The Cincinnati Red Stalkings

by Troy Soos

  On the diamond of Redland Field, there was a return to normal as well. Heinie Groh was healthy enough to play third base again, so I was back on the bench as the Reds continued the drive for sixth place.

  After the game, I decided to see Charlotte Ashby again. At least I could answer her question about how I knew about Sarah and tell her that her childhood friend was buried in Eden Park.

  There was only half an hour left for visiting when I arrived at the Cincinnati Work House. When I went in, I already had my discharge paper in hand to show the jailer. He made the entries in his register and turned the book for me to sign.

  After scrawling my name and sliding it back to him, it occurred to me: maybe Rufus Yates had a visitor when he was here. How else would he have gotten money to pay the fine while he was confined to jail?

  “Can I take a look through that book?” I asked.

  The jailer shook his head. “You ain’t authorized.”

  “How can I get permission to see it?”

  “From somebody who is authorized.”

  I considered for a moment. “Would the president be authorized?”

  “Of the United States?” He appeared to be seriously wondering if there was a chance that I knew the president. “Yeah, I guess he would.”

  I pulled a five dollar note from my wallet. “Hope that includes a dead president.”

  He glanced at the portrait of Benjamin Harrison. “Better than most live ones.” He pushed the register to me and tucked the money in his pocket.

  It was June 30 that Yates had gotten out of jail, so I looked at the entries for that date. And there was the answer: Rufus Yates had been visited by Nathaniel Bonner of the Queen City Lumber Company.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Mr. Rawlings?”

  “Uh, yeah, this is me.” My answer was tentative; the phone call had awoken me and I wasn’t entirely sure who I was.

  “This is Adela Whitaker. We met in my office about a month ago.”

  “Yes, of course. How are you?”

  She skipped the social niceties. “You spoke with my brother on Saturday, told him there might be some scandal about to come out regarding our family.”

  “Yeah, I talked to him.”

  “I would appreciate it if you could stop by my office today to discuss the matter.” The words were polite; the tone was steely.

  “Sure.” I was planning to speak with her again anyway. Doing so at her invitation might make her more willing to talk. Although probably not by much.

  “You remember how to get here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. I’ll see you at 9:45.”

  “Well, I—” Since she’d already hung up, I decided 9:45 would be fine.

  Adela Whitaker greeted me with a firm handshake. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Rawlings.”

  “Glad to.” I hoped an offer of coffee would follow, but it didn’t come.

  Having met her brother, it struck me what a contrast there was in their surroundings. Aaron was an outdoorsman who dabbled at horse ranching; she cloistered herself in a modern office that looked like it ran with the efficiency of a military organization.

  “I won’t take up any more of your time than necessary,” she began. I took that to mean that she wanted me in and out of her office as quickly as possible. “Can you tell me the nature of the trouble you think my family might be facing?”

  I could tell her something about it, but wasn’t sure I wanted to. “It involves your father, Miss Whitaker.”

  She toyed with a fountain pen on her desk while keeping her stern gaze on me. “Details, Mr. Rawlings.”

  “It dates back to the 1869 Red Stockings,” I said, “when your father was their bookkeeper. My understanding is that a serious crime was committed, and your father had something to do with it. It’s been covered up all these years, but now a lot of material has been gathered on the old team, and whatever happened may become known to the public.”

  “You’re holding back, Mr. Rawlings.”

  “Yes. Aren’t you?”

  A flicker of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Let’s put our cards on the table.”

  “Okay.” I leaned back and adopted an expectant expression.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll go first.” The rigid set to her jaw softened and a smile took over her face; she looked like a completely different woman. “Before I do, however, I would like to apologize. I have a tendency to treat everyone who comes in here as a business competitor, and I’m afraid I can be a bit brusque at times.”

  “In my line of work,” I said, “people throw baseballs at my head and try to plant their spikes in my shins. And ‘brusque’ is the way they talk when they’re being friendly. You’ve been acting just fine to me. No need to apologize.”

  “Well, thank you. I’ve occasionally been accused of playing ‘hardball,’ but I suppose that’s a relative term.” She smiled again. “So far, I’ve never tried to spike anyone.” Then her tone became serious. “Back to the matter at hand: you are not the first person to tell me my father was involved in something criminal back in his younger days.”

  “Who else told you?”

  While Miss Whitaker considered whether to reveal the name, she began doodling on the desk blotter, making geometric figures with hard strokes. “Nathaniel Bonner,” she said. “He’s president of Queen City Lumber Company.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve met him.”

  The pen stopped moving. “You and he aren’t ...”

  “No. I was helping Ollie Perriman with his exhibit. Nathaniel Bonner is donating some bats for the grand opening, and that’s how I met him. I don’t have any other connection to the man.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The reason Mr. Bonner came here was to blackmail me. He told me that long ago my father had engaged in criminal activities and that unless I paid him a substantial sum of money each month, he would expose my father in the press.”

  Blackmail. So that was Bonner’s angle. “Did you go along?”

