before opening the gate and moving in for a bear hug.

  Thirty years had gone by but Kilgore smelled the same, astringent enough to make Traveler’s eyes water.

  Relief pitcher’s cologne, Hap had called it the first time they met. Sloan’s Liniment. Slap a little on your pitching arm and you’re ready to go. No fuss, no muss.

  He ended the hug and stepped back to peer up at Traveler. “How the hell did you get so big? You must be a foot taller than your father.”

  “Not quite.”

  “I’ll be goddamned just the same. I remember the first time he brought you to one of our games. You were big for your age, but not this big.”

  He took a pouch of Redman tobacco from his back pocket and reloaded his cheek. “No wonder you went into football.”

  “I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t hit curves.”

  “Baseball’s a bitch, isn’t it? But I still love it. You know why?”

  Traveler didn’t answer, knew he wasn’t expected to.

  Kilgore was talking to hide his nervousness, a common enough reaction when someone called in a private detective.

  Even so, there was a little-boy glint in his eyes. “Where else could a man my age spit whenever he wants to and get away with it?”

  He took off his cap to rub his bald head, a gesture of frustration that had been his trademark when he managed the old Bees. In those days his scalp had been as fiery red and shiny as the rest of him. Now it was spotted and wrinkled. His age, Traveler calculated, had to be somewhere in the sixties.

  A ball got by Hooty and bounced against the fence. Kilgore spit at it and missed. “I’d better hit a few, Mo. Can you wait for a few minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re Martin’s son, all right. You don’t let a man down.” With that, Kilgore went to get his bat. As soon as he started hitting fungoes the outfielders moved in fifty feet.

  As a playing manager of the Bees, he’d been known to drive fielders all the way to the walls during batting practice. That wasn’t easy at Derks, where it was 351 feet down the line in left, 365 in right, and well over 400 to the center field clubhouse.

  But relief pitching, not hitting, had been his specialty, with a fastball that some said was a spitter. Whatever it was, he could strike out the best of them for an inning or two.

  When Kilgore’s fungoes ran out of steam, dribbling into grounders, he rejoined Traveler. “It’s hell to get old.” When he spit, tobacco trickled onto his shirt.

  “You’ve lasted longer than I did in sports,” Traveler said.

  “I saw that article about you in the Tribune. You had bad luck. Simple as that. In baseball you can get beaned or spiked. In football, the odds of injury are higher, that’s all. So you crippled a guy. He knew the chance he was taking. Still, I can understand how you felt. You came back home to start over as a detective. I came back to be with the Saints.”

  “And now you need my help?”

  “I remember telling your dad once that you had the look of someone who’d follow in his father’s footsteps. But that was a long time ago, something I’d forgotten about until I saw Moroni Traveler and Son listed in the phone book.”

  His hand went to his bald head. His fingers moved slowly, as if searching for hair. “The first time I met Martin was in a bar, the Zang.”

  Kilgore spit again, this time with more precision. “I went looking for the place the other day but couldn’t find it.”

  “It’s a rib joint now.”

  “I used to hang out there with a couple of my older players. They weren’t going anywhere, so they didn’t need a curfew. We’d arm wrestle for beers. Your dad took all three of us the first time we met him. How tall is he, for God’s sake? Five-six?”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “He’s not a man to be taken at face value, that’s for sure.”

  “He played tennis at the university, you know.”

  “I do now. His right arm is twice as big as his left, for Christ’s sake. I never did see that man pay for a beer, not when there was someone to arm wrestle.”

  “Martin seldom drinks these days.”

  “That’s another thing. If his name is Martin and yours is Moroni, how come the business is called Moroni Traveler and Son?”

  “Ever since he was a kid, Dad insisted on calling himself Martin. He hates being named for an angel.”

  “I can’t say I blame him.”

  Growing up, Traveler had been tempted to call himself Martin, too. But his mother wouldn’t hear of it. You’re named for the Angel Moroni, she’d drummed into him. Every time I see the temple I say to myself, “My son’s namesake is up there. His golden likeness is blowing a trumpet to call the faithful to Zion.”

  “When you called, you said you needed help,” Traveler reminded him. “You said your life needed saving.”

  Kilgore caught Hooty’s eye. Hooty nodded and said, “Don’t worry about me. I’m doing fine.”

  Kilgore took hold of Traveler’s arm and led him down the right field line toward the bull pen. When they reached the pitching rubber, Kilgore perched on it.

  “Jesus, this brings back memories.” He squinted as if to keep the light of day from leaking into his past. “They got rid of the Bees when they tried to push Salt Lake into the Pacific Coast League. When that flopped this town didn’t have a team until the Saints started up. But the Saints aren’t my Bees, not by a long shot.”

  Traveler agreed but kept it to himself. Saying so would keep Kilgore from coming to the point.

  The old man went through his pitching motion. “I never made it to the big leagues, either as a player or a manager. But I’ve been all over this country. In Dodger Stadium, Yankee Stadium, and a lot of stadiums in between. And you know something? This is still my favorite ballpark. Look at that view, for Christ’s sake.” He pointed toward the Wasatch Mountains. “There’s inspiration for you. Ten thousand feet of rock and ice that Brigham Young crossed to get here. One hell of a lot of faith went into that.”

  Traveler concentrated on the left field bleachers instead of the mountains. A man was sitting in the front row, apparently watching them through binoculars.

  “I’m here on faith, too,” he said after a moment. “You’re young. You’re in a hurry. But I’m coming to the point. Do you remember Pepper Dalton?”

  “I was here the day Pepper hit his one and only home run.”

  Tickets to that game had been a birthday present from his
father, along with a picnic dinner and all the hot dogs, popcorn and soda that he and his best friend, Willis Tanner, could eat.

  “No-hit Dalton we called him,” Kilgore said. “But he was the greatest fielding shortstop I ever coached, with an arm like a Springfield rifle. And fast on his feet. Shit, he was a threat to steal every time he got on base. Of course, that was the problem. If you don’t hit, you don’t get to first base, do you?”

  He sighed. “You’ve got to remember, the Bees were C League. If you don’t hit at that level, and I mean hit, you don’t move up in the farm system. Sometimes, if you’re really good with the glove, they give you a couple of years to come around. But if you don’t produce then, you’re out on your ass. I stuck out my neck for Pepper. I gave him three seasons with the Bees. You know what he hit on his best year?”

  Traveler knew all right. After that birthday home run, Pepper Dalton had supplanted Hap as his hero. Thinking back now, it was the only birthday gift he could remember from childhood.

  “I’ll tell you,” Kilgore went on. “One-sixty-one, and that was after two years of me working with him. I cashed in favors to bring in a batting instructor from the Coast League. Hopeless, the guy told me. Tum him into a pitcher. I tried. But curveballs hurt Pepper’s arm. Even so, I stuck with him. It cost me a promotion. Why—”

  “Hey, Hap,” Hooty called. “Jo-Jo’s arrived. You’d better start hitting a few.”

  “Jo-Jo’s the manager,” Kilgore explained. “Come on. I can talk and hit at the same time.”

  “And Hooty?”

  “Aw, what the hell. He can hear the rest of what I have to say.”

  But Hooty didn’t stick around to eavesdrop. Instead, he hustled into the dugout as soon as Hap took up the bat. The outfielders moved in again. Hap spit tobacco juice on a ball, then whacked it over their heads. “That’ll teach those young bucks a little respect. Toss me another ball.” Traveler obliged. “Watch this.”

  Kilgore swung too hard and popped it up. A fielder broke in at a dead run, caught it one-handed, and threw it back as if he were trying to nail someone at home plate.