Gone to Glory Page 3

  Kilgore spit disgustedly. “You saw me play, Mo. I used to be like a cat when I got out on that pitcher’s mound.”

  “Come on. Use me as a prop. That way we’ll get out of here faster.”

  The old man clenched his teeth. The rest of him shook in frustration but he held on to Traveler just the same.

  When his trousers were finally in place, he slipped his feet into tennis shoes that looked old enough to be Keds. The last item out of the gym bag was a bright orange down-filled vest, the kind hunters wear. From one of its pockets he produced a small can of spray deodorant, which he turned on himself to kill the smell of liniment. “I’m ready,” he said, handing the gym bag to Traveler. The moment Kilgore’s hands were free, he scooped up his uniform and wadded it into a bundle the size of a medicine ball. Then he grinned at Traveler. “I won’t be needing a Saints rig anymore. Pepper’s going to change the name back to the Bees.”

  With that, he spit tobacco juice onto the uniform and hurled it into the dugout, missing Jo-Jo by less than a foot.

  Kilgore laughed so hard he hiccupped. That caused him to swallow again. He tried to spit but the tobacco was already on its way to his stomach. Even so, he managed an obscene gesture at the dugout.

  As soon as the manager started up the concrete steps, Traveler grabbed Kilgore by the elbow and hustled him through the gate and under the grandstand. There, the fight drained out of the old man. He sagged against Traveler and made a gagging sound. After a moment he wheezed, “A man my age ought to know better than to chew tobacco.”

  “What you need is a drink.”

  “Coffee, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “The old Bees hangout, Fred and Kelly’s on State Street.”

  4

  Fred and Kelly’s was a relic from the past, a drive-in on the outside and a cafe with booths and a counter inside. The architecture was that streamlined stucco from the 1930s with rounded edges and porthole windows. Because it was late for breakfast and early for lunch, they had the place to themselves.

  “I’m buying,” Kilgore announced with enthusiasm that sounded forced.

  “I’ll include it in my expenses,” Traveler said. He’d already assumed that his usual fees were beyond the old man’s capabilities. Whether or not he’d ever see money from Pepper Dalton was moot at this point.

  The waitress was a relic of the present. Her earphones were wired into a portable cassette player clipped to her belt. Whatever she was listening to had erased all sign of animation from her face.

  “What will it be?” she said, her mouth moving carefully, as if she were lip-syncing someone else’s words.

  “Two coffees,” Traveler told her.

  As an afterthought, he held up two fingers to make certain that he’d gotten through.

  Once they’d been served Traveler went to work. “All right, Hap. You’d better tell me everything.”

  The old man’s hands crawled across the table to wrap themselves around his coffee mug. “If Pepper has to stay in jail, his dream will die. Both of us will be out of baseball for good.”

  “Stick to the killing.”

  “You’re right. I’m rambling like a senile old man.”

  Kilgore poured enough sugar into his coffee to shock a diabetic. “It began about ten years ago. Pepper and his sister, Priscilla—Prissy, everybody called her, and with good reason—inherited an abandoned coal mine and the town that went with it. Their grandfather had bought the place sometime after the war. By then, of course, there were better pickings to be had elsewhere. Oil was kicking the crap out of coal prices. Things like that. It’s no wonder the place became a ghost town. Shit. We’re talking the Pavant Mountains near the old state capital of Fillmore. Glory, it’s called. Glory, Utah. Population, God only knows.”

  Kilgore paused to test his coffee. He made a face and added cream. “These days Glory is full of religious squatters. Polygamists chasing everything in skirts, Prissy Dalton included.”

  Only in Utah, Traveler thought. Where Joseph Smith’s revelation from God gives no slack, either to the faithful or to those who merely seek justification for their lust. For behold, I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then are you damned.

  “My father has a cardinal rule,” Traveler said. “Never stick your nose in church business.”

  “I’m not talking the LDS Church here,” Kilgore said.

  “These fruitcakes call themselves the Flock, or some such nonsense.”

