“From a newspaper death notice,” Wolfe replied. “It seemed more than a coincidence that a veteran noted for his proficiency with a rifle should kill himself on the same night as the shooting at the baseball game. That the police in Queens did not pick up on this is hardly surprising, especially given that far too many servicemen continue to commit suicide, even almost a half-decade after the war’s end.”
“What about the weapon?” Cramer asked.
“Mrs. Hackman has what almost surely is the murder weapon, a M1 Garand rifle that belonged to her brother, and I’m sure she will give it to you,” Wolfe said, looking at the woman. She nodded.
“Not that we could prove anything by having it,” Cramer said. “It’s been days now since it was used. Besides, that bullet could have been fired by almost any .30 caliber weapon. But still, we want it.”
“It is yours, to do with as you will,” Marguerite Hackman said. “I do not want to see it ever again. And I also do not want to see that man ever again,” she added, indicating Charles Fentress.
“Assuming for a moment that the shot had killed Mrs. Fentress, what was her husband’s plan for keeping Thompson quiet?” Cramer asked.
“Perhaps you will learn that, Inspector,” Wolfe said. “My surmise is that Charles Fentress would have used the same tactics to get Mr. Thompson to end his life as he did after Senator Milbank’s death.”
“I feel like I’m in some sort of damned kangaroo court,” Charles Fentress said, sitting up straight and suddenly reverting to his combative stance. “Nothing that was said here tonight about my presumed actions can be proven. Everything is totally surmise, a setup, probably engineered by my dear wife,” he said, turning to scowl at Mona. “I want a lawyer.”
“Oh, you will get a lawyer,” Cramer said. “Purley, put the cuffs on him and let’s go.”
As Charles Fentress was led away, his wife stood and watched his back, her face a mixture of sadness and loathing. Although I was not overly fond of Mona Fentress, I could not help but feel sympathy for the woman.
“Well, this has been quite the show,” Bacelli said to Wolfe as he rose and rubbed his palms together. “Very entertaining. I told you before that I had nothing to do with the senator’s death.”
“First, I am pleased to hear that you were entertained tonight, although I assure you that such was not my intent. Second, I never seriously considered you to be a suspect, but I felt this evening might give you some idea of what is in store for you in a far different setting.”
“So now you’re a comedian, huh?” Bacelli snarled. “We’ll see who gets the last laugh.” He turned on his heel and marched out.
The others, some of them visibly amused at the byplay between Wolfe and the Mob boss, began to file out. Marguerite Hackman hung back and waited until all of them except Elise DuVal had gone down the hall, where Saul Panzer would usher them out.
“Mr. Wolfe, thank you very much both for what you did tonight and what you said about Dick. These last few years were terrible for him,” Mrs. Hackman said.
“I can only imagine what you have gone through, madam,” he said. “As a nation, we sadly lack in giving our service personnel the kind of postwar care they richly merit.”
“Dick was a fine marine.”
“I do not doubt that for a moment. In wartime, we cannot say enough about the bravery and valor of our fighting forces. But once the armistice comes, they become invisible to the public, never mind that many of them have been permanently damaged, both physically and psychologically.”
She nodded and gave Wolfe a thin smile that had no happiness behind it, then left the office. I walked her down the hall to the door, and as I opened it, she put a hand on my arm. “Even during your first trip to my house, when I realized you were not what you claimed to be, I could tell you were a good man. That is why I let you come back, and I am glad that I did. Thank you for everything you have done.” She turned and went down the steps to the street, her destination the empty house in Flushing.
Back in the office, Elise DuVal, still in the red leather chair, was jawing with Wolfe. “Well, you did it,” she said. “I never would have guessed it was Charles Fentress. Did you know from the beginning?”
“No, although of all those who were involved in this sad business, he seemed to be the most morally bankrupt—other than Franco Bacelli, of course.”
“And as you told Bacelli, you really never seriously considered him a suspect?”
“I did not, even when I still believed Senator Milbank to be the intended victim. Mr. Bacelli is currently far too occupied with fighting other battles, courtroom battles he is almost sure to lose.”
“Well, you have both my thanks and a well-deserved fee,” she said standing. “Goodnight.”
I walked her to the door. “Remember,” she said, “you are going to buy me dinner.”
“Yes, and I’m sure you just can’t wait to tell Lily Rowan about that, can you?”
“Why, Archie, why ever would I want to do that?”