  “I did not!” There was a ripping sound as the nib of the pen scratched deeply into the blotter. She laid the pen down. “For one thing, he refused to tell me the particulars of the crime—he merely claimed that it was terrible enough to ruin the family. For another, I do not believe that my father could have ever been involved in anything as awful as Mr. Bonner implied. I told him to bring me proof and then I’d reconsider. I also told him that if he didn’t, I would file charges of attempted extortion against him.”

  “When was this?”

  “In the spring. I never heard from him again, so I assumed there’d been nothing to it—simply a feeble attempt to extort money.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “No. If it had gone any further, I would have.”

  “You wouldn’t have paid?”

  “No. Even if he had brought me proof, I wouldn’t have paid blackmail. And it’s not a matter of the money; it’s a matter of principle. I’ll pay generous wages for honest work, but I will not pay a penny to an extortionist.”

  “What if Bonner did go public with the information?”

  “Then my father would face up to it. That’s the way he is, and it’s the way he raised Aaron and me. My father wouldn’t want me to protect him by paying blackmail.” She folded her hands together and eased back in her chair. “Now you tell me, Mr. Rawlings: is there something that Mr. Bonner might have on my father?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Sarah and the possibility that her father was a murderer, though. “But Nathaniel Bonner might have done at least as bad as what your father did. And if I can think of a way to do it, I’d like to nail him for it.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Rawlings,” she said, “so would I.” There was a sparkle in her eyes and a firm set to her jaw. Maybe she’d never actually spiked anyone, but something told me she had what it took to do it.

  Good news gree
ted me when I entered the clubhouse at Redland Field. “Yer playin’ second today,” Pat Moran told me. “Stram’s out sick for a while.”

  “Great!” My reaction was in response to getting in the game, not to the rookie’s misfortune, but I realized it might not have sounded that way. So trying to sound concerned, I added, “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He got himself another groin injury,” the manager answered with disgust.

  “Oh.”

  “Starts takin’ his shots tomorrow.”

  Oh! That kind of “groin injury.” The phrase was often used to keep the public from finding out why a player was really out. The kind of groin injury Curt Stram was suffering from, the only kind that required shots, was syphilis. And the way Moran put it, this wasn’t the first time Stram had come down with it.

  By the time I took the field, I was enjoying the dual satisfaction of replacing my obnoxious roommate in the lineup and having finally found out what had gone wrong with the “big favor” Stram had done for Katie Perriman—he’d probably given her the disease.

  After the game, while I was drying off from the shower, the manager came up to me again. “Herrmann wants to see you.”

  “Okay. Do you know—”

  Moran averted his face and walked away. Whatever Garry Herrmann wanted to tell me, it wasn’t going to be something I wanted to hear.

  When I entered his office, and the Reds president didn’t offer me any beer or sausage, I knew it was going to be bad. “This was your last game for a while, Mickey,” Herrmann said.

  “Did Landis—?”

  “He has not reached a final decision. But there has been a new development. A man has come forward who says you tried to hire him to murder Rufus Yates.”

  “What? Who?”

  Herrmann glanced at a paper on the desk in front of him. “Earl Uhlaender.”

  The name meant nothing to me. “Who the hell is he?”

  “A hoodlum. Detective Forsch tells me he goes by the name ‘Knucksie.’ He’s made a statement to the police and to Judge Landis’s investigators. Says you and Yates had a violent encounter last week. Swears you later offered him five hundred dollars to kill Yates. Also swears he didn’t accept.” Herrmann eyed me steadily; there was no sign of the Teutonic good humor he was so famous for. “The suggestion has been made that perhaps you found someone else to do it—in order to keep Yates from talking about your relationship with him.”

  “There wasn’t any—” I realized it was pointless to go on. I’d told it all to Herrmann before. “What happens now?”

  “Mr. Uhlaender has agreed to travel to Chicago. The commissioner would like to talk with him personally. Until then ...” He spread his hands. “You don’t come to the ballpark.”

  I left his office angry. And one of the things I was angry about was that I’d actually been grateful to Knucksie for not killing me when Yates wanted him to. I wished I had told Forsch about him. It would do me no good to tell the detective now; he’d only think I was trying to get back at the thug for the charges he was making.

  I wanted to rant and rave and cuss, but no one was at home to listen and commiserate. Margie had left me a note saying that she and Karl were at the zoo and didn’t expect to be home until late. No further explanation.

  So I heated up some of Margie’s latest batch of burgoo and tried to make sense of things.

  I couldn’t understand why Earl “Knucksie” Uhlaender would claim that I’d wanted to hire him to kill Rufus Yates. One possibility was that he truly believed that I was behind Yates’s death, and with no arrests in the case, decided to provide the police with fabricated testimony in order to get me. I didn’t find loyalty to Yates a likely motive, though; the two of them hadn’t seemed close pals by any means. There was something else odd about Knucksie coming forward. The crooks behind the fix of the 1919 World Series kept their mouths closed about what had gone on; none of them provided information to Judge Landis. So why would Knucksie? The only answer I could think of was that somebody was paying him to do so.