  “When it comes to religion in this state, the Mormon Church is always involved.”

  The old man fingered the tip of his sun-ruined nose. “It never occurred to me that you might be LDS.”

  “I’m not,” Traveler said.

  “Like father, like son, eh? The Word of Wisdom never cut no ice with Martin, that’s for sure. Not the way he used to down those beers at the Zang.”

  The Word of Wisdom was another of Joe Smith’s pronouncements, known as WOW among the faithful. No tobacco, no liquor, no coffee, no tea, no artificial stimulants.

  “Like I was saying, Mo, Prissy’s been living down there ever since the inheritance. Screwing her polygamous head off for all I know, though I don’t like speaking ill of the dead.”

  “And Pepper?”

  “After he lost his last managing job in baseball, Triple-A it was too, he settled in Fillmore. That way he could be close to Prissy without having to live out to hell-and-gone in those mountains. At least Fillmore has a sandlot team. They were glad to get him, too.”

  Kilgore finished his coffee and pointed at Traveler’s cup. “Are you drinking that?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Winking, Kilgore exchanged cups. “Yes, sir. If you hadn’t told me better, I’d think you were a real LDSer. Sitting here, letting a good cup of coffee go to waste. No sign of cigarettes either. Hell, I haven’t even heard you swear. That always makes me suspicious in Utah. I saw an article in the paper the other day. It said there are counties in this state where ninety percent of the people are Latter-day Saints.”

  He took his cap from the bench seat beside him and covered his bald head, adjusting the brim to eye level. “If you ask me, they’re all a bunch of closet polygamists. But aren’t we all when we’re young? Christ, when I was your age, I’d screw anything in skirts.”

  He stared out the window as if his past would be there if only he looked hard enough. What was there, Traveler saw, was Golly Simpson in a tan Chevy four-door. The man grinned at them and waved.

  “When you come right down to it,” Kilgore went on, “wisdom is nothing more than a lack of testosterone.”

  Traveler nodded toward the parking lot. “Do you know the guy in the tan car?”

  Kilgore squinted. “Should I?”

  “He was at the ballpark.”

  Kilgore shook his head. “I haven’t got my glasses with me, Mo.”

  Traveler eased out of the booth. “Could be it’s me he’s watching.”

  Smoke belched from the Chevy’s exhaust pipe. As soon as Traveler took a step toward the door, the car raced from the parking lot.

  “That’s the trouble with having a past,” Traveler said when he sat down again, staring the old man in the eye. “It can catch up with you at the wrong time.”

  Kilgore reached out hesitantly, his fingers stopping short of contact with Traveler’s hand. He spoke quickly, as if to hide any thought of intimacy. “Where were we?”

  “We were talking about Glory,” Traveler said.

  The old man sighed. His hand retreated. “That’s right. I said ‘Glory hallelujah’ when Pepper and Prissy got an offer for the mine. Hell, it was for the whole damned town—lock, stock and barrel. Enough money so that Pepper could buy a baseball team with his half of the proceeds. But Prissy wouldn’t have it. She sa
id the people living there in Glory would have no place to go if she sold out. Even when Pepper told her she could buy them someplace better, she wouldn’t listen. God had brought them to Glory, she said, and that was where they’d stay.”

  The coffee mug trembled in Kilgore’s hand. “Do you know what Pepper said to that?”

  Traveler shook his head as was expected of him. “That she was hypnotized. That Zeke Eldredge had her under his spell.”

  The name rang a bell, and Kilgore noticed Traveler’s reaction.

  “You’ve heard of him, huh?”

  The Eldredge that Traveler had in mind was a self-proclaimed preacher who claimed to speak for God. He nodded.

  Kilgore wet his lips. His tongue found a shred of soggy tobacco, which he scraped into his mouth with his teeth.

  “How big is the inheritance?” Traveler asked.

  “Pepper never did tell me exactly. But it was enough to buy the Saints, so I guess he was going to be a millionaire.”

  “Who’s buying the mine?”

  “That he did tell me. The Deseret Coal and Gas Company.”

