Big Leagues Read online

  Cat couldn’t get over the respect Erich’s presence commanded. They simply stepped into a room and awe poured in their direction. Every time he introduced her, an employee would slam his laptop, hang up her phone or otherwise drop whatever work was being done to accommodate their visit. They hadn’t even left the fourth floor when Cat began contemplating the lengths the staff would go to in order to impress their boss.

  I bet if he told them to speak like pirates for the rest of the day, they would shout “aye, aye, matey,” slap on an eye patch and go rent a parrot.

  After the fourth floor tour, they headed upstairs to meet the head honchos—the scouts and advisors—some of whom were former players whose presence in any other venue would have had Cat begging for an autograph. Erich walked her to his office suite, which was tiny in comparison to the small mansion where her interview had been held at Hohenschwangau Palace.

  “I have an open door policy here, unless, of course, the door is closed.”

  He chuckled, but judging from the three deadbolts that secured the thick wooden doors, there was no humor in his statement. The twosome took Erich’s private elevator down to the third floor, where she was introduced to the team’s brain trust—the accounting, IP and legal departments. She had never thought the business of baseball could be dull until she stepped off the elevator. With all the talk of computer equipment and contracts, Cat had a tough time feigning interest.

  “So you monitor the disposable utensils inventory? For the entire park? That must be … fascinating.”

  Fascinating that you haven’t impaled yourself on a plastic fork yet.

  The second floor, Event Operations, offered a bit more excitement. Cat tried to peek at their upcoming calendar. Maybe a Hollywood celebrity was scheduled to throw out the first pitch in one of the upcoming games.

  Ryan? Omar? What’s a girl gotta do to see the infamous baseball fan duo of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on her field?

  “Come along, Catriona. We shall let these fine employees return to their hard work.”

  The first floor housed the ticketing department and security office, with an exit out to the ballpark concourse. Ticket sales were a lot different in Vegas compared to Porterville. Tamela and three assistants managed every aspect of ticketing for the Bulldogs, and even with those duties, they had a lot of down time.

  Hence the birth of the Porterville Finger Football League, where folded paper triangles were flicked back and forth for hours. Tams currently held the record for longest field goal when her tiny triangle made it all the way across the room to Cat's desk … and into her coffee mug.

  As soon as Cat and Erich stepped into the Chips’ ticketing office, their visit was trumped by ringing phones and the chatter of headset-wearing operators. The other half of the room stayed glued to their computers, monitoring online sales. The back of the office served as paper cut central, where unlucky interns processed the paper tickets for snail mail.

  Cat’s ears finally stopped buzzing when Erich shut the door behind them and they moved across the hall. The security department was nearly the size of a metropolitan police substation. Cat scanned the empty room. “Sure is quiet in here.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, the security staff schedule coincides with game times. They are not due to arrive for another oh, two hours or so.”

  “Hey, Boss.”

  Cat turned around to see a hulking guard come out from a back hallway of the lobby.

  “Otis, hello. I would like to introduce you to Catriona McDaniel, our newest employee. Catriona, this is Otis Snow, head of security.”

  The sight of the burly man took Cat aback. He towered over her by nearly a foot, and his shoulders were as wide as a Louisville Slugger. A bright smile peered out from his devilish stubble, making him almost attractive, if not for his intimidating presence. Cat extended her hand. The guard wiped his fingers on his uniform pants and thrust his clammy palm into hers, his large hand eclipsing hers with a vigorous shake.

  “Nice to meet ya. The reporter, right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I was just showing Catriona around the stadium,” Erich said.

  “Well, welcome to the security department.”

  “So what exactly do you do here, Mr. Snow?”

  “Oh, you know, bust the scalpers and control the drunks. Break up a brawl or two. Every now and then we get a streaker that goes tearing across the field butt ass nak—”

  “Danke, Otis. I think that will be all.” Erich said.

  Otis gave her a polite nod, which Cat returned with an amused smile. As the hulking guard departed, Erich smiled. “I found Otis through an outreach program.”

