AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’s still his paper,” Megan said.
“Not today,” Jack Wolf said.
Ten minutes later, Megan Callahan was bursting into his office. Behind her he could see everybody in the city room staring at the big television set near the bullpen.
“Your father died.”
She told him how and said, “I guess Charlie just got saved from death by front page.”
“Like hell he did,” Jack said.
Five
BECAUSE OF THE LOCATIONwhere they’d found his boat and the time when his body ended up at Crissy Field East Beach, the assumption was that the tide had carried him in.
After a thorough search ofThe Sea Wolf,the police could find no signs of foul play and reported drowning as the official cause of death—even though the autopsy showed that Joe Wolf had died with a blood alcohol level almost twice the legal limit and suffered a massive heart attack sometime after he’d gone into the water.
We’d been informed by the lead detective, a guy named Ben Cantor, that the case was still very much open.
And that we’d all be hearing from him as he continued his investigation.
The manager of the St. Francis Yacht Club said that night when he’d yelled over and asked if he had any passengers with him, Joe Wolf clearly didn’t hear the question. As we all knew, it had been a long time since Dad could hear worth a damn.
“Go, Wolves!” was his answer.
It was the last anybody had heard from Joseph Thomas Wolf.
Now I was in his suite overlooking the fifty yard line at Wolves Stadium. Though calling it a suite didn’t do it justice and really never had. I’d always thought of it as one of the city’s great luxury apartments, with a football view instead of water and bridges and the little cable cars that my father liked to sing about when he had enough vodka in him, the ones going halfway to the stars.
It wasn’t a wake today. The memorial service would be held at the end of the week, the day before the Wolves’ next game. It was what had been billed as a “gathering” to celebrate Joe Wolf’s life, organized, mostly for show, by his second wife, Rachel, who’d been living apart from my father for months. The first Mrs. Joe Wolf, Elise, mother to my brothers and me, was also in attendance, keeping her usual healthy distance from the second Mrs. Wolf.
Joe Wolf had met Rachel, thirty years his junior, when she sold him the house he bought after he left my mother.
I thought both the house and Rachel had been impulse buys on his part.
“She ended up waiving her commission,” he told me after they had separated. “I should have paid it—might have saved me a boatload of money on the back end.”
My three brothers were involved in three different and intense conversations throughout the room. Danny, I saw, seemed surgically attached to the NFL commissioner. Jack Wolf was in a heavy exchange with the governor, who, I noted, was almost as pretty as Jack was.
My younger brother, Thomas, vice president of the Wolves and just back from his most recent trip to Cabo, was chatting up a female bartender, nonalcoholic beer in hand.
Thomas was my favorite, the funniest of all of us and the one who did his best to hide how much he knew about football and cared about the Wolves. After spending too much of his adult life drugging and partying, he was six months out of rehab, even more fun clear-eyed and sober than he’d ever been under the influence.
The mayor was noticeably absent. But both of California’s US senators were in attendance. The owners of the Warriors and the Giants. Station managers and anchor monsters from their stations. Jim Nantz was here, and Tony Romo, and so was the owner of the Horseshoe Tavern, my father’s favorite bar. The archbishop had just arrived. So had my ex-husband, bless his heart. He waved when he saw me. I acted as if I hadn’t seen him.
“It’s like a scene out ofSuccession,” I heard from behind me. “Just without any good actors.”
I turned to see that the voice belonged to Seth Dowd, the one-man investigative unit in theTribune’s sports department and someone I trusted about as far as I could throw the buffet table.
“I forgot how much I didn’t miss this,” I said. “It’s like the Tournament of Ass Kissers Parade, without floats.”
“May I quote you on that?”
“Hell, no.”
He smiled.
“Everybody always says you’re the one most like him.”
