A Welcome Murder Page 2

  “Not good,” I said.

  “Gonna try again next year?”

  “Nope. I’m done.”

  He shook his head, disgusted, and sent a spray of tobacco juice into my mother’s zinnias. “I knew you should have taken one of them football scholarships,” he said, already walking away.

  Everything in my life had been a competition. It wasn’t that I loved winning, but I loathed losing. The victories in my life were never as sweet as the defeats were bitter. Why else at this point in my life would I still be upset that some people thought Jimmy Hinton was better-looking than me back in high school? It’s great to have a competitive fire as an athlete, but it can lead to problems if you don’t control it off the field. I am the poster child for that last statement.

  For the first time in my life, I didn’t have some kind of athletic season to get ready for. I moped, worked on model cars, and generally felt sorry for myself. This was a major blow to my ego. (Once upon a time, my mammoth ego was my most dominating characteristic. That’s not so much the case anymore. Seven years in the penitentiary and going bald in the process will knock the swagger right out of you.) I was pushing twenty-seven, my baseball career was over, I was driving a rusting Camaro with 180,000 miles on it, I had thirteen hundred bucks in my checking account and no education beyond high school, and my only job prospects were the steel mills or the coal mines. Tell me that isn’t depressing.

  And, just to prove that God has a sense of humor, three days after I got home from my knee surgery, Dena Marie Conchek rapped twice on the front door and then just came in. I was sitting at the dining-room table putting together a model of a ’64 Thunderbird. “Hey there, Dena Marie,” I said, my first words to her since I left her crying in her living room.

  She stopped in mid-stride, her eyes widened, and she said, “Oh my God, you’re going bald!”

  “Thanks so much for noticing. It’s nice to see you, too.”

  She sat down at the table next to me and said, “Johnny . . .” She waited until I looked up from my model. “I knew that you’d come back to me.”

  “I know this will come as a big surprise to you, Dena Marie, but I didn’t come back to Steubenville looking for you. My knee exploded, the Detroit Tigers fired me, and I needed a place to live.” She pretended not to hear me, but I knew Dena Marie, and I’ll bet the minute she heard I was coming back home she had started planning our wedding. “Besides, aren’t you still married to Jack Androski?” I knew she wasn’t. My mom was the most spectacular gossip in Steubenville, and I had received regular updates on the town’s sins and sinners. Jack had divorced Dena Marie a few years earlier, after he caught her with Alan Vetcher.

  “I’m divorced. It was a bad marriage from the start,” she said in a whiny tone. “I couldn’t help it. I was so upset when you left that I married the first man who asked me.”

  “Well, I knew it would somehow end up being my fault.”

  “Johnny, is it my fault that I never stopped loving you?”

  It was my turn to pretend like I hadn’t heard her, and I went back to working on the Thunderbird. Dena Marie sat at the table for an hour, telling me everything I didn’t want to know about everything I didn’t want to hear about. I was exhausted just from listening. I was ready to ask her to go when she said she was late for her job at the grocery store and left.

  She stopped by the next day.

  And the next.

  On her fourth visit, we had sex.

  I hadn’t been with a woman in months, and my willpower was at low tide. Granted, my moral compass spends a lot of time at low tide, but I got a good whiff of her perfume, and when she touched the inside of my thigh while inspecting my surgery scars it became readily apparent that although my knee was out of commission, other body parts were fully operational. A stiff dick has no conscience. I hobbled up the steps on my crutches and we had clumsy sex in the twin bed in my bedroom, which was still adorned with trophies and plaques from my high school days. Once again, I was back to ignoring Dena Marie’s lunacy in exchange for sex.

  I have the morals of an alligator.

  Things got worse. I was five weeks post-surgery when Rayce Daubner showed up at my door. I hated Rayce Daubner. I had pretended to like him when we were playing football together, even though he smelled like piss and used to call me “Hollywood” with a sneer because he was jealous of all the attention I received. The last time I recall ever talking to Rayce was when he was named second-team all-Ohio in football. He was upset, of course, because I was first-team. I said, “Second-team all-state is a hell of an honor.”