  “Outreach? Was he homeless or something?” She felt bad thinking it, but Otis looked like the type that would choose to live under a bridge and eat billy goats.

  “Prison. The outreach program helps offenders re-enter the workforce and become productive members of society. I believe that everyone deserves a second chance. Don’t you?”

  Cat was softened by his genuine kindness and in turn offered him an equally authentic smile. “I really do.”

  Erich led her out the department’s glass doors.

  “Are you too famished for one last stop?”

  It had been nearly three hours of meeting the Chips’ employees and Cat still had not visited the one area of the stadium—and the one set of employees—she wanted to see most. Lunch could wait.

  “Not at all.”

  Erich smiled and punched his key code into a door marked “Chips Clubhouse: Employees Only.”

  She oohed at the thirty thousand square feet of clubhouse space and awed at the state-of-the-art weight room. By the time they walked through the sauna, the batting cages, the therapy room, the players’ lounge and all the other places most Chips’ fans would auction their firstborn children to see, Cat was out of oohs and could spare no more awes. The facilities left her speechless. That is, until she and Erich entered the players’ dressing area.

  “Whoa.”

  A eucalyptus air freshener floated through the room, but Cat didn’t need the menthol to draw her attention between the mirrored walls. In the center of the waxed hardwood floor was an inlayed medallion almost as large as the field tarp. Carved in the exotic wood was the Chips’ emblem, complete with the signature poker chip dotting the “i.” Leather sofas were arranged artfully throughout the spacious room. Mahogany benches bordered the matching lockers and fifty flat-panel televisions lined the top of the walls. Though no one was in the clubhouse, several of the televisions were blaring ESPN. The room confirmed the one universal theme she’d noticed throughout her tour of Hohenschwangau Stadium.

  Want a lot, waste a lot.

  Energy conservation was obviously not a top priority of the Las Vegas Chips.

  “I’d hate to see your power bills every month,” she blurted, and instantly bit her lip, wishing she’d kept the thought to herself.

  Erich threw up his hands and shrugged. “Well, when you have the Hoover Dam at your disposal, you might as well put it to use.”

  Cat wondered if the endangered fish in the Colorado River agreed. She decided this was not the time to take moral umbrage and instead gave her new employer a fleeting, thin-lipped smile.

  The expression of a sellout.

  Cat shook off her shame and tore her eyes away from the televisions. Her stare fell upon the new uniform hanging in front of each player’s locker. “New” only in the sense that they now presented with a small patch on the sleeve. The patch was in the shape of an ink pen and adorned the initials “B.D.” Erich followed her gaze.

  “To commemorate Brad Derhoff, of course.”

  She nodded. Such a gesture was a standard practice in the league. When a member of the organization passed, the team uniforms took a trip to the tailors and came back decorated with a memory of the deceased for the rest of the season.

  She followed Erich as he led them out of the large clubhouse, down the hallway and into an open office.


  “This,” he said with gusto, “is the finest doctor our side of the Rio Grande. Catriona McDaniel, meet Dr. Kevin Goodall.”

  She shook the extended hand of the short, stocky physician. He was dressed not in a white coat and stethoscope like her own doctor but in Dockers and a solid oxford, which fit the unwritten dress code of the front office. His space had the clean, medicinal smell one would expect in a hospital, but not from an office that shared its walls with a men’s locker room. She looked around the room and pointed at the wall.

  “Wow. Harvard Medical. That’s impressive.”

  He turned to the diploma and nodded. “Oh yes. Many, many moons ago. My mother is oh-so proud. What about you? Don’t tell me we’ve got another Yale brat on our hands?” His eyes danced.

  Cat looked down at the scuff on her Mary Janes. “Oh no. State school all the way. I’m afraid I’ve given my mother nothing to be proud of.”

  Of course, I can say the same about her.