“Because you’re you,” I said, smiling. “But at the risk of puncturing your balloon, I already told her.”
“You’re a killjoy, Archie Goodwin. That’s what you are.”
“Maybe, but as I told you before, I can dance up a storm. If you don’t believe me, just ask Lily.”
Chapter 30
With everyone gone from the brownstone, I called Lon Cohen, who picked up before the first ring had stopped. I gave him a rundown on the events of the evening, and after I had unloaded, he gave me a quick thank-you and set off to put the news-gathering machinery of America’s fifth-largest newspaper in motion. The man would have his scoop, as promised by Nero Wolfe.
After a marathon grilling by the police, Charles Fentress spilled the works. It turned out that he had met Richard Thompson when they sat at the same table at that Waldorf Astoria banquet. Fentress learned in their conversation about Thompson’s having worked briefly at both the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, and the ex-GI had bragged that he still had keys to both stadiums, although he had never made use of either one. At the time, that seemingly meaningless fact meant nothing to Fentress, but he filed it away and it later became significant to him.
Fentress’s confession saved the state the cost of a trial, and his high-powered Manhattan lawyer helped him escape the electric chair, although he did get life in prison and now resides in a cell at Sing Sing prison up on the Hudson north of the city, where he has plenty of time to reflect upon his sins.
Franco Bacelli also got himself one of the best and most successful defense lawyers in all of New York, but Bacelli and his slick mouthpiece had the misfortune of going up against our ambitious new federal prosecutor, who was out to make a name for himself. He certainly did during that highly publicized case, nailing the Mob boss on a fistful of charges. Bacelli’s lawyer appealed the decision without success, with the result that the former Mob kingpin now resides at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, at least fortunate that he didn’t get sent to the even worse fate of Alcatraz, that island fortress in San Francisco Bay that houses the worst of the worst in the criminal world.
As for Mona Fentress, she was handily beaten in her campaign for Milbank’s senate seat. According to Lon Cohen, the Gazette’s political editor felt she had been undone by all the publicity surrounding Milbank’s death, along with her rumored affair with him and also her husband’s murder conviction. But she was unbowed in the face of her defeat, saying that she would fight on.
“Orson Milbank’s legacy is just too big, too important, to be cast aside like yesterday’s newspaper,” she said in her impassioned concession speech. “I will be back to carry the Milbank banner forward. I promise that you have not heard the last of Mona Fentress.”
Regarding the Northern Parkway, at present it survives only on the drawing boards of the state’s civil engineering department. Increased cost estimates and continuing disputes
over its precise route have led to a stalemate in the New York legislature. Both Jonah Keller and Ray Corcoran often get quoted in the newspapers decrying the inaction of the politicians and stressing the importance of the highway to those counties that lie just north of the city.
Just last week, the New York Times ran a three-column photograph of a group of perky coeds from Vassar marching in front of the state capitol in Albany. They carried signs on sticks reading PARKS NOT ROADS! and MONEY FOR SCHOOLS YES, FOR HIGHWAYS NO. In the background, I spotted Howell Baxter, lugging a sign and grinning like the victor in a war.
For the record, I did have that dinner with Elise DuVal, and in a private room upstairs at Rusterman’s, no less. Between courses, she confided that Lily Rowan had told her I was harmless.
“You know,” I said, “a comment like that plays havoc with the image I’m trying to develop as a devil-may-care bon vivant, boulevardier, and man about town.”
“I promise, Archie, that I won’t tell anyone else,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes. “Besides, even if you weren’t harmless, it wouldn’t matter. I have developed a crush on Nero Wolfe.”
“Too bad, he’s already taken. He has concubines.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. There are ten thousand in all. Maybe Lily has told you about them. They are the orchids in the plant rooms up on the roof of the brownstone, in three temperature-controlled rooms. You will have to see them someday to fully appreciate what you are up against, and I would be happy to arrange a visit. You are a lovely and desirable woman, but give this up before you embarrass yourself. As beautiful as you are, you do not stand the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell against those exotic beauties.”
Author Notes
This story is set at the approximate midpoint of the twentieth century, roughly a half decade after the end of World War II, near the outset of the Korean War, and a handful of years before the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers baseball teams deserted their longtime hometown for San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively.
