by Mike Reuther
“Of course,” Mick said. “Downstairs I got Nautilus, some treadmills, two racquetball courts…”
“Racquetball’s my thing,” Walter said.
“Yeah,” I said. “What else is your thing Walt?”
The young pitcher glared.
“I also got a sauna and some whirlpools in the place,” Mick added.
“That’s nice Mick. You got a real state-of the-art facility here.” Walter and I exchanged glares. “What can either of you guys tell me about Lance Miller?”
Billy was leaned forward on the bench, his elbows resting on his knees, his eyes on the floor. He glanced at Mick before lowering his eyes again.
“He helped me a lot with my hitting,” he said. “Lance was always there to help you out when you needed it.”
“How do you mean Billy?”
“Like if I wanted to go out to the park early to get in some extra hitting, he’d be there to throw to me.”
“From what I’ve heard Lance was out at the park early a lot of days anyway.”
Billy sat mulling that one over for a moment or two. “I guess that’s true. Thing is, he’d stop whatever he was doing to give me some help.”
The activity in the gym had grown quieter by this time. In fact, I could see more than a few of the goons had paused from their lifting and were looking our way.
“You guys lift together too?”
“Sometimes.”
“Lance worked pretty hard at that too huh?”
Billy grinned. “He didn’t even know what a bench press was that first day he came in here.” It brought smiles to the faces of Mick and Walter.
“Lance had never lifted before?”
Billy shook his head.
“Yet the guy had become quite a physical specimen in just … what … a couple of months?”
“Come off it Crager,” Mick said. “The guy built his body up a little. He wasn’t going to win any body-building contests.”
“What about it Billy?” I asked.
“Lay off him,” Walter said.
Billy’s eyes found the floor again. He began holding with his left hand the bicep of his right arm as he flexed it. “I don’t know. He just worked out real hard.”
“Come on Billy. He was doing steroids wasn’t he?” I brought my face down close to his. He looked helplessly from Walter to Mick.
“All right Crager. That’s it.” Mick grabbed my one arm and stood me up, spinning me in a semi-circle to face him.
“Listen asshole,” he said, his finger stabbing my chest. “You start harassing my customers, you’re reaching into my pocketbook. You got that.” He slammed his fist into my chest. One good poke was all I needed to find out just how strong the guy really was.
But then he began pounding me in the same spot a few times for good measure. Each time he pounded felt like an iron spike being nailed into me. It caused me to crumple up at his knees where he could have kicked me like dog shit. And I felt sure he would. Instead, he stood glowering over me for a few moments before walking away and leaving me there. I was face up, the room was swirling, and I was hacking like an asthmatic. The throbbing in my chest felt like I’d just come out on the losing end of a sword-swallowing contest.
I finally managed to get myself up to a sitting position. Mick and Walter were over me. Both of them looked like they were dying for an excuse to start up a game of kick the detective. Naturally, I was only too eager to get it started.
“Heh. Heh. Mick. What’s the matter with your friend? He shy about taking his best shot?”
“You don’t know when to quit do you?” Mick said. And then Walter came at me.
I managed to deflect his punch, and then we were tussling on the floor. He was on me, but I had him in a choke hold. We might have gone on like that forever until Mick and Billy stepped in.
“Let him be,” Mick said. The two of them grabbed the pitcher from behind and pulled him off me. Billy managed to lead Walter away. Meanwhile, I was in the midst of hacking my guts out all over again.
“So,” I said between hacks. “You boys had enough?”
Mick just looked at me with disbelief.
“Well? I’m waiting.”
He shook his head. “Look Crager. Shut up. Just shut up.”
“C’mon big guy. You can do better than that.”
“Get out of here Crager …”
“C’mon. Mick. What are you hiding?”
He glared at me for the longest time. “Billy,” he finally said. “You and Walt go back to your workout,” he said. “Me and the good detective here are going to finish this once and for all. He looked at me and nodded toward his office.
“Those two kids. They don’t got a clue.”
I sat in a chair watching Mick make tracks back and forth in his office. Normally, watching someone pacing would have driven me nutty, but I was in no condition to yap about it. My chest still felt like Sherman’s Army trashing Georgia. On the wall behind Mick’s desk, the words, No Pain, No Gain, stared back at me in big bold letters. I figured I could live with those words. At least for now.
“Relax. They didn’t say anything to incriminate you.”
“No. But you were fishing for stuff just the same.”
“This is a gym for Chrissakes. These places aren’t exactly foreign soil for steroids.”
Mick suddenly stopped pacing and wheeled to face me. “Not my gym.”
“Maybe the things are here, and you just don’t know it.”
He thought about that one for a moment. And then he went behind his desk and fell into the chair, allowing himself a deep-chested, husky laugh as he did so. Laughter from a guy like Mick Slaughter was all wrong. Kind of like listening to Sinatra at a hoedown.
“You think that’s funny. Stick around for my next act,” I said. “I’ll have you and the rest of these muscle boys howling like hyenas.”
“You’re too much Crager. You come in here accusing me of murder and then you turn around and play the good cop with me.”
“Okay. How about this. Just where were you the night of the murder?”
