Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  “That’ll have to do. Now, listen, can you hang at Marshall’s till two or three this afternoon? I think I’ve found a house for us. I want to check it out, and then I’ll pick you up, and we can go to your place and get your things.”

  “I feel like I’m in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”

  “You’re not, Moss. You’re in the Blissberg Protect-Your-Black-Ass Program.”

  Harvey flipped through his Rolodex until he found Professor Roy Hinch of the University of Rhode Island’s Crime Lab in Kingston, where he trained a lot of the Rhode Island BCI forensic people.

  “Remember me, Hinch?” Harvey asked.

  “I remember hearing you were out of the detective game.”

  “I still like to get my feet wet now and then. Can I bring you something later today?”

  “My people are more backed up than a bus station toilet.”

  “I just want you to eyeball something and give me a low-tech opinion. Nothing fancy.”

  “When?”

  “Let’s see,” Harvey said, trying to plan his day. If he saw the house by eleven-thirty and liked it, he’d need to make arrangements for heightened security. … “One this afternoon okay?”

  “I’ll slip you in,” Hinch said without enthusiasm.

  “Hinch, you still into dessert wines?”

  “More than ever.”

  “Good. I’ll make sure there’s something in it for you.”

  The next call was trickier. Detective Linderman had retired soon after he investigated the death of Harvey’s Providence Jewels’ roommate Rudy Furth fifteen years ago. Harvey hadn’t talked to him in years, and wasn’t even sure he was still alive. Linderman answered his home phone on about the tenth ring.

  “What took you so long?” Harvey said when Linderman uttered a rumpled hello. “Couldn’t find your walker?”

  “Blissberg?”

  Harvey had to smile. It was like Old Home Week. Felix, Marshall, Campy, Debbie Rubino, and now Linderman. “It is I.”

  “Don’t laugh. My knees don’t work so good anymore.”

  “Then why aren’t you in Scottsdale with the other retired cops?”

  “I got a place in Florida, whaddya want? But it’s frickin’ July, Harvey. I like to spend the summer near my granddaughter. I hope you’re not calling me for money.”

  “Something far more valuable. I was wondering whether you could run me a little interference with the Rhode Island AG’s office.”

  “What makes you think I still got friends there?”

  “Just give me a yes or no.”

  “Not until you tell me more.”

  “I’ve got a job in your state, and I need a pistol permit for my thirty-eight because your pathetic state won’t honor my Massachusetts concealed firearms permit. I need someone to get my application pushed to the top of the pile. I’m not waiting thirty days. I don’t have that kind of time.”

  “Why should I do this for you?”

  “How about because I need to prevent a terrible catastrophe from occurring in your beloved state?”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Only if you can keep your mouth shut.”

  “You want your permit or not?”

  “One of the Jewels needs protection.”

  “The mob?”

  “Nobody knows. The ballplayer doesn’t think he has any enemies.”

  “All right, I’ll make the call for you. When are you planning on showing up at the AG’s office to fill out the application?”

  “Later today.”

  “Don’t forget to bring IDs, a recent photo, and your fingertips.”

  “I never leave home without them.”

  Harvey was leaning back in his chair, hands folded behind his head, basking in the unfamiliar glow of his own competence, when a knock on his study door was followed immediately by the appearance of Mickey Slavin in a loosely cinched bathrobe.

  “You were very loving last night,” he said. “I appreciate that.”

  “Bliss, I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to you, but you have a headless lawn jockey in the backseat of your car.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t go through my things.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I went out to my car to get some files, and I noticed a big box sitting in the backseat of your car, and I just thought I’d have a little peek. You can imagine my surprise.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got the head.”

  She glowered at him. It was amazing how good she’d gotten at glowering in recent years.

  “I was going to surprise you with it for our anniversary,” he said.

  “Anniversary of what?”

  “Fifteen years of living together? I’m pretty sure it’s the headless-lawn-jockey anniversary.”

  “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “It’s just something I picked up at a yard sale. They’re collectors’ items now.”

  “I’m sure. Especially with a severed head. You know what I think?”

  “I have a good idea.”

  “The team’s hired you to protect Moss Cooley because he’s been receiving death threats, one of which has taken the form of said lawn jockey.”

  “It’s too early in the morning for this,” Harvey said. “Did you make coffee yet?”

  “You just expect me to sit on my hands?” Mickey said as they ate bowls of Familia in the kitchen.

  “Yes,” Harvey said.

  “For how long?”

  “Until it’s no longer a problem. Then it’ll be your exclusive. That’s your reward for putting up with me all these years.”

  “Just tell me this.”

  “What?”

  “Where did the headless lawn jockey show up?”

  “At the ballpark.”

  “And the head?”

  “It showed up later,” Harvey said tersely, head bowed over his Swiss cereal to indicate his disinclination to continue. “What’s your schedule the next couple of days?”

  “I fly to New York this afternoon to do the Yankees—Devil Rays tiff tonight.” Unlike Felix, Mickey used sportscaster cliché ironically, and merely to taunt him. “Tomorrow night I’m in Cincinnati for the big Reds-Cubs clash.”

