[RebelYell]

I quit thinking shortly after I realized the girl was dead in the stairwell.
Once in my room, I dialed 911 and reported what I had seen. I gave my name, who I was and everything I had discovered -- minus the bat.

Right away, I had decided the bat had been part of the crime. I sit here thinking before getting on the plane to go back home and realize that I could be wrong. But I packed the bat away with my fungo.

Besides, when the detectives discover the girl had been hit across the back with something, breaking one of her arms in the process, I figured the bat would be high on the list of possible weapons.

The real murder weapon, I came to find out through a 15-minute interview with a detective was probably a long telephone cord. Not the cord that hooks the earpiece to the phone, but the cord that goes from the back of the phone into the wall.

The girl had been strangled, it appeared to them. It was a crime of passion, they said.

I thought again about what I had seen over the past couple of days: The girl in a room with a few of our players; The girl wearing the same clothes two days later; The girl in the stairwell of our hotel and located just two floors above was a baseball bat that belonged to our team.

Is it possible that one of my players had killed her?
I looked among them as we began boarding our plane. None of them knew any more than somebody had been killed near our hotel during the night. That's enough to get my curiousity going, but these guys were pretty calm about it. None of them knew who the girl was or that it was even a girl who had been killed. I told the detectives that all of my players were in their rooms at a midnight bed-check.

Yeah, sure, it was an out-and-out lie.

Asked if it was possible for any of the players to have sneaked out, I told them that I had been out myself and checked again when I came in at 3 a.m. I was pretty sure there hadn't been any movement outside of the players' rooms and, therefore, none of them could have possibly been involved with the crime.

Along with the baseball bat, I conveniently left out the fact that I had seen the girl with three of my players only two days before her death.
But what did that mean, anyway?

I got on the plane and prayed I could sleep.