Lee fires off a shot of the gold-colored Maxell CD-R. The burst of the flash appears to trigger one in Lyons’s head as well, for he says suddenly: “You know, this is probably way off, but that’s a term surgeons sometimes use to describe the music they play in the operating room.”
“Surgeons?” Madden says, startled.
“Yeah. Why? That mean something?”
Madden looks at the numbers in his notebook. He puts the girl’s phone down on the desk and pulls his Motorola out of its belt holster and flips it open.
“Hey, Donna,” he says when he gets the weekend dispatcher on the phone. “Hank Madden. Can you do me a favor and run a couple phone numbers? I’m not in my car.”
“Gimme a minute, Hank,” she says. “Let me get my computer back on. I was just restarting it.”
When she’s ready, he reads the second number, the one the girl dialed four times. A short silence on the line, then her voice comes back.
“Belongs to one Carrie Pinklow.”
He reads her the first number, the one the girl dialed three times, the last time around three hours ago, at 1:36 p.m.
“That one’s T. Cogan.”
“Is that a Mr. Cogan?” he asks.
Another silence, this one shorter.
“Actually, that’s a doctor, Hank. Dr. T. Cogan.”
7/ SEAVER GOES THE DISTANCE
Summer, 1973
COGAN WAS NINE WHEN HE FIRST VISITED A HOSPITAL. HIS MOTHER had something wrong with her brain. She kept forgetting things, and no one could tell her why, so they took her to the University of Chicago Medical Center to see someone called a specialist. He remembered walking into the hospital and seeing people in white coats and his father telling him these people were going to try to make his mother better. That was his first impression of doctors, and his introduction to medicine.
His mother died in 1983, when he was nineteen. But she’d been institutionalized in a Jewish nursing home for the previous six years. She died at sixty. Initially, she was very forgetful. She couldn’t remember, for instance, where she’d left things around the house. Or his father would take her shopping downtown, and he’d say, Phyllis, meet me in front of such and such store at five o’clock. But when he’d show up at five o’clock, she wouldn’t be there. And he’d end up looking for her everywhere. When he finally found her he’d say, “What the heck’s going on?” And she’d say, “I don’t know. I don’t remember a thing.” There was obviously something wrong. And later there were personality changes. Today, people recognize these as symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but back then no one really knew what was wrong.
His brother, who was almost eleven years older, grew up in a more traditional setting. His father would come home around six after a hard day at work in the bakery and his wife would meet him with a prepared dinner and would wait on him and her boy. She waited on everybody. She saw that as the role she had to play. And in that generation that was the role you had to play. There wasn’t a lot of outward affection, hugging and kissing and so forth. And there wasn’t a lot of Ward Cleaver, Hello, Dear, and all that. But there was at least some semblance of a family with dinner on the table.
By the time Cogan was nine it was all gone. They took his mother away for good when he was eleven. A few years earlier, his older brother had gone to ’Nam. He was in the Marines. It made for a strange adolescence. His father worked long hours then went out at night sometimes, leaving him home alone. It was at night, after he finished his homework, that he played ball. He would stand outside in the driveway, pitching old tennis balls into a wooden box filled with Styrofoam in the back of the garage. The hole in the box was the exact height and size of the strike zone. For hours, he’d throw balls into the box. Once, he threw fifty straight strikes.
“Who’s pitching tonight, Teddy?” one of the neighbors, a widower named Sid Feinberg, would always ask when he took his dog out for his nightly walk.
“Seaver,” he said.
“I thought he pitched Sunday.”
“We’re going for the pennant. I had to send him on one day’s rest.”
“Is that wise?”
“Well, it’s the top of the seventh and he’s pitching a two-hitter with thirteen strikeouts.”
“Pull him,” Feinberg said. “Pull him before it’s too late.”
“No way. He’s going the distance.”
Tom Seaver was