  “Shit,” Traveler muttered. The word Deseret came from The Book of Mormon. It stood for honey bee. The beehive was Utah’s state symbol. “It sounds like church money to me.”

  Kilgore dug into his pocket. Out came a pouch of Redman. Using two fingers he dipped a pinch and slipped it into his cheek.

  “I like the way you think, Mo. The church buying in.” He smacked his lips. “That would be one way of getting rid of polygamists, wouldn’t it? But me and Pepper don’t care who the money comes from. We just want to buy the Saints and turn them back into the Bees.”

  “What kind of relationship did he have with his sister?”

  “They were close in the old days, before Prissy took up with Eldredge. Of course, she was always a little strange. All you’ve got to do is see Glory for yourself and you’ll know what I mean. A woman would have to be crazy to want to live in that place when she could sell it and move to a mansion in Salt Lake.”

  “What you’ve told me so far gives Pepper a good motive for murder.”

  “Not if you knew him the way I do. Besides, just last week things were back to normal between them. She had a change of heart and was coming up to the city to sign the papers. But when she got here, Prissy was still the same old Prissy. Took one look around and said Salt Lake was the new Sodom and Gomorrah, which was Zeke Eldredge talking if I ever heard it. Anyway, she and Pepper got into one hell of an argument in the lobby of their hotel, the old Semloh down on South State. There must have been a dozen witnesses. Which is probably why they arrested him this morning when they found her body right in his room. I mean, for God’s sake. Would a killer leave a body in his own room? Anyway, we were having a team meeting, just the two of us, when they nabbed him. I tried to vouch for him but they wouldn’t listen.”

  The more Kilgore said the worse it sounded for Dalton. “Did Pepper have anything to say for himself?”

  “You gotta understand. There wasn’t much time. The police came storming into the dining room where we were eating breakfast. ‘Are you Rick Dalton?’ they asked. As soon as he said, ‘That’s me,’ they handcuffed him and took him out. All he had time to say to me was, ‘Find me some help, Hap.’ I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head off ever since. It wasn’t until an hour ago that I remembered you and your father.”

  Kilgore slid toward the aisle and looked up and down the café as if searching for a spittoon. “She was killed with a Louisville Slugger. I saw the police taking it away myself, wrapped in plastic. I know my baseball bats, Mo. That was a heavy, thirty-six-inch model. Pepper always used a light bat, no more than thirty-three inches long.”

  Traveler couldn’t help smiling. He expected the same from the old man. But all Kilgore did was pluck a couple of paper napkins from a dispenser and wipe his mouth, surreptitiously relieving the buildup of tobacco.

  “I heard them talking in the lobby later,” he went on. “Someone said they saw a woman going into Pepper’s room. They think it was his sister. I say it had to be the woman he was going to marry, Kate Ferguson.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “Sure, but when they went looking for Kate they couldn’t find hide nor hair of her, not that they tried all that hard. I can’t blame them much. I must have looked like some kind of lunatic, standing there in the hotel wearing the shirt half of my old Bees uniform. I only did it to celebrate the deal. Of course, that was before Prissy turned on us.”

  “Someone must have seen Pepper’s lady friend.” Traveler could hear the skepticism in his voice. “The desk derk, for instance.”

  “Pepper and Kate were staying together all right. But you’d have to know Kate to understand why she wouldn’t sign the register as Mrs. Dalton. That’s not her style, not until after the wedding. The room was in Pepper’s name only.”

  Kilgore pulled another wad of napkins from the tabletop dispenser and absently wiped his mouth. “Right after the cops left with him, I saw that bastard Eldredge. Right there in the lobby, which was goddamned strange since Prissy said once that he’d taken an oath never to set foot in Salt Lake again, not until the Mormon Church relented and went back to following God’s revelation about polygamy.”

  The old man leaned to one side so that he could reach the back pocket of his work pants. The wallet he brought out was as old and worn as he was. He opened it carefully, extracted a folded newspaper clipping, and gave it to Traveler.

