Runner in Red Read online

  The next day at noon I went downstairs to the bar to work the lunch shift, part of my deal with the owner for a break on the rent, when two regulars pulled up seats. One guy they called “Moon Shot” because he had a moon face and drank shots with his Buds.

  The other guy they called “Tiger” because he wore a Detroit Tigers cap, and he knew everything about Boston sports. I don’t know why he wore a Detroit cap when he was such a Boston freak—something about a girl he dated from Detroit, the only girl who ever went out with him according to Moon Shot—and as such the hat was his connection to that sweet memory.

  “What’s with the pink case?” said Moon Shot as I set the pouch Ellen Crutchfield had dropped in Philly on the bar. “You played for the Sox, now you playing for the other team?”

  “I’m going to give this back to the girl who lost it, after I finish liquoring you guys up,” I said, and I showed Moon Shot and Tiger the contents from the case, including the gold medal with the embossed writing, Boston Athletic Association, 1951.

  “That’s the 1951 Boston Marathon gold medal. Where did you get it?” said Tiger.

  “Belongs to a girl I met. I’m going to give it back to her.” I pulled out the piece of paper Ellen had scribbled for me. “Know where 183 Minot Street is?”

  “Head south on Dorchester Ave. ’til you get to the Ashmont T, the end of the Red Line. After the station, about quarter of a mile, you’ll see Minot Street, make a left and head up the hill. But the medal is missing the diamond in the middle.” Tiger pointed to an empty space, a hole above the Boston Athletic Association logo, a unicorn. “The Boston Marathon winner’s medal has a diamond in the middle. That’s what makes the Boston Marathon gold medal unique. But this one is missing the diamond. What’s with that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shineki Tanaka of Japan won the race in 1951. How did your girl get the medal won by Tanaka? Is she Japanese?”

  “She’s USA, a blonde. A drop dead gorgeous blonde.”

  “1951 was a big year for the Americans. In ’51, for the first time since the war ended the Japanese sent a team to Boston. The Americans didn’t have anyone to compete with Tanaka, but Jock Semple and Pop Gallagher saw a chance to carry the day for America by winning the team prize. Whoever won the team trophy, Jock’s Boston Athletic Association team or Pop’s Dorchester Athletic Association, could claim ownership defending the homeland against the Japs. That got Pop and Jock’s juices going, know what I mean.”

  “Pop Gallagher? He was a crusty dude, I hear.”

  “Not in these parts. You’re in Dorchester, boy. This is Pop Gallagher country.”

  Tiger waved me over to a wall with sports photos—Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, and other baseball and hockey photos—but with running pictures, too. He pointed to a photo of five crew cut boys standing with a middle-aged man. Stout as a fireplug, the middle-aged man stood with the boys and beamed as he held a trophy, tall as a skyscraper.

  “That’s Pop Gallagher with his Dorchester Athletic Association team after they won the team prize in 1951. Tanaka won the marathon, but Pop and his D.A.A. boys planted the flag for America. That’s the only time Pop’s D.A.A. team ever beat Jock Semple’s Boston Athletic Association team. That was a huge win for Dorchester to be able to claim they beat the Japanese, especially with the war so fresh in everyone’s mind.”

  I studied the photo of Pop and noted his barrel chest, the one he had used to block Bridget twenty years later. I noticed, too, that one of the boys, a short kid with big eyes, wore a sweatshirt with a hood. I remembered that the story at the BC library said the hood was red.

  “Who’s the guy with the red hood?”

  “That’s Tim Finn. Next to Tim is his brother Joe Finn, the Governor. He’s running for re-election. This place uses Joe’s posters instead of wallpaper.” Tiger pointed to the “Elect Joe Finn, Dorchester’s Own!” posters that plastered the place.

  “Do you remember anything about the Runner in Red? A woman who ran in the Boston Marathon in 1951?”

