PLEASE STOP ASKING ME TO INVESTIGATE YOUR PURLOINED ARTIFACTS, I AM A BASEBALL PLAYER
By Jack Leathersich
Another one came barging in, arm-waving, bug-eyed, a trail of papers and spectacles and tweed harrumphing his way through the clubhouse. Which one of you is Leathersich, he said, tripping on pine tar and fungo bats. Paunchy. Flustered. Meat. I could toss some chin music at him and brush him back on the next boat to another continent. The guys steered him to my office before he could even finish, another egghead, another missing urn, another counterfeit sarcophagus.
The skipper gave me an office after the Assistant Curator, Americas Collection from the Field Museum put Vallardo on the DL when he hit him in the eye with his collapsible pointer while complaining that the missing jaguar sculpture was the centerpiece of the exhibit. It’s a supply closet filled with glove lace and eye black, and the smell of old dip lingers like a deadbeat relative. The guys paid for the frosted glass from kangaroo court. It’s a shabby operation, but as I constantly remind them, it’s not an operation at all. I’m a relief pitcher. I don’t know anything about the fertility idol black market. I don’t have anywhere to put your jacket that won’t stain the elbow patches with pine tar.
He told me that I had done good work for his colleague, Beatrice Chope, late of the Hearst Collection. I told him that the tapestries were hidden right there in the bullpen in Papillion under one of the mounds, that any unlucky Joe could have found them while dragging his cleats around, and that it was dumb luck that the crooks hauling off that doubloon collection were making tracks towards a freight train that happened to be passing right by the Dell Diamond in Round Rock. No, I told him, I don’t have any brandy in here.
They beg then they threaten and after twenty-five minutes he was telling me that it might interest me to know that the scions of the Brooklyn Tip Tops fortune were no small donors and they’d be gravely upset if he couldn’t open the Mummies Besides Tutankhamun exhibition on time. Besides, he said, I didn’t see you turning down those gentlemen from the Peabody museum. Look fella, I told him, that was an open-and-shut case. They should’ve never given that key to that grad assistant who fell so easily under the sway of the Pumberswan twins. Very charming pair, high-living, yachts and champagne, not the type of thing you expect when you’re in a damp room with some hieroglyphs and even the statues won’t make time for you. Suppose he’s got to get used to another lonely, damp room now, I said. That was February. The offseason, when I don’t play baseball so why don’t you go scram and polish your halberds.
He wouldn’t go. He was dug in tighter than a regiment at Verdun. Fine, I told him. It’s forty-five a day, plus expenses. Double if I get in a shoot-out again on a foggy dock with a desperate forger of the Herculaneum papyri. I’m not grabbing anything with the left arm. No catacombs. And don’t come whining here when I can’t find anything because I’ve got to be in Albuquerque on Tuesday and they got some hot lefty bats and there’s no way our guy’s going more than five at that launchpad. I’ll make some calls, maybe prowl around in a mustache, talk to some guys I know at the baccarat tables. But that’s all you’re getting. We just might make the playoffs, and September’s right around the corner. And tell your friends that this is it, this is the last one, I don’t care if the thieves have been leaving calling cards in Cuneiform and it’s clearly a pattern.