  “I’m glad we’ve been able to spend this time together.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. You’ve been just as unavailable.”

  “I’ve been right here on the sofa.”

  “Emotionally unavailable. I’m only geographically unavailable.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “You’re suffering from sad man-ism, Bliss. You’re so deep inside sad man—ism I can’t reach you.”

  “Every guy’s entitled to a few years of total dysfunctionality.”

  “Just remember to put me on your mailing list when you notify folks that you’re fully functional again.”

  “I’m coming out of it, Mick. I’m now officially attached to the hip of the best hitter in baseball.”

  “Come here,” she said, motioning him closer with her finger.

  Harvey leaned in, hoping for a kiss.

  Instead Mickey raised her paper napkin to his face. “Let me wipe your chin,” she said. “You’ve got more Familia on your face than a two-year-old.”

  7

  A MAN CARRYING A GUN is exponentially different from a man without one. A gun has the power to alter any reality into which it enters. But it’s also a beautiful fusion of form and function; a poetic, metallic extension of the hand; deadly jewelry. Shooting a gun has a hard elegance about it not entirely related to its deadlier duties, which is why you can always find cops in the bowels of a police station at two in the morning firing off a couple hundred rounds for the sheer brain-changing, soul-satisfying pleasure of it. At a certain level, firing a gun is just another explosive physical challenge, like hitting a golf ball well, a first serve, or a hanging curve.

  Guns were not in Harvey’s blood. He had come to them late, in his thirties, when his new profession demanded it. His rapport with his gun wa
s clouded by a healthy aversion to violence. While Mickey was in her study downloading files from her ESPN producer on the Yankees and Devil Rays, Harvey got down his nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38, removed its chamois swaddling, and laid it on the bed next to a box of hollow-points and the little clip-on buckskin cross-draw holster he used to carry it inside the left side of his belt. History could not be undone, gunpowder uninvented, and so he accepted his gun as an inevitable and morally justified advantage in situations that might otherwise end badly as far as society in general and himself in particular were concerned. But every time he pulled the trigger at a firing range, each shot seemed to leave on his soul a trace of dread, a memory of the damage he might have done. The idea that tools of such instant and remote-controlled violence were available to ordinary citizens—above all teenagers who either had not yet tasted mortality or had become impervious to it—still shocked him.

  Harvey dressed in a dark blue short-sleeved sport shirt that draped comfortably over his linen pants. The shirt had been expensive, far more expensive than polyester ought to cost. He was feeling a little Rip Van Winkle-ish these days, rubbing his eyes at a changed world and its oxymorons: expensive polyester, beautiful Providence, The Jewel Box, gun-toting Blissberg. He wiped down his pistol with an oily cloth, then clipped the cross-draw holster inside his pants about eight inches to the left of his belt buckle and slid the gun into it. He practiced drawing it a few times, lifting the tail of his shirt up with his right thumb as he grabbed the checkered walnut grip and raised the pistol into firing position, his left hand gripping the bottom of his right for support.

  He put everything—gun, bullets, holster, oily cloth, and cleaning kit—into a small leather bag. Then he packed a week’s worth of clothes and his toiletries in a nylon duffel and put it in the trunk of his Honda, along with his gun bag, his Toshiba laptop, two bottles of Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise 1997, and a pair of dark blue coveralls with the name “Stanley” stitched on the left breast in white thread.

  When he came back in the house, Mickey was still at the PC. Harvey went back to his office and called Jerry Bellaggio, the former FBI special agent and Boston private detective under whom Harvey had once worked in the 1980s to earn his license. Bellaggio was retired and almost always at home now, thanks to his emphysema. Leaving the house required him to drag along a portable oxygen tank about which he was self-conscious.

  “I need some basic research,” Harvey said.

  “Hey, what happened to motivational speaking?” Bellaggio said.

  “I was highly motivated to stop motivating people.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ve just been hired to bodyguard Moss Cooley.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised. Aaron had one, you know, chasing Ruth.”

  “Some joker left him a headless lawn jockey with a note, then hung the head from his garage ceiling.”

  “Any evidence there’s more than one person involved?”

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “Two or more, and it falls under possible FBI jurisdiction. Title 18, U.S. Code 241, Conspiracy against Rights.”

  “Right now we’re not trying to shine a big light on it. It could just be some asshole showboating.”

  “Who knows about it?”

  “The team’s top management and me, basically.”

  “They haven’t gone to the locals?”

  “No. I’m their insurance policy right now against having to open the thing up to a public viewing. That’s why I need you.”

  “Well, go on, give me my marching orders.”

  “First of all, can you get on the Web while I’m baby-sitting and find out everything you can about Negro lawn jockeys, especially cast-iron ones—who still makes them, who distributes them in Rhode Island, any news stories or legal cases involving lawn jockeys? This one’s about two feet tall, goes about fifty pounds. He’s hunched over, wearing a red vest and cap, and he’s holding a hitching ring in his extended right hand. His head is a caricature—bulging eyes, obsequious grin. You still have access to FBI databases?”

  “I’ve got a friend in the BAU, but the bureau frowns on the abuse of database privileges.”