  “That’s a rumor a group of Canadian runners dreamed up, but it’s never been proven. The Canadians said they saw a woman in red running beside them during the race. Pop undercut that, though, by pointing to Tim Finn and his red hood. I wouldn’t give it any credence. Pop’s word was gold and the story never went anywhere.”

  I returned to the bar as Tiger followed me and offered a throw-away line. “Don’t know how your gorgeous blonde got Tanaka’s gold medal, but you better hope she doesn’t think you stole her diamond.”

  Moon Shot piled on, as he tapped the pink case.

  “Maybe you like diamonds, now that you play for the other team.”

  After my shift ended at three o’clock, I drove south from Fields Corner. It was stop/start on the narrow, traffic-clogged streets as I worked my way past parks with holes in the chain link fences and storefronts offering a mix of coffee shops, auto parts places, liquor stores, and law offices with Irish names on the signs. A hundred years earlier, Dorchester had once been an exclusive neighborhood, but now it was struggling, like a runner in the last stages of a marathon trying to hold on.

  I made a left after the Ashmont T station and turned onto Minot Street as Tiger had directed. I continued past huddled houses, several with cars on cinder blocks in the driveways, yet some of the wooden clapboard houses retained tidy, cared-for looks, including the small house Blonde Ponytail stepped out of.

  Blonde Ponytail!

  Ellen Crutchfield wore blue shorts and a yellow top as she crossed the street in front of me twenty yards ahead. She started to jog and I gave it gas to catch up to her when a panel truck—R. J. Casey and Sons Electrical—pulled out from the curb and not only blocked me, but blocked my view of the girl.

  I swung hard around the truck, but in the meantime, Blonde Ponytail had turned down a side street—I didn’t see which one—and my heart raced as I tried to guess which turn to make. I made two rights and a left, clipping my tires on the curb each time, even prompting a woman walking her dog to hop back, but still I did not see Ellen, and then I came to a dead end.

  “Damn it,” I shouted as I backed up, tires screaming, along with my id, and before long I found myself back out on Minot Street, where I had started, hopelessly lost!

  “God damned truck!”

  I drove to the bottom of the hill past the house Ellen Cruchfield had stepped out of, anticipating that if she had turned right, most likely she was heading to the water—and I assumed I might find her there since my understanding of runners was they liked to run along paths near water.

  Confused by all the intersecting streets, I felt like a soldier floundering in another guy’s rice paddy as I worked my way east toward the harbor area. Ten minutes later I came down the back end of what signs told me was Savin Hill and I stopped at a red light in front of a long straight stretch of road, Morrissey Boulevard. The harbor waters rolled out in front of me and that’s when I saw her, running along the shoulder of Morrissey Blvd. toward me from the right. I leaned on the horn and waved out the window to get her attention, but she regarded me with a mix of scorn and irritation, assuming I was a stalker, and she quickened her pace as she passed in front of my car and headed down Morrissey Blvd., gliding away now to the left.

  I continued to wait for the light to change, like sitting through a 20 inning ballgame, and that’s when I saw a red sedan come barreling down the boulevard from my right. It passed in front of me going 70 mph, easily, as the driver weaved through traffic, and I honked to warn her, but she never saw the car as it came up behind her and brushed her, or appeared to.

  Over she went, head over heels down a ditch, and I ran the light to catch up as she did another cartwheel, then two more, and landed in a ravine in the water in front of the entrance to Columbia Point.

  I pulled up onto the shoulder and raced down the embankment where I found her lying at the water�
��s edge trembling.

  “Hey,” I said. “You OK?”

  She sat up, eyes wide, hip deep in water, and I lifted her as she raised a fist in the direction of the red car and shouted, “Asshole!”

  “Wow, that was close,” I said, as I helped her stand on bandy legs, and I knew she was going to be OK, the way she was giving it to the the offending driver.

  The sedan disappeared around a bend, and I picked wet leaves, cigarette butts, McDonald’s wrappers and whatever else had been in the ditch off her legs and arms.