“Oh. It’s back to that again huh?”
“Well?”
“Okay. What night was that? Sunday?”
“Saturday.”
“Let’s see. Saturday … Saturdays are usually busy days here at the gym, but I normally only stay till about lunch time when someone else comes in to watch the place the rest of the day.
“How late were you here that Saturday?”
Mick leaned back in his chair. He laced his hands and brought both thumbs to his chin. “Let’s see. Probably till one. That’s when I went down to the marina. A buddy of mine was showing off his new boat. He was to have a little party on the thing.”
“Ballplayers there?”
“Ah … yeah. As I remember there were a few guys from the team there.”
“That’s crap Mick. The ball club had a game that afternoon.”
“Okay. Wait a minute. You’re right. There weren’t any players there.”
“How long did this party last?”
He shrugged. “Most of the afternoon.”
“Five o’clock. Six?”
“That would be about right.”
“Then what?”
“Marcia and I headed over to her place.”
“Marcia?”
Mick frowned. “Marcia’s my fiance. Listen. You don’t need to be asking her a lot of questions now.”
“Fine. So you went over to her place. What did you do once you got there?”
“Marcia cooked me dinner.”
And then the phone on Mick’s desk rang. It was one of those portable, cordless jobs. He had barely spoken into the thing before he gave me a funny look and went out the door with it cradled to his ear. A few moments later he was back.
“One of your adoring fans?”
He was studying his watch. “You’ve got about three minutes Crager. I’ve got to meet with someone.”
“We were just sitting down
to dinner.”
“That’s right. Marcia and I had dinner.”
“Then what? You tucked the little lady into bed for the night?”
“I’m a healthy, robust guy. What do you think?”
“So you spent the night?”
He let out a sigh. “That’s right Crager. I spent the night with my fiance. Are we done now?”
I slowly got up. “There’s just one thing.”
“What’s that?”
I shot my fist into his upper abdomen. He was hard all right, but I knew I’d gotten him good. He let out a mean gasp as the flesh of his stomach collapsed around my hand.
Yeah. It was a sucker punch. But no sucker punch ever felt sweeter.
“Guess that makes us about even big guy.”
He was on his knees still gasping for air when I left the place.
“Gooden. You got to be kidding. He couldn’t hold Koufax’s jock.”
Red shook his head and moved away to the television down at the end of the bar.
The TV picture had begun spinning like shish kebab turning over a flame, and Red began banging away on it with an open hand.
“But you admit that nobody was ever any better than Gooden in ‘85.”
Red wasn’t even listening. The noon news had just come on, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to miss it. Red was no news junkie, but some cutie with a husky voice had just been hired for the mid-day broadcasts. He wouldn’t consider wasting time continuing the baseball argument when he could be ogling the pretty talking head reporting the day’s fatalities, betrayals and scandals.
“Hey,” I said. “Give the boob tube a rest and name me one pitcher in the past twenty years who had a better year than Gooden.”
He stepped back from the television. The set had finally seen fit to cooperate with his back-handed blows. Red’s wet dream - a blonde, ruby-lipped anchorwoman - had appeared on the screen.
“Earth to Red.” But he just stood there, his face right against the TV.
It was after the camera broke away from Red’s fantasy girl for some footage of a warehouse fire that Red spoke. “Guidry in ‘78,” he said.
I shook my head. “No comparison. Guidry played on a World Series-winning team. Besides, his home games were in Yankee Stadium, a southpaw’s haven.”
Red shook his head. “He went twenty-five and three that year.”
“So. Throwing left-handed in that ball park, with Reggie, Nettles, Munson, Chambliss in my lineup, hell I could win ten games at the minimum.”
“You’re nuttier than ol’ Erma there,” he said, nodding toward the far end of the bar.
“Face it Red. Gooden, for that one year at least, was all but unhittable. He won twenty-four games for a team that had to struggle just to get ninety wins.”
Red stood before me scraping one of his molars with a swizzle stick. “Gooden? Give me a break. Guidry has it all over him. And I can name you a few others too.”
“Okay. Hotshot. Sing.”
“Koufax for one. He was unbelievable in ‘65.”
“Interesting choice.”
“Interesting choice hell. He won twenty-six games. Threw his fourth freaking no-hitter. Struck out 382 hitters. What does that tell you?”
“It tells me 1965 was one of the worst years for hitters. Hell. That whole decade was a pitcher’s wet dream.”
“Shit Cozz.”
“Look it up Red. By ‘69 they ended up lowering the mound and shrinking the strike zone to bring back hitting.”
“What about Eckersley,” came a voice from behind me.
There, just inside the barroom’s front door, stood Police Chief Joe Gallagher.
Chapter 7
Joe Gallagher had no sooner settled his thick girth onto the stool beside me when Red plunked a quart of Irish Whiskey on the bar before him.
“You can give that a rest for the day Crager,” he said, nodding to my beer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills which he threw on the bar between us. Then he held two fingers toward Red. “I’ll need a pair of shot glasses too.”