  The article was half a page wide. Centered in the middle was a photograph of a man identified as Clarence Eldredge. Clustered around him were half a dozen women; his wives, according to the caption. All of them wore homespun dresses and old-fashioned sunbonnets.

  Traveler scanned the article to refresh his memory. Clarence Eldredge had made national news five years ago by getting himself murdered. At the time his eldest son, Zeke, had been charged with patricide but was eventually acquitted. Testimony at the trial varied from one extreme to the other. Some witnesses claimed that no murder had taken place, that it was solely a church matter of blood atonement, Zeke having killed his father to free the old man of sin, one of Brigham Young’s favorite prescriptions. Others said it was justifiable homicide, because Clarence had tried to steal away his son’s younger wives. In any case, Zeke disappeared after the trial, taking with him two brothers and his father’s wives, among them a woman named in the article as Priscilla Eldredge.

  “How many Eldredges are there?” Traveler asked.

  “That’s a good question. When Zeke surfaced again in Glory, he had women with him, but no brothers. Some say they took off on their own, forming their own religions. Others say the desert in southern Utah is full of unmarked graves. Which brings me to the point. With his record, Zeke Eldredge is the one the police should have arrested.”

  “It might be a good idea if you gave this article to Pepper’s lawyer when he gets one.”

  “He’s got one already.” The old man delved into his wallet again and came out with a cream-colored business card, which he handed to Traveler.

  The card felt expensive. Its texture reminded Traveler of heavy parchment. The name embossed on it, samuel j. howe, attorney at law, conveyed more than money.

  “How the hell did he get Sam Howe?”

  Kilgore exposed his palms, gesturing ignorance. “He just sort of showed up at the jail when I was trying to get in to see Pepper.”

  “He’s one of the top criminal lawyers in town. I understand he’s on permanent retainer to the church. A hired gunslinger waiting in the wings to shoot down trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Traveler shrugged. “Is Pepper a member of the church?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  Traveler returned the newspaper clipping and the calling card. “This may be a waste of time, you comi
ng to me. Attorneys usually do the hiring when it comes to private detectives.”

  The old man shook his head adamantly. “I’m the one Pepper trusts. He asked me to get help.”

  “I can’t get in to see Pepper without his attorney’s permission.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to work for us?”

  Traveler slumped against the booth’s red plastic backrest and closed his eyes. The old Bees were there waiting for him, Ted Ingram at first base, Bob Allen at second, and Pepper at shortstop. But third base eluded his memory, as did left and right field. Center, though, was visible. That belonged to Chuck Cecil, the only Bee to make it to the big leagues. Pete Watson was behind the plate as usual, having a hell of a time digging Kilgore’s spitters out of the dirt.

  “Have you kept in touch with any of the old team?” he asked when he opened his eyes.

  “I had a note from Chuck Cecil a while back. You remember him, don’t you?”

  Traveler nodded.

  “A dead pull hitter, Chuck was. If we’d had a short porch for him here at Derks, he would have hit fifty home runs for us. It was a damned shame he ended up at St. Louis, with those long fences. It cut his career short, not being able to hit to the opposite field. Still, a year on top is better than nothing. Chuck lives in California now, Orange County. He’s some kind of a salesman.”

  Kilgore was staring out the window again, searching for better times. When tickets to the Bees games were ninety cents. Malted milks a quarter. And Sloan’s Liniment was standing by in the bull pen.

  “I tried to buy one of Chuck’s bubble gum cards a while back. I couldn’t afford it. The damn things are worth a small fortune these days.” The old man’s shoulders sagged. “That says it all, doesn’t it? God, what I wouldn’t give to go back thirty years. Money was worth something then.”

  Traveler shook his head to indicate he preferred the present, where his fee was two hundred and fifty dollars a day, not twenty-five.

  “I still feel like the same man.” Gingerly Kilgore fingered his protruding stomach. “Except for my weight. But you should see Chuck Cecil. He must weigh close to two-fifty. As for the rest of my boys, I don’t know where they are. Why do you ask anyway?”