  “I got hit once,” she said, as I led her by the arm to my car.

  “You what?”

  “I got hit by a car once,” she repeated, but she didn’t fight me as I eased her into the front seat on the passenger side and I draped her shoulders with a blanket from my trunk.

  “You got hit?”

  “Who are you?” she said, before recognition flashed in her eyes. “Oh!”

  “I met you yesterday, remember? Your car broke down.”

  “What are you doing here?” she said, meaning here, in this place at this time.

  “I was looking for you.”

  “Me?”

  “I came to return something to you.”

  “What?”

  I realized it would be too complicated to explain about Philly and her blowing me off the day I had put a camera in her face, so I figured I would tell her about the pink fanny pack later. I said simply, “Doesn’t matter. Where can I bring you now?”

  “Home,” she said, and she pointed behind us.

  “Right, your grandfather’s house,” and I turned the car around and headed back down Morrissey Blvd.

  “How do you know that?”

  “You told me,” and I showed her the piece of paper she had given me the day before with her address.

  “You know my name now too, don’t you, smart guy?”

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Crutchfield,” I said with as a big a smile as I could muster, and it worked because she smiled back as color returned to her face.

  She didn’t say anything as we drove and she pointed out turns for me to take, then she said several minutes later, “What’s your name?”

  “Colin.”

  “And what do you do, Colin? That is, when you’re not fishing girls out of Boston Harbor and fixing their cars?”

  I blew past bartender as an answer and said, “I’m up for a position working on a Boston Marathon project.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” she said, and she pointed to the house that she had stepped out of earlier, before her run-in with the red sedan. “Why don’t you park here and come in. I will only be a minute. Since you’ll be working on the marathon, you may find the house interesting.”

  “What do you mean only a minute? Aren’t you going to lie down or something?”

  But she was already out of the car and walking toward the front door of the house. “I’ve got a month till the New York City Marathon and I’m 30 miles short for the week,” she said over her shoulder. “I need to train.”

  “New York City Marathon? You’re going to run in the New York City Marathon?”

  “I plan to win it.”

  She held the front door open for me, and I followed her in. The place was dark with a heavy oak furniture theme, which combined with the thick drapes made the place feel even darker, but the walls were filled with running photos which gave the tiny place some life.

  “Looks like a marathon museum,” I said, as she disappeared into a bathroom off the kitchen, but before she closed the door she said, “I thought you’d find the place interesting since you’ll be working for the marathon.”

  I talked to her through the bathroom door. “You think you can win the New York City Marathon?”

  “Winning Boston next April is my real goal. My grandfather and I, we plan to use New York as a tune-up.” A moment later she stepped out of the bathroom and caught me staring at her bare midriff, with her perfectly flat stomach. She wore a red sports bra and fresh new red shorts. “What are you looking at?”

  I switched my eyes from her midriff, and pointed to a photo on the wall. It showed a tall, thin young woman with a blonde ponytail striding down a road in a Boston College singlet. “That you?”

  She turned to face the wall and her blonde ponytail followed the snap of her head. “Yes, that’s me at Boston College before I got hurt.”

  “You got hurt? You mean the car you told me about that hit you?”

  “No, that was in Oregon, after I got married.”

  “You’re married.”

  “I was. In college I ran in the Olympic Trials my sophomore year, but I got hurt. I was leading the race, until I got a stress fracture at mile 18 and hobbled in in 10th place. After that I lost my chance for shoe money, no shoe sponsor wanted a tenth place finisher, and that’s when I got married.”

  “That’s the Crutchfield?”

  “More like a ‘Ball-and-chain field.’”

  “You’re not married anymore?”

  “It wasn’t bliss.”

  “What happened?”

  She was about to tell me when a key turned in the front door and the hippy with the gray ponytail, the guy who had taken her home after her car broke down, walked in with an old man who was short but who had a powerful frame. The old man had piercing blue eyes which he trained on me.