  Cat’s mom had realized three years too late she wasn’t cut out for motherhood so she left her toddler in the arms of an irresponsible father, headed to New York to become an actress and never looked back. Cat had yet to see her mother on daytime or primetime TV but figured Tina McDaniel was probably as good an actress as she was a parent. Maybe she’d gone into the adult film industry. Anyway, as far as the family was concerned, she was dead.

  “Oh, miss, somehow I doubt that.”

  Erich stuck his hands in his pockets. “Contrary to the rumor mill, Catriona, the remarkable well-being of our roster is actually due to the talents of Dr. Goodall.”

  Dr. Goodall winked at her. “I can’t take all the credit. It’s easy to keep these bodies up and running when you have every piece of therapeutic equipment manufactured from here to the Rhine-Ruhr.”

  Cat pointed behind her, gesturing toward the hallway. “So I noticed. I dig that underwater treadmill thingy. Don’t suppose we’ve got one of those on the fourth floor, too?”

  The men chuckled. Dr. Goodall took his glasses off the top of his bald head and placed them back on his nose. “Well, they don’t pay me to laugh. I have a sore hamstring on an outfielder to attend to. Nice meeting you, Ms., uh—”

  “McDaniel. Cat. You can call me Cat.”

  “Cat. That’s easy to remember; I’m allergic to them.”

  She patted him on the arm. “Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m sure you’ll find me as irritating as a real cat when I’m harassing you endlessly about MRI results and estimated stints on the DL.”

  Erich chimed in. “Disabled List? We don’t have such a thing here at Hohenschwangau.”

  She flapped her hand for a quick goodbye to the doctor before Erich escorted her back to the elevator. His cell phone chirped from his suit pocket.

  “Excuse me, Catriona. Yes? She is? Very well. I will be right up.” He frowned as he returned the phone to his jacket. “Catriona, I am afraid there is an urgent matter upstairs I must attend to immediately. I shall let you familiarize yourself with the press box before this afternoon’s game. How does that sound?”

  Cat’s eyes lit up and she swallowed the squeal fighting its way out of her throat. “Awes-uh, how do you say … wundervoll?”

  Erich grinned and pointed down the hallway. “The entrance is

  up the stairwell.”

  13

  Her fourth floor office with an amazing view was a great hideaway, but the room where Cat would spend most of her days was the press box. They didn’t have a press box in Porterville.

  With the exception of me, we had no press.

  Now Cat knew what she had been missing. She took a step into her alternate office and stopped. She blinked twice and felt her jaw migrate to the hardwood floor. The media accommodations at Hohenschwangau Stadium had more in common with a balcony box at the finest opera house than a press box in a baseball park. The walls wore a deep mahogany finish that matched the rich floor beneath her feet. Four rows of executive chairs bordered a solid line of granite desktops. Engraved brass nameplates sat in front of each chair. The staggered rows faced a giant wall of windows terraced above the lower deck of fan seating. Cat gazed out onto the field from a vantage point that could easily win an argument for the best view in the park. She approached the rows with deliberate caution, as if one wrong move would land her back in Porterville with the Bulldogs, battling her coworkers for day-old hot dogs.

  The back row, she gathered from reading the brass nameplates, was for the national coverage writers. During most regular season games, she figured the row would remain empty. National reporters didn’t cover every individual game. No, their assessments would depend on the local reporting and the team coverage.

  My coverage.

  Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of sports writing icons reading her postgame synopsis and possibly even quoting her in front of the entire country. She ran her hand along the thick top of the table and relished the feel of the smooth finish beneath her fingertips.

  The visiting press reserved the row below, with ten chairs for each city’s media to fill.

  She stepped down to the next set of chairs and nameplates. This row’s labels had names she recognized from the local Vegas news circuit. The first chair belonged to the charming Colin Castillo, Channel 10’s own media darling and the star of the evening sport segment, Ballin’ with Colin. Cat pushed away the anticipation of spending three hours an evening with the gorgeous reporter by looking at the next nameplate: Andy St. John, whose Vegas Daily column Cat had read for the first time yesterday. He was a sportswriter with whom she couldn’t disagree more.