  “Really? Do they put your picture up on the wall for second-team?”

  I shrugged. “No, but . . .”

  “That’s right. They don’t. I bust my ass blocking for you, Hollywood, and what do I get—second-fucking-team. That’s nothing.”

  Until the minute he walked through my door, those were the last words that we had spoken to each other, but he acted like we had been best friends for years. “John-eeee Earl!” he yelled, holding up a hand to give me a high-five. “How the hell are ya?” His hair was long and black, drawn into a ponytail that somewhat disguised his lopsided head, and he had a thin goatee. He was wearing a yellow shirt with green paisleys and a hard pack of Marlboros in the pocket, blue jeans, and sandals. He was thinner than he had been in high school, but still muscular and broad across the shoulders. It was an odd look for someone who had aspired to join the Marine Corps and boasted of having uncles who were card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan. He still smelled like a wet diaper.

  In yet another bad decision, I started going out with Rayce to the Starlighter Bar, otherwise known as the Star Bar. The Star Bar was the hangout of many of my buddies who had mentally and emotionally never left high school. You could hear the same stories about the same high school heroics night after night at the Star Bar. The regulars would buy me beers and ask me to tell stories about home runs or touchdowns that I could barely recall. The first night I was there, Chico Deter asked, “Johnny, do you remember that block I threw on that linebacker from Warren Harding that sprung you for that touchdown just before the half our junior year?”

  “Oh, hell yes, I remember that, Chico!” I said. “You lit his ass up.” Chico smiled, slapped me on the back, and bought me a beer. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of the block or the touchdown, or the game, for that matter, but it made him happy.

  After a night of drinking, just as I was starting to walk without a noticeable limp, Rayce said, “Let’s swing by the house and do a line of coke.”

  I had never done cocaine. I was mostly a beer man, and on rare occasions, reefer. “Ah, I dunno, man. I’ve never done coke.”

  “Come on, try it. Once. You’ll fuckin’ love it.”

  He was right. I fuckin’ loved it. The minute that powder hit my nose, I was hooked. My eyes watered, my dick got hard, and I thought a kettle of popcorn was going off in my brain. I turned to Rayce and said, “I’m gonna call Dena Marie and ask her to marry me. Maybe even tonight.”

  He laughed and said, “Why don’t you wait and rethink that in the morning?”

  I did cocaine every night for a week and drained my checking account. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that I was heading down a path that was not conducive to a promising future. Cocaine was going up my nose at an astonishing rate. I was borrowing money from my parents to buy cocaine from a man I didn’t trust as far as I could throw him. I was sleeping with Dena Marie, and she was starting to talk about what color drapes she wanted in our living room. I had no job and no prospects. I had to get out of town and find some work.

  I went to Pittsburgh and landed a job with a construction company owned by Geno Bartelli, who had been a Pirates season-ticketholder and had once told me to call him if I ever needed work. Because my knee was still tender, Mr. Bartelli had me train to be a backhoe operator. I quickly got the hang of it. When my knee healed to the point where I could walk and kneel, Mr. Bartelli said he wa
nted me to be an apprentice mason. I liked the backhoe, but he assured me that there was a better future in masonry.

  As I stated earlier, I didn’t start out to be a drug dealer. After two months with Bartelli Construction, I figured I owed myself a reward, so after work on a Friday afternoon I drove back to Steubenville to visit Rayce’s supplier, a guy I knew only as Squirrel. He was a disgusting little man with oily, shoulder-length hair, an unwieldy moustache, and a perpetually runny nose, but great cocaine. I bought four grams and, as luck would have it, ran into Rayce on my way back to the car. “Where the fuck you been?” he demanded.

  “Pittsburgh. I got a job.”

  “You couldn’t say something?”

  “It came up kind of sudden.”

  “You fuckin’ prima donna. You still think you’re better than everyone else.” Rayce Daubner was a prick once again. My universe was back in alignment.

  That night I went to a club downtown that I frequented when I was with the Pirates. Yes, I went there hoping that someone would recognize me as a former Pirate. Perhaps someone was at the game when I tripled off of Nolan Ryan. Either they had faulty memories or the game had been poorly attended, because no one remembered. I was no longer Johnny Earl. Now, I was simply Johnny the backhoe guy.

