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It was the doorbell that awakened me. I reached over and found my phone on the coffee table and saw that it was past eleven.Nice going, Thomas,I thought. I pulled myself up off the couch and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, prepared to tell my brother that this was a new record for being late, even for him.

But when I looked through the peephole, it wasn’t my kid brother.

It was Ben Cantor standing on my front porch, about to reach for the doorbell again. And even though the image was distorted, I somehow knew, maybe instinctively knew, that this wasn’t Cantor the cute guy.

This was Cantor the cop.

When I opened the door he said, “It’s about Thomas.”

Fifty-Six

“THOMAS WOULDN’T KILL HIMSELF,”I kept saying to Cantor, when I could get the words out.

We were on my couch. I had collapsed into Cantor’s arms when he told me where Thomas’s body had been discovered at Wolves Stadium: in the stands below his suite. Back up in the suite, they’d found the syringe and the baggie filled with what they were sure was heroin and an empty bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

The crying was starting and stopping by now; there was no way for me to control it. Cantor had found the whiskey in the kitchen and poured me a glass, and I managed to choke it down. I told him I wanted him to drive me over to the stadium. Cantor said not yet, not when I was like this.

“Likewhat?”

He quietly said, “When you get yourself together enough, I’ll take you there. But not until then. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I kept shaking my head.

“You’re telling me that I’m supposed to believe that he got drunk and shot up and then jumped from up there…”

Now I started to cry again.

“I’m telling you what the scene looks like,” Cantor said. Then he said he made it a practice to not jump to conclusions, immediately apologizing for his choice of words.

“Where’s his body right now?”

“Where one of the security guys found it,” Cantor said. “Field-level box. You know as well as anybody how much of a drop that is.”

I drank some whiskey and ran a distracted hand through my hair. I’d gone into the bathroom and stayed there awhile, not caring what a wreck I looked like when I saw myself in the mirror.

Thomas.

My kid brother.

Dead.

At Wolves Stadium.

I started gulping in air again, and Cantor put a hand on my shoulder.

“He was deathly afraid of needles, from the time he was a kid,” I said. “If he had to get some kind of shot, he’d make me go to the doctor with him and squeeze his hand, and even then I thought he might pass out.”

“I saw the needle marks in his arm myself,” Cantor said.

“I don’t care if his arm looked like a goddamn pincushion! Are you listening to me? There is no way he would stick a needle in his arm himself!”

“Maybe he had a slip,” Cantor said. “Happens. And people can’t deal with it afterward.”

I let out some air. I didn’t want to fight with him. I knew he was trying to help. I was glad he was there.

“He didn’t slip. And he didn’t fall.”