Rough Trade

indicate Jeff made three calls, two to his wife and one to his office at the stadium. Jeff and Ken and Jack had dinner in the restaurant, a real power deal according to the waiter, who knows everybody and strings for the scandal sheets on the side. That’s when things started getting interesting.”
    “What happened?”
    “Well, first this guy Jack McWhorter gets an emergency phone call. Apparently there was some kind of fire at Monarchs Stadium where they cook the food, and he excuses himself, he has to fly back and take care of business right away.”
    “Is that it?”
    “No. Then about an hour later the concierge received a fax for Jeffrey Rendell and delivered it to the table.”
    “I know. The cops showed it to us at the hospital. He had it in his pocket when he was shot. It said, ‘If you want to catch them at it, try your father’s house tomorrow at two.’ The message was printed by hand in block letters.”
    “Well, according to our waiter snitch, the fax really upset Jeff, who immediately excused himself saying that he wasn’t feeling well and headed back to his room.”
    “Let me guess. He wasn’t really sick.”
    “He immediately made a string of phone calls, one to the airlines, one to his house in Milwaukee, and one to a taxi company. He left L. A. an hour later on America West flight 252 to Chicago. Apparently he stayed overnight somewhere near O’Hare, rented a car, and then headed up to Milwaukee.”
    “Okay. I’ll bite,” I said. “So who sent the fax?”
    “I don’t know who. All they could tell me is that it was transmitted from the Milwaukee Monarchs’ offices at the stadium.”
     
    There is a kind of theater to safe depositories, an inherent drama in the locks and keys, the heavy vault door that swings so silently on its hinges, the solemn banking acolyte who ushers you into the softly lit private room and closes the door upon you. For me the mystery was heightened by the fact that I not only had no idea what I was going to find, but that I’d made the journey from thinking that whatever it was, was critical to irrelevant and back to critical again.
    The fact that the fax had come from the stadium did not in and of itself blow my theory about Harald Feiss out of the water. After all, you’d hardly expect him to send something so potentially incriminating from his own office. However, it messed up my tidy theories, and I desperately wanted things to finally turn out neat. Indeed, I was starting to feel as though I deserved it.
    I laid the box upon the table and pulled the key out of my bag, inserted it in the lock, and turned it. With a sense of anticipation that surprised me, I lifted the long flat lid.
    Just as Jeff had said, the box contained documents. Manila envelopes, neatly labeled, contained the contracts of key personnel. I noted there was one for Darius Fredericks, the one that was as infamous for its lack of a morals clause as it was for its dollar amount, another example of Harald Feiss’s incompetence. Jake Palmer’s was there, too, along with Coach Bennato’s and, interestingly enough, one for Jeff. I looked them through briefly and was forced to conclude that I’d chosen the wrong line of work. Football paid better than anything else I could think of, including robbing banks. Indeed, a quick scan of Darius Fredericks’s contract revealed that if the wounded wide receiver ended up dying, the organization would find itself considerably richer.
    There was only one envelope that was unmarked, and I pulled it from the bottom of the pile. It was also sealed, and after a moment’s hesitation I loosened the flap and emptied out the contents on the table.
    It has been a long time since I have been really, truly shocked. I stared and gaped, pushing my chair back instinctively from the table to gain some distance. They were a series of photographs, professional quality, of my friend Chrissy Rendell engaged in what could only be described as an astonishing variety of sex acts with a generously endowed black man who I did not recognize.
    My stomach turned and yet I forced myself to take a closer look. In the pictures her hair was cut in the shaggy style she’d favored in her last year of college. A close examination of her face revealed that the pictures were, I guessed, at least a half a dozen years old. I wondered why Jeff had chosen to keep them in the team’s safe deposit box and could only conclude that the decision had not been his own, but Beau’s. If it