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The one who had sent the rose to me at the Beverly Wilshire after he had persuaded the hard-line owners to change their votes.
I slowly spelled out my uncle’s last name for him.
“Five letters. Three vowels. Easy to remember.”
Erik Mason stared at me when I finished, but only briefly, before turning and walking to his car and driving away.
One Hundred
BY A LITTLE AFTERnine in the morning, Ben Cantor had been sitting in his car for an hour, waiting for the guy to come out of Hit Fit SF, the fancy high-end gym on Harrison Street, thinking, thinking about something an old detective who’d mentored him, Pat Lynch, had once told Cantor about coincidence.
“Just speaking as a good Catholic and former altar boy,” Lynch had said, “there’s no way that God would leave that much to chance.”
Cantor didn’t believe in coincidence, either. First Joe Wolf had gone into the water. Now John Gallo had taken a flier a few hours after he had tried to buy the Wolves from Jenny Wolf. In between there had been what Cantor was more certain than ever was the staged suicide of Thomas Wolf.
Joe Wolf had owned the team; Thomas had worked for it; Gallo wanted it. All gone.
What were the odds?
Cantor had been to Gallo’s home in Belvedere a few times, hoping to find something, anything, that might prove that Gallo had been shoved, but he had come up with nothing, at least so far. He had hoped there might be security cameras, but it turned out that Gallo had fired one home-security company, something he did routinely, and hired another one the previous week, and the new system wasn’t up and running on the day he died.
In the past, when Cantor couldn’t decide what his next move should be, he’d look for someone to annoy. So he had decided to make another run at Erik Mason, knowing he came to the gym at the same time every morning. Now here Mason was, still in his exercise clothes, leather bag over his shoulder, holding some kind of green smoothie drink in his hand.
Cantor got out of his car and walked over to Mason as he was about to get into his Mercedes.
“We need to have another talk.”
“We already talked,” Mason said.
“Got a few more questions.”
“I’ve got someplace I need to be.”
“Almost everybody does,” Cantor said.
“You can’t possibly think I killed Mr. Gallo.”
“Well, yeah. But let’s face it, Erik. You didn’t do very much to keep him alive, either.”
One Hundred One
THE WOLVES SHOULD HAVEalready clinched a playoff spot, but we had lost our previous two games, suddenly looking like the team we’d been at the start of the season, when Rich Kopka, that jerk, had been the coach and my ex-husband, Ted Skyler, a much bigger jerk, had been the quarterback.
It was mostly happening because Billy McGee, out of nowhere, was acting as if he’d forgotten how to play football, or at least NFL-level football. He was throwing interceptions. He was making bad decisions. On top of everything else, he’d fumbled four times in the two losses.
“What are we going to do?” I said to Ryan Morrissey after the Titans had beaten the Wolves 35–17.
“I don’t want to get too technical or take you too deep into the weeds,” Ryan said, “but what we’re going to do is hope he starts playing better.”
Our last game was against the Patriots onSunday Night Football. For the league, it was a dream ending to the regular season, even though nobody could have seen it coming when the schedule was announced.
Ted Skyler’s new team, the one for which he was now the starter, was playing the Wolves, the team run by his ex-wife, who also happened to be the person who fired him.
What made it even better was that in the seventeenth game of the regular season, we needed to win to make the playoffs from our division. And so did the Patriots from theirs.
Loser went home.
I was pondering the magnitude of the game, and the stakes, alone at home on Saturday night. I had been alone a lot lately once I left Wolves Stadium, staying there later and later. Cantor would occasionally call with some question related to his various investigations. I had called him after Erik Mason showed up at the house, telling Cantor that Mason was now working for Michael Barr, whom my father had always referred to as “that gunny.”