  He wants to trade Umberto Alvarez!? A switch-hitter with a .380 on-base percentage? And make Abercromby our leadoff man? Does he even watch these games?

  Now that she was experiencing all the amenities Hohenschwangau Stadium offered, including the deluxe lounge in the next room, she thought there was a good possibility he didn’t.

  Phil Bonati’s station was next in line; a ceramic mug already marked his territory. Cat looked out to the field and spied the veteran reporter’s puffy, gray-striped afro, recognizable from even the high perch of the press box. He pointed out various players in the bullpen to a cameraman she guessed was also from the Desert Herald. The nameplate next to Phil’s cold cup of coffee was blank. She pondered if this was a vacant spot or perhaps reserved for another newbie like her. Not that she felt like a rookie when she stepped down to the front row.

  Though there were six chairs lined up, the row that bordered the windows was occupied with just two nameplates. One shined Dustin Carlyle, Las Vegas Chips Junior Reporter. The other glittered Catriona McDaniel, Las Vegas Chips Senior Reporter. She let her fingers caress the back of the Italian leather. Cat wondered if this was the same chair where Brad Derhoff had sat. She no longer cared. The spot was hers now. He had thrown all this away, and the dead man’s trash was wholeheartedly her front row treasure. She eased into the chair and spun around with her feet in the air.

  My chair.

  She kicked her leg out to the wall to stop the spinning and gazed out the windows toward the field.

  “So you’re my husband’s replacement.”

  Cat stiffened when she saw the reflection of a dark dress in the window and immediately hopped out of the chair. Offering a meek smile to the woman in the doorway, she said, “Hello. I’m Catriona McDaniel. Are you Mrs. Derhoff?”

  “Deidre, but you can call me the Widow Derhoff now.” Her glazed eyes froze on Cat’s face. “You’re young.”

  “Yeah. I hope someday to have your husband’s impressive résumé.” Cat cleared her throat. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to hear about his passing.”

  “Passing? You make it sound like he died of a stroke at age ninety.”

  “I only meant …”

  “Please, save me the Chips rhetoric. I got enough of it upstairs when they gave me my hush money.” She wagged the papers in her left hand flamboyantly.

  “Hush money?”

  “The
Chips provided me with a very handsome, oh how did they say it? Ah yes, a posthumous life insurance settlement for a policy that never existed. In exchange for this generosity, I don’t tell everyone the truth.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “That Brad was murdered, of course.” The widow took a step closer as each word hissed out. “Here.”

  Cat didn’t move. The woman took another step, bringing them face to face.

  “This place killed him. It strangled the life right out of him.”

  Cat looked around the empty press box, hoping for a little help. “Maybe you should sit down. I’ll get you a drink of water.”

  Deidre shook her head emphatically, and the greasy strings of her short blonde hair fell in her face, shielding her eyes, swollen from crying.

  “How about I get us both a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t need coffee and neither do you. You need to hear this.” Deidre reached out and grabbed Cat’s arm.

  “Okay, okay.” Cat pried the woman’s spindly fingers from her arm and gently clasped the frail hand. “I’m listening.”

  “There was another, you know. Another reporter before Brad.”

  “I thought Brad had been here since the team’s inception.”

  “It was before the season started. She was fired. She sued. The Chips settled.” A bitter laugh escaped from her mouth. “More hush money.”

  “Why was she fired?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? She found out the truth, too!”

  Cat chose her words carefully. “That Hohenschwangau Stadium is evil?”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t make me sound like a crazy person.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’ll see. After that girl left, König was in a jam. That’s when he poached my Brad from Seattle. We were so happy there.” Deidre closed her eyes for a moment. “So happy until we came here. I watched this place kill my husband. It took three years, but it finally did.”

  She shot a quick glance at the doorway and brought her wild eyes back to Catriona.

  “They’re coming. We don’t have much time.” She squeezed Cat’s hand. “You have to listen to me. This place will destroy you, too.”