A Face in the Crowd

problems. That was when Leonard Wheeler—never Lennie except when Evers and his wife were safely tucked into bed and giggling like a couple of kids—decided it was time to go national. Evers finally stood up on his hind legs and demurred. Not gently, as in previous disagreements, but firmly. Loudly, even. Everyone in the office had heard them, he had no doubt, even with the door closed.
    The game came back on while he was waiting for the Resolve to set. Hellickson was still dealing for the Rays, and he was sharp. Not as sharp as Hernandez, though, and on any other night Evers would have been sending him brain-wave encouragement. Not tonight. Tonight he sat back on his heels at the base of his chair with his bony knees on either side of the stain he was trying to clean up, peering at the stands behind home plate.
    There was Wheeler, still right there, now drinking a beer with one hand and holding a cell phone in the other. Just the sight of the phone filled Evers with outrage. Not because cell phones should be outlawed in ballparks like smoking, but because Wheeler had died of a heart attack long before such things were in general use. He had no right to it!
    “Oh-oh, that’s a loo-oong drive!” Dewayne Staats was bellowing. “Justin Smoak smoked aaa-alll of that one!”
    The camera followed the ball into the nearly deserted stands, and lingered to watch two boys fighting over it. One emerged victorious and waved it at the camera, pumping his hips in a singularly obscene manner as he did so.
    “Fuck you!” Evers shouted. “You’re on TV, so what?”
    He hardly ever used such language, but had he not said that very same thing to his partner during the argument over the expansion? Yes. Nor had it just been Fuck you . It had been Fuck you, Lennie .
    “And what I did, you deserved it.” He was dismayed to discover he was on the verge of tears. “You wouldn’t take your foot off my neck, Leonard. I did what I had to do.”
    Now the camera returned to where it belonged, which was showing Smoak doing his home run trot, and pointing at the sky—well, dome —as he crossed home plate to the apathetic applause of the two dozen or so Mariner fans in attendance.
    Kyle Seager stood in. Behind him, in the third row, the seat where Wheeler had been was empty.
    It wasn’t him, Evers thought, scrubbing the stain (that barbecue sauce was simply not going to come up). It was just someone who looked like him .
    That hadn’t worked very well with Young Doctor Young, and it didn’t work at all now.
    Evers turned off the TV and decided he’d go to bed early.
    Useless. Sleep didn’t come at ten or at midnight. At two o’clock he took one of Ellie’s Ambiens, hoping it wouldn’t kill him—it was eighteen months past the expiration date. It didn’t, but it didn’t put him to sleep either. He took another half a tablet and lay in bed thinking of a plaque he’d kept in his own office. It said GIVE ME A LEVER LONG ENOUGH, A FULCRUM STRONG ENOUGH, AND I’LL MOVE THE WORLD. Far less arrogant than Wheeler’s plaque, but perhaps more useful.
    When Wheeler refused to let him out of the partnership agreement Evers had foolishly signed when he’d been young and humble, he’d needed that kind of lever to shift his partner. As it so happened, he had one. Leonard Wheeler had a taste for the occasional young boy. Oh, not young young, not jailbait, but college age. Wheeler’s personal assistant, Martha, had confided to Evers one rum-soaked night at a convention in Denver that Wheeler was partial to the lifeguard type. Later, sober and remorseful, she’d begged him never to say a word to anyone. Wheeler was a good boss, she said, hard but good, and his wife was a dream. The same was true of his son and daughter.
    Evers kept mum, even keeping this nugget from Ellie. If she’d known he intended to use any such scurrilous information to break the partnership agreement, she would have been horrified. It’s surely not necessary to stoop to that, she would have said, and she would have believed it. El thought she understood the bind he was in, but she didn’t. The most important thing she didn’t understand was that it was their bind—hers and little Patrick’s as well as his own. If Speedy went nationwide now, they’d be crushed by the giants within a year. Two at the outside. Evers was dead certain of it, and had the numbers to back it up. All they’d worked for would be washed away, and he had no intention of drowning in