  My first cocaine sale was that night at the bar. A brunette with a couple dozen earrings rimming each ear squeezed up to the bar next to my stool and ordered drinks for her and some friends. As she waited, she turned and her eyes locked on my face. Finally, I thought, someone remembers. After a few moments, she asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Johnny Earl.”

  “Uh-huh. Johnny. I’m Samantha. Can I give you a little advice, Johnny?”

  “Sure.”

  She put an index finger in her mouth, wetting it with her tongue, and swiped it under my nose. She held out the finger for my inspection. It was smeared with a thin film of white powder. “Don’t let this stuff go to waste,” she said, putting the finger back in her mouth. I grabbed my cocktail napkin and began furiously scrubbing my face. “Relax, sweetie, I got it all.” I kept rubbing. “Got any more?”

  I leaned toward her and asked, “Could we have this conversation outside?” She followed me to the parking lot and that’s how it began. I sold her a half gram of cocaine for double the amount I paid for it. It seemed ridiculously easy. “I have friends who’ll buy coke from you,” Samantha said. “Can you get more?”

  I thought it over for a moment and said, “I’ll be here next Friday.” The next week, I doubled my purchase from Squirrel, then doubled it again the next week. At first, I just sold to Samantha and her friends. Eventually, I had Samantha and one of her friends selling for me. I found out that I’m a damn good businessman. I kept my overhead low and my profit margins high. I didn’t sell on credit and was real strict about getting paid. No money, no coke. I started sleeping with Samantha, and she thought this would entitle her to free cocaine. When she found out otherwise, she was livid and stood naked in the middle of my apartment, screaming and throwing empty beer cans at me and calling me a greedy bastard and a greedy prick and a greedy son of a bitch, all of which were arguably true, but that didn’t change my cash-and-carry policy.

  I used to wonder why people would take the chance of going to prison for dealing drugs. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Dealing was lucrative as hell. Within a couple of months, I had upward of $80,000 hidden in my apartment. I kept working my job with the construction company, because I was smart enough to know that no one grew to an old age in the cocaine-dealing business. You either get arrested or someone who wants your business hits you over the head with a two-by-four and they find you floating in the Monongahela River. My plan was to make enough money to buy a backhoe and dump truck and start my own excavating business. The problem was, as Samantha noted, I’m a greedy son of a bitch. I worked all day for Bartelli Construction and made coke deliveries at night. Eventually, I took on the drug-dealer image. I shaved my head, grew a lip beard, wore lots of gold, and got an earring. I liked the persona. Mr. Bartelli saw me one day and said, “You’re not going faggot on me, are you?” I recruited some lieutenants to keep me away from the action. I’m sure they were stealing from me, but I was still making a ton of money, so I let it slide. I expanded my business and found another supplier, which reduced my costs but really pissed off Squirrel.

  After about three years, I knew I was running on borrowed time. Too many people knew I was a drug dealer, and that meant it was just a matter of time before a cop or a competitor put a stop to my business. Adding to the angst was the fact that beneath the floor of my closet were bricks of hundred-dollar bills. I had to find a better hiding place, but where? Depositing the money in a bank would set off an alarm at the Internal Revenue Service, and I didn’t want to put it in a safe-deposit box because if I was ever arrested my ill-gotten gains were a mere search warrant away from being confiscated.

  By this time, I was still an apprentice mason with no enthusiasm for the work. This aggravated the masons, who perceived themselves as being above the other crafts, and certainly above a heavy equipment operator. They gave me menial jobs, like mixing mortar, or building trivial shit, like brick walls in front of buildings or the little vaults that held cornerstone documents or time capsules. Basically, I did jobs in which a mistake would not cause an entire building to come crashing down.

  As I was considering getting out of the cocaine-dealing business, I got a phone call and the guy on the other end says, “Hey, Hollywood.”

  My stomach knotted up. “Rayce?”

  “Yeah, dude, it’s me. I need some help. You seen Squirrel?”

