Rough Trade

forced to operate outside of my element—standing with Chrissy at the funeral home when I should have been at my desk figuring out a way to keep the team solvent and rushing off to meetings when I should have been at her side.
    I must have finally dozed off because when I woke up, Chrissy was sitting beside me on the bed, shaking me and calling my name. I struggled to sit up, feeling disoriented and surprised to find that it was still dark.
    “What is it?” I mumbled, rapidly clawing my way from sleep to panic. “What’s happened? Is it the police? Have they come for Jeff?”
    “No,” whispered Chrissy, her voice sounding shocked and thin, “but you have to see today’s paper.”
    I sat up and scrabbled clumsily at the nightstand, fumbling until I was finally able to switch on the light. Chrissy was dressed in a heavy flannel bathrobe. She smelled of winter and outdoors, and the newspaper that she handed me was still stiff and cold from lying out on the driveway. I was expecting to see a picture of the Reverend Marpleson beside an article accusing Avco of participating in the white slave trade. Instead I was assaulted by a two-inch headline, the size usually reserved for mass murderers and declarations of war: MONARCHS MOVE IN WORKS, it screamed.
    At first I couldn’t say anything. It took all my energy and concentration to force myself to breathe. Coming as it did so soon upon waking, my sense of internal disorder was so profound that for a fleeting moment I found myself wondering whether I also needed to tell my heart to beat.
    I forced myself to read the entire article, whose main thrust appeared to be that Jeff Rendell, without even waiting until his father was decently in the ground, was determined to move the team to L.A. in order to not only enrich himself, but also enjoy the glamorous California lifestyle at the expense of the loyal Milwaukee fans. This was incendiary stuff designed to sell a ton of newspapers. That much of it was untrue seemed practically beside the point.
    There was absolutely no mention of the team’s financial predicament, only the lurid retelling of Jeff’s acrimonious battles with his father and his disagreements with Bennato about how the team was to be run. While Chrissy was outraged by the unfairness of the portrayal of her husband’s motives, what troubled me was not what the paper had gotten wrong, but what it had gotten right.
    What I found most terrifying were the details—the exact number of luxury boxes that were in the plans for the new Los Angeles stadium and the exact dollar amount that had been offered to help move the team. Whoever had fed the information to the paper had had access to the term sheet that Jack McWhorter had distributed last Sunday morning in Beau Rendell’s dining room.
    “Has Jeff seen this yet?” I asked.
    “No, he’s still asleep. I gave him another one of those sleeping pills last night. I didn’t have the heart to wake him.”
    “Let him sleep for now,” I said. I needed time to think. From somewhere in the house I could hear the telephone ringing. “Don’t get that,” I instructed. “It’s probably a reporter.”
    “That’s who woke me up this morning. Somebody called. That’s why I went out to get the paper.”
    That made me think of something. “I wonder why no one from the paper called Jeff for confirmation before they ran the story,” I mused out loud. “You’d think they would have if only to be able to run a denial or ‘no comment.’ It doesn’t make sense.”
    “Maybe they tried. Ever since Beau died we’ve gotten so many calls from reporters, we’ve been taking the phone off the hook.”
    “Either that or you’re being deliberately sandbagged.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Maybe whoever leaked the story didn’t want you to know that it was being written.”
    “Who would want that?”
    “Maybe the cops.”
    “How would the cops have found out about the L.A. offer?”
    “Maybe somebody fed them the term sheet.”
    “Beau may have had a copy in his office. Maybe the police found it after he died.”
    “No. Beau didn’t have a sheet. He tore his up at the meeting on Sunday morning. Jack handed out four numbered copies. I still have mine. Assuming that Jeff still has his, that leaves Harald Feiss.”
     
    It has been said that there is a shorthand to every crisis, a rhythm to the swells and troughs of catastrophe that, if you are adept enough, can be anticipated and ridden like the surf. John