“You can tell from the overhead pipes that those two kids got into one of the restricted sections of the ballpark. The bowels of Wrigley Field are unbeautiful space. You can see in this shot—too many dangling wires, unsealed conduits—it’s worse now because they’ve added more wiring for the electronics the media folks have to have, but it was bad enough back then. Maybe your cousin . . . But the photographer worked for us, he should have had enough sense to stop them.”
“When Boom-Boom had a full head of steam he was hard to stop,” I said. “But from the looks of these, it was Annie who was leading him on a dance.”
She’d been playing hide-and-seek, I guessed, from that daredevil grin she’d been flashing at Boom-Boom. Find me if you can, follow me if you dare. Seventeen years old, feeling her powers start to unfold. Whether she’d cared for my cousin or just been enjoying being alive didn’t matter.
I sat back in my chair, wishing my head weren’t quite so clogged. For a week I’d been arguing with Bernie that the putative diary didn’t matter, but now it started to feel important to me again.
Annie had flirted with the lawyers at Mandel & McClelland—maybe even had sex with Mandel. There was no sin or crime in her flirting with Boom-Boom, too, but how had he responded? Someone else—Joel Previn, or Spike Hurlihey, or Mandel himself, maybe would have gotten angry enough to threaten her with the classic male complaint: You led me on, how could you have been playing with me?
Not Boom-Boom: my cousin would not threaten any woman for having multiple strings to her bow. Or for any other reason. Even on the ice, where he was fast and cunning, Boom-Boom did nothing out of malice.
Mr. Villard was studying the prints, trying to figure out where Annie and Boom-Boom had been. He put them down with a rueful smile. “I haven’t been underneath those stands for years now and I don’t remember them clearly. Some of the boys used to go down there to smoke marijuana before the game—I pretended not to notice and they assumed an old fart like me wouldn’t recognize the smell.”
“Would you let me take these home with me?” I asked. “I can scan them and get them back to you.”
Villard laughed. “Take them, keep them. My girls want to sell all my memorabilia for charity, so if you bring them back, chances are they’ll sell these, too.”
Adelaide brought me more tea, and a second gin for Villard, although a moment later I heard his daughter in the hall upbraiding her for encouraging his drinking—a no-no with diabetes. I lingered with him, watching the lake while Villard talked to me about his wife, his son who died in Vietnam, the baseball players he’d known and loved. I left him regretfully so that I could make my appointment with Murray.
“When you get that book about your cousin finished, you be sure to come back and give me a copy. Get Adelaide to tell you the address where I’ll be moving.”
I definitely had to write the wretched biography, I thought, bidding Villard a reluctant farewell. He was an attractive guy, and for a brief time I’d forgotten my wounds and my worries. I wasn’t eager to get back to them, but once in my car, my uneasiness about Bernie, myself, the whole situation returned.
I had a text from Tim Streeter, saying that he’d connected with Bernie, who’d decided that he was cool enough to tag along for lattes with her and her friends. At least I didn’t need to fret about her for the moment.
I stopped at my office before heading to the Golden Glow to meet Murray, since I’d left all my papers there. I had half an hour, too short for a nap, but instead of returning e-mails and phone calls, I spread the photos of Annie and my cousin out on my worktable.
In the second of the pictures of my cousin in the hidden passageway, I thought I could make out the shadow of Annie’s face in the background. I got out a magnifying glass and she appeared more clearly, an elfin ghost with curly black hair, the outsize white shirt hanging over her jeans halfway to her knees.
I held the glass over each of the pictures and saw one where her shirt was smudged with dirt. So, taken after she’d been in the tunnel. An obscure impulse made me try to lay them out in chronological order, starting with the first print I’d seen, with Boom-Boom looking down at her from the top of the bleachers.
In the next one she was facing the camera full on, apparently talking to the photographer. She had a black oblong in her left hand that I’d originally assumed was a clutch purse, but under the glass it turned out to be a notebook bound in leather or plastic.
The room seemed to heave around me. I clutched the edge of the table, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Annie had kept a diary. She cherished it so much she brought it with her on a date to Wrigley Field.