Northern Manhattan’s Polo Grounds, site of the narrative’s murder, had been home to the baseball Giants from 1911 until they migrated to California in 1957. The New York Yankees also were tenants of the ball park from 1913 until 1922; they moved across the Harlem River into the newly completed Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1923. The New York Mets played their first two seasons in the Polo Grounds, 1962–1963, before moving to the new Shea Stadium in the Flushing Meadows–Corona Park neighborhood of Queens in 1964.
The Polo Grounds also hosted several professional football teams: the New York Giants of the National Football League from 1925 to 1955 and the NFL’s New York Bulldogs in 1949. The New York Titans (later Jets) of the American Football League played in the Polo Grounds from 1960 to 1963.
The Polo Grounds often was referred to by journalists and fans as “Coogan’s Bluff” because that was the name of a promontory, or cliff, that overlooked the ball park and provided non-paying spectators a view of the action far below on the field.
The most famous moment in the venerable stadium’s history came on October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson of the baseball Giants hit a three-run homer (“the shot heard round the world”) with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Brooklyn Dodgers to give the Giants a 5–4 victory and the National League pennant in the third and final game of a playoff series to determine the championship. The teams had finished in a first-place tie at the end of the regular season. The Thomson home run was hit to approximately the same spot in the close-in left-field stands as the home run in this story that immediately preceded the murder of New York State Senator Orson Milbank.
Nero Wolfe–creator Rex Stout, who was an avid baseball fan, placed one of his Wolfe tales at the Polo Grounds. The novella “This Won’t Kill You,” from the trilogy Three Men Out (1954), is set against the backdrop of a fictional World Series between the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox and involves a murder at the ball park. Wolfe is obligated to attend the seventh and deciding game of the series because a house guest and friend, famed Paris restaurateur Pierre Mondor, has asked to see a baseball game. Archie Goodwin reports that Wolfe must suffer through sitting on the front edge of a seat at the ball park because his girth will not fit between the armrests. Uncomfortable or not, he overcomes that adversity to solve the crime—the killing of one of the Giants’ players.
According to his biographer, the late John McAleer, Rex Stout was “an ardent Giants fan,” and both his daughters add that he disliked the New York Yankees. McAleer wrote that when the Giants and Dodgers moved to California, Stout switched his allegiance to the new Mets team.
The Polo Grounds was demolished in April 1964, and the site is now occupied by the Polo Grounds Towers, a housing complex comprising four high-rise buildings.
All of the characters and events in this story are fictional, and no person is modeled on a specific individual. The Northern Parkway also is fictional and should not be confused with the Adirondack Northway (Interstate 87), which began construction in the 1950s and which runs more than 330 miles north from New York City to the Canadian border.
With the exception of Lon Cohen’s Gazette, a fictional newspaper that plays a role in many Nero Wolfe stories, all of the other newspapers mentioned either exist or did exist at the time of this novel’s setting.
As with all of my previous Nero Wolfe stories, my heartfelt thanks go to Barbara Stout and Rebecca Stout Bradbury for their support and encouragement. My thanks also go to my agent, Erik Simon of the Martha Kaplan Agency, for his tireless efforts and wise council; to Otto Penzler and Rob Hart of MysteriousPress.com for their guidance; and to the great team at Open Road Integrated Media for their work on the editing, production, and promotion of the book. A special note of gratitude to longtime friend and encourager Max Allan Collins, a son of Iowa and a filmmaker and mystery writer extraordinaire, who had made invaluable suggestions and to whom this book is warmly and deservedly dedicated.
A tip of the hat to lifelong friend and ace competitive marksman Ray Rausch, who reminded me of the significance to American troops during World War II of the iconic M1 Garand rifle, which I myself toted, cleaned, and slept with during army basic training. And most of all, thanks and love to my wife, Janet, who for a half century has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration, even in my grouchiest moods, of which there have been more than a few.
As has been the case with my earlier Nero Wolfe stories, I found several books to be particularly helpful as references:
Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street: The Life and Times of America’s Largest Private Detective by William S. Baring-Gould (Viking Press, 1969); The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe by Ken Darby (Little, Brown & Co., 1983); The Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout and the Editors of Viking Press (Viking Press, 1973); and the excellent biography Rex Stout by the aforementioned John J. McAleer (Little, Brown & Co., 1977), which deservedly won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for the best critical/autobiographical work in 1978.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 Robert Goldsborough
Cover design by Kelly Parr
ISBN 978-1-4804-4563-5
Published in 2014 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Murder in the Ball Park Page 20