I knew right off that he’d been drinking. For one thing, Gallagher rarely was sober before coming into Red’s. Even on a Sunday with most of the city’s bars closed, Gallagher found places to drink - the VFW or at the barrooms of one of the fraternal groups he belonged to. His eyes had taken on that glassy-eyed look of someone who’s been into the sauce. And now he was ready to really do some serious drinking. Yeah, when Joe Gallagher set you up with a shot it was time for serious drinking.
“Sons of bitches are doing it to me again,” he fumed.
Red and I exchanged knowing smiles. Even Crazy Erma knew what was coming. She took her drink and shuffled off to one of the booths in the dining area.
“What’s that?” Red said with a twinkle in his eye. It was all Red ever needed to say to set Gallagher off on another running diatribe of politics Centre Town style. Gallagher was forever battling city hall over the way he ran his police department. Not that he was doing a bad job from what I could see. But in a town where the city council had a long history of giving the shaft to the police force, especially its top cop, Gallagher was getting his turn to be crapped on. It usually took a few drinks for him to get through with his tirade on city politics and then he would become the jovial Irishman.
“Council voted down new radios for patrol cars,” he said, pounding his fist on the bar.
“How the hell they expect you guys to communicate?” Red said. “Use donut shop pay phones?”
“Sure Red. Make jokes. But it would be money well spent.”
“Hey. The city’s all but broke.” Red said.
“That’s the thing,” Gallagher said. “They spent two hundred thousand to reconstruct that … that …”
“The dome at city hall?”
“Yeah. That Goddamn monstrosity Supposed to be someone’s idea of historical preservation. I’ll give ‘em some historical preservation.”
“Got to make city hall look good Joe. Good for the tourist trade.”
Gallagher suddenly wheeled around in his seat toward me. “Tourist trade my ass. They can fix up that monstrosity for half the money.”
“What are you suggesting Joe?” I asked with a straight face.
“What am I suggesting? What am I suggesting? I’ll just tell you what I’m suggesting.” His big hand snatched up the shot glass, and he drank off the whiskey. That done, he slowly brought the glass down then motioned with a nod of the head, a conspiratorial wink of the eye for us to both come closer. He had a secret to share.
“Those little chiselers down at city hall want to skim some money off that city dome project for their own use.”
“No. Why … why that’s corruption,” I said, widening my eyes and throwing a hand across my mouth. With a laugh Red moved off to the television. He usually lost interest by the time Gallagher was off and running with his latest story of graft, scandal and larceny in city politics. Besides, Melinda, his anchorwoman princess, was back on the tube. It was left up to me to carry the burden of baiting Gallagher.
“You’re damn right it’s corruption,” he thundered. “And I don’t have to put up with it.”
I brought my fist down on the bar and leaned toward him. “Darn it. What can I as a hardworking, taxpaying citizen of this city do about it?”
And now Gallagher came to realize that he was being strung along. He managed to fight back a grin though. “I’m not shitting you Crager. We got some bad apples running this city. Some real shysters.”
He poured some whiskey into his glass and stared at the liquor bottles resting on the shelf behind the bar. “Ah, the hell with it,” he said. We both sat quiet for a few moments, the only noise in the barroom coming from the sounds of the television set.
Melinda was finishing up the news, and Red had his nose right the hell up against the screen. Gallagher drank off his whiskey then began turning the empty glass around in his hand. “You know Crager, that stabbing the other night looks pre
tty open and shut to me.”
“How’s that?”
He grabbed the bottle and poured some whiskey for himself and me. He didn’t drink any more just yet, instead fixing his eyes on the Christmas-like colors from the barroom’s neon beer signs swirling in the golden liquid of his shot glass.
“The city’s gone to hell. My guess is someone from off the street looking for drug money killed that ballplayer.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t wash. Someone after a fix doesn’t slip into a hotel like the Spinelli.”
“I didn’t say a fix Crager. I’m saying our dead ballplayer might have been involved in some drug dealing.”
I watched Gallagher take a sip from his whiskey. “Unless you know something I don’t know.” He put down the glass and stared past me at the television. “To tell you the truth Crager, my boys aren’t getting anywhere with this. You know this is the fourth murder in the city this year. That’s more than we used to get in five years.”
“Keeps you boys on your toes.”
“Damn niggers from Philly bringing’ their shit to Centre Town,” he continued. “Killing each other over rock candy. You know we shut down two crack houses in the spring? Crack houses. Hell, when I started on the force it was the long-haired faggots and their marijuana.”
The alcohol was beginning to slur his words. His hand fumbled with the whiskey bottle. Somehow though, he managed to fill both our glasses without spilling a drop.
“Yeah. The town’s gone to hell,” he said.
“Joe. Who knocked off Lance Miller?”
He shrugged. “Some madman. Or someone pretty hopped up on drugs.”
“I thought you said it involved a drug deal.”
“Nah. My guess is someone slipped into that room looking for something, found the ballplayer there and plunged a knife in his back.”
“Just like that?”
“Had to be. You saw the body. No knife wounds on the victim’s hands, arms or anyplace else. What does that tell you?”
“That there was no struggle.”
Right. In and out. Nice and clean.”
“And the weapon was never found either.”
“Exactly. The guy knew enough to take the weapon with him. A lot of guys would have left the blade before fleeing.”