  “You again?” said the guy with the gray ponytail, hardly congenial again.

  “Tim,” said Ellen. “This is Colin. He gave me a ride home after some asshole ran me off the road.”

  All of this was too much for gray ponytail to absorb and he shook his head confused as the old man continued to stare at me with a laser-like glare.

  “Who are you?” said the old man pronouncing each word individually and with a voice as hard as steel.

  “This is Colin,” said Ellen. “I wanted him to see your house since he’s going to work for the Boston Marathon.”

  “You work for the Marathon?” said gray ponytail. “Who for, the B.A.A.?”

  “No, for a television station, actually.”

  This got everyone’s attention, including Ellen’s, and not in a good way.

  “What television station?” said gray ponytail.

  I wanted to impress. “I’ll be working on a project at Channel 6 to find the first woman who ran the Boston Marathon. The Runner in Red, they call her.”

  I might as well have dropped a fucking bomb.

  “You work with my mother?” said Ellen, and white showed on all four sides of her eyes.

  Now it was my turn to show an OMG face. “Your mother…” and I fumbled for the words as images flashed through my mind, pictures crystal clear of her mother and my connection to her. “Your mother is Bridget?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you worked with my mother?” said Ellen, and I could see pain, shock, hurt, surprise—most of all disdain for me—in her eyes.

  “Out!” I don’t know who said it, the old man or gray ponytail, but it was gray ponytail who leaned his shoulder into me—like a bobcat machine on a construction site—and began moving me toward the door.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I heard Ellen say, which I was grateful for, but the next thing I knew I was all alone on the front stoop, and I heard the door slam behind me. Bang!

  I don’t know how long I stood on the stoop with my head ringing, as if someone had placed a kettle bell over me and whacked it. I lost and any ability to think clearly. The next thing I knew I was standing at my car, unaware of the steps I had taken to get to the car from the house.

  Then I remembered the pink pouch and the reason I had come.

  I returned to the porch and rang the ball, about a hundred million times, before Ellen’s face, still reflecting hurt and shock, appeared in a window beside the door.

  I held up the po
uch, to show her, and I could see her process that, but at some point she motioned to me to set the pouch on the stoop and leave it there.

  That’s what I remember most, her motion with her finger to leave the pouch on the porch, and the words that followed as I read her lips:

  “Then you go away!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tiger knocked on my door a few minutes after I got back to my apartment.

  “Your Boston Marathon medal got me really interested and I wanted to know more. I found this,” he said, and he handed me pages he had copied from a seven-year-old edition of Sports Illustrated.

  The story was titled, “Like Mother/Like Daughter.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Boston Public Library. They’ve got tons of old stuff.”

  The story had been written while Ellen was a senior in high school. It told how she had broken the American schoolgirl record for the mile, prompting twenty colleges to pursue her, but she chose Boston College. “I want to follow in my mother’s footsteps,” she said in the story below a photo showing Ellen and Bridget smiling on the track at BC.

  “See the name?” Tiger said.

  “Ellen Maloney.”

  “Pre-Crutchfield.”

  “In the days when mother and daughter still talked to each other,” I said and I grabbed my coat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Boston Public Library. To do my homework.”

  I had questions. The Sports Illustrated story told how in high school Ellen had idolized her mother and wanted to be like her. She chose Boston College, Bridget’s school, over twenty other colleges. Now she was not only training under Pop’s tutelage, she was living at his house.

  What had prompted Ellen to switch allegiances?

  Most importantly I wanted to know why the Runner in Red was so critical to Bridget that she would choose to pursue a mystery figure and jeopardize her family?

  When I had helped her with her car Ellen told me her mom had given her dad “hell.” I thought Bridget was estranged from her husband. Were they back together and where did the husband come down on the Ellen/Bridget/Pop triangle?