  As for who that somebody might be, my gut feeling was that it was most likely the man who’d visited Yates in prison: Nathaniel Bonner. I started to put together a possible sequence of events.

  In the spring, Bonner visits Adela Whitaker. He demands hush money or he’ll reveal a crime from her father’s past. Adela turns him down and says come back with proof. But he doesn’t come back. So maybe the proof he thought he had was missing.

  According to Katie Perriman, somebody who wanted to buy the collection had been calling Ollie in the months before he died. It could have been Bonner: his evidence of what happened in 1869 was missing, so he thought it might have gotten into the mass of materials Perriman had accumulated.

  Perriman refused to sell the collection, so Bonner—or somebody in his employ—searches the office and kills Perriman in the process. Whatever he was looking for wasn’t found. Two days later, Bonner visits Rufus Yates in prison and gives him money to pay off his fine. Then both men continue the search: Yates by breaking into my house, and Bonner by getting involved in the exhibit at Redland Field.

  So far, it all seemed plausible. As for killing Yates, and setting me up for it, all I could think was that maybe Bonner felt I was getting too close. Since I’d talked with him at his lumberyard, he knew I had in interest in the events of 1869. And I was probably being watched—hell, Yates and Knucksie even knew which side of Dalton Avenue I habitually walked on, because they chose the right one to lay their ambush for me. So Bonner probably also knew I’d gone to the Cincinnati Work House and that I’d recently met with Adela and Aaron Whitaker.

  I couldn’t piece it all together, though. There were gaps and inconsistencies in the scenario that I couldn’t yet resolve. The problem was I didn’t think I had time to wait for more information—not with Knucksie on a train to Chicago to tell Judge Landis that I tried to have a man murdered.

  So I thought of how I could fill in the pieces, and as the night drew on, I came up with a plan.

  As I picked up the telephone, I thought it was probably a good thing that Margie and Karl were still out. They’d certainly have tried to talk me out of proceeding.

  Then I went ahead and placed the first call. Let’s see how far Adela Whitaker will go to do something about Nathaniel Bonner.

  Chapter Thirty

  I’d been asleep when Margie and Karl got home Monday night, and although she’d tried to explain what had happened at the zoo, I was too drowsy to comprehend. It wasn’t until morning that I got the full story of their adventure.

  Over a breakfast of coffee and chocolate cake, Margie said, “I never would have believed anyone could steal their food like that.”

  “From the animals?”

  “Yes. And we caught them red-handed.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “Well, an anteater died yesterday, so I knew something would be going on last night. That’s why Karl and I went—to stake out the place.”

  Margie seemed to enjoy using the phrase “stake out the place.” I didn’t get the connection. “The anteater died of starvation?” I asked.

  “No, old age, the vet said.” She backed up, and started again at an earlier point in the chronology, “You remember when I went to dig up the wildebeest?”

  I said that I did. It was when I’d been in Boston—and I’d thought at the time that she was kidding.

  “Its carcass wasn’t there. In fact, I found there were hardly any animals buried in the plot where they were supposed to be.”

  “So where’d they go? Cremated?”

  “Sausage.”

  “What?”

  “The attendant who was supposed to bury the animals sold them for meat. They went into Maynard Kimber sausages.”

  Kimber, I recalled, was one of Garry Herrmann’s guests at the memorial for Ollie Perriman. I wondered what Herrmann would think if he knew that his friend was putting anteater in his beloved wurst. “Yech,” I said.

  Karl
spoke up, “Read The Jungle sometime if you’d like to know what other things end up in sausage casings.”

  Margie went on, “He had a nice business for himself. The zoo has almost two thousand animals in the collection. Every week, several of them die from age or disease. The attendant saved himself the work of digging graves and made extra income by selling the meat.”

  “But how does stealing food from the animals come into it?”

  “The keeper of the Carnivora House found out what was going on and he wanted in on the deal. A big cat is fed about six pounds of fresh meat a day—and it’s prime meat. The keeper skimmed off more than a pound a day from each animal. With twenty or thirty big cats in the collection, it added up. And he got a better price than the attendant got for dead animals.”

  “So what happened last night?”

  “We caught them! A panel truck from Maynard Kimber was picking up the anteater, and we saw the driver give the attendant his money. The attendant tried to run off, but Karl tackled him.” She gave him an admiring look, and he blushed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I asked. “I’d have gone with you.”

  “You already had enough to worry about with your own situation,” Margie said. “Anyway, we called the police and the zoo superintendent, Mr. Stephan. The driver got away, but the attendant confessed to everything. There should be a few more arrests soon.” She was beaming and Karl was looking awfully pleased with himself.

  I congratulated them on their success, and silently hoped that my upcoming engagement this afternoon would have an equally successful outcome.

  Adela Whitaker sat behind her desk and I was in one of the two chairs in front of it. Neither of us spoke, and I had the feeling that behind her iron facade she was as nervous as I was. I kept glancing up at the portrait of her father; his stolid, homely face had a calming influence on me.

  We were waiting for the phone to ring, but were both startled when it finally did. Adela picked up on the first jangle of the bell. She listened a moment, then said, “Send him in.”