  “Squirrel? No, I haven’t seen him in a year or so.”

  “I got to find him. I got a fuckin’ opportunity here that you can’t believe.”

  “I can’t help you, Rayce. I don’t know where he is.” My curiosity and greedy nature got the best of me. “What kind of opportunity?”

  “A big-time deal. Big time. I got a guy from Cleveland, some lawyer, who says he knows these rich cokeheads who will buy anything he can get his hands on.”

  “How much you looking for?”

  “Six kilos.”

  “That’s a lot of dope. Squirrel’s a small-timer. He couldn’t get you that much.”

  “Goddamn, dude, I’ve got to have it. This guy’s got more money than good sense. I can make a shitload of money on this. Can you help me out?”

  Now, here’s the thing: I’m smart enough to know that I shouldn’t have gotten involved with any of Rayce Daubner’s brainstorms. Warning sirens should have been going off in my head. But I was thinking that unloading a steady stream of dope on Rayce would be easy money and expedite my exit from the trade. “When do you need it?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “It’ll take some time to line it up. Give me a number, and I’ll call you back.”

  Four days later, I had the coke and called Rayce. I told him to meet me at a restaurant along Route 22 in the West Virginia panhandle. I was having a cup of coffee when he arrived. “I’m in a hurry,” he said. “You got the coke?”

  “Good seeing you again, too, Rayce.”

  “I told you, I don’t have the time for chitchat. You got the coke?”

  “Maybe. You got the cash?”

  He slid the newspaper he was carrying across the table. I pulled an envelope out of the sports pages and, holding it in my lap, slit the flap with my finger. It was stuffed with crisp hundred-dollar bills. I put my foot behind the gym bag that was on the floor and slid it between his feet. “Don’t open it here. It’s all good. Your lawyer friend will be pleased.”

  “Good. Let me get out of here first,” he said.

  “When are you going to want more?” I asked. “I never keep this much in stock. You’ve got to give me more time.”

  “I’ll let you know.” And he booked.

  I pushed the envelope into my pants, paid the bill, and walked outside. I never made it to my car. Unmarked cop cars
came in from everywhere. Guys in baseball caps and black jackets with “FBI” across the back jumped out, pointing pistols and shotguns at me, screaming, “Get your hands in the air! Get on your knees, get on your knees, goddammit!” I was screwed. The feds had the dope, and I was carrying an envelope full of marked bills. I found out later that a guy who had been sitting across the restaurant had a video camera in his briefcase. They had me dead to rights.

  The headline in the Steubenville Herald-Star the next day read:

  Former Steubenville High Star Arrested for Cocaine Trafficking

  Before my arrest, not one person in Pittsburgh remembered my brief stint with the Pirates. Afterward, however, every news story in every paper carried the phrase, “former Pittsburgh Pirate Johnny Earl.” Once upon a time, I would have been proud to see that in the paper. Now, it was just humiliating and a reminder of how far I had tumbled.

  Everyone in Jefferson County looked at each other and said, “Oh, that’s why he didn’t make it to the major leagues. He was on cocaine.” Rayce was a federal informant. He was working off some minor drug rap and had told the feds he could get them a major dealer. Mainly, me. He testified before the grand jury that he had asked me why I wasn’t afraid of getting caught and I had said, “I’m a former Pittsburgh Pirate and a six-time all-Ohioan. Who’s going to mess with me? I’m untouchable.”

  Bull crap. I never said anything of the kind. He invented that just to make me look bad, as though being charged with cocaine trafficking wasn’t bad enough. But that was it. That whole all-Ohio thing had sat in his craw all those years.

  After I was indicted, I asked my lawyer, “So, what do you think my chances are?”

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “Of getting off.”

  “Zero. Maybe less than zero. You’re totally screwed.” Not exactly the words I was hoping to hear. “It’s your first offense. Let’s cop a plea. You’ll get out of prison while you’re still a young man.” It is a sickening feeling knowing that you have only two options—prison or more prison. Before my sentencing, my lawyer said, “How about we soften up the looks a little? Let’s lose the lip beard and grow some hair.”