  “Doesn’t it count for anything that you’re a proud member of the Society of Ex-Special Agents?”

  “Yeah. That and six dollars will get me an FBI souvenir key ring. I don’t like to call in too many favors, Harvey. It puts my buddy at risk.”

  “Oh, for chrissakes, Jerry, I’m feeding you data the FBI can use in their profiling.”

  “But it’s not their case.”

  “Some day it might be theirs. I just need to run with it for a while.”

  “Well, tell me what you want,” Bellaggio said, wheezing.

  “I need to know about any right-wing or racist activity in southern New England, especially groups or incidents where death threats involving lawn jockeys or other segregationist symbols are the signature. Also anybody in southern New England currently under federal surveillance for suspected hate crimes.”

  “All right. Let me see if I can get my buddy to tap in for you. What about the note?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it handwritten or typed?”

  “Neither. Cut-out letters from magazines.”

  “Did you know that ninety percent of those are written by the so-called victims themselves?”

  “You’re kidding,” Harvey said.

  “Nope. It’s a curious fact, since the bad guys would be better off using that technique, but for some reason they insist on writing or typing them themselves. Bureau’s got a huge repository of death threats and ransom notes to draw on, but cutouts aren’t going to help you.”

  “In any case, I seriously doubt that Moss Cooley sent himself a decapitated lawn jockey with a note telling him to lay off DiMaggio’s streak. He doesn’t need publicity that bad.”

  “No, I suppose not. So where do I reach you?”

  “I’ll be on the fly, Jerry, so use my cell phone number the minute anything lights up.”

  On the way out of the house, he gave Mickey’s ass a fierce squeeze, and she gave him two sheets of computer downloaded printout, folded in thirds, saying, “Read this before you see Cooley today.”

  As Harvey drove from Boston to Providence, there was a moment—it was soon after he hit the straight leg of 95 that began around Norwood and shot south to Rhode Island’s capital—when he felt like he was passing through a membrane from one world to another. It was hard to explain to others, the uncanny feeling he had about Providence, that it existed in another place and time. Maybe it went back to his childhood outside Boston. Providence was only fifty miles away, yet he had never gone there as a boy. It lurked on the edge of his awareness, like an aunt too eccentric to visit. That he had finished his playing career there, in the costume jewelry capital of America, only enriched its personal mythology for him.

  No matter how many television shows were set in Providence, no matter how much they gussied it up with canals and urban renewal, it was still a city ensnared in the past. In fact, it was the only major American city whose entire downtown was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. For forty years, from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, there had been virtually no money for new building downtown. Despite its recent growth spurt, the city continued to exhibit what a Christian Science Monitor journalist once called “a curious lack of bustle.” Who could explain Providence? The New England mob, with roots in Prohibition, when Narragansett Bay was a rum-runner’s paradise, made a Federal Hill storefront its headquarters, while only a mile away, on College Hill, Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design churned out the power elite and the avant garde. In this tight town, everything was a stone’s throw away from its contradiction. Its mayor was a man who had once extinguished a lighted cigarette on the forehead of a man he suspected of sleeping with his estranged wife, but now sold “The Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce” on the Internet.

  On the empty straight stretch of 95, H
arvey unfolded the printout Mickey had given him, propped it up on the steering wheel, and read it in snatches. It was a short item from Sports Illustrated, published almost six years ago, headlined “Farewell to Al Molis.”

  Journeyman catcher Al Molis was found dead last week in an Ohio motel, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Thus ended one of the saddest major league baseball careers in recent memory. Molis, 35, who had been released this spring by the St. Louis Cardinals, failed to catch on with another team and at the time of his death was contemplating a coaching offer from an undisclosed minor league team, according to his estranged wife Jeannette.

  He had a major league lifetime batting average of .244 with six teams, but was perhaps best known for his highly unorthodox political activities in a sport not known for its players’ political involvements. A professed right-winger and member of the rogue white supremacist group Izan Nation, based in Virginia, Molis recruited fellow major leaguers to his cause. As a member of the Colorado Rockies, Molis was arrested, along with teammates Andy Cubberly and Rod Duquesne, for disrupting a Black Pride parade in downtown Denver by shouting racist slogans and hurling white paint-filled balloons at the marchers. The charges were eventually reduced, and all three were required to perform community service.

  On the field, Molis was twice reprimanded by the league for his habit of whispering racist comments to black batters from his position behind home plate, but his defensive skills and knack for handling pitchers—yes, even African-American ones, as long as they were his teammates—kept him in the league for twelve years.

  Always prone to erratic behavior and drug use, Molis’s troubles seemed to worsen over the winter. Police in his hometown of New Welford, Ohio, arrested him in January for possession of crystal methedrine and had to subdue him with pepper gas.

  Molis once said to a reporter who asked him what it was like playing for so many different teams: “I’ve only played on one team my entire life—the white team.”

  Harvey gunned his Honda southward. As he approached the gleaming domed Rhode Island State House off 95, just north of downtown, he was surprised by Snoot Coffman’s face smiling down on him from a billboard. Coffman was holding up a baseball glove, which seemed to be catching the line of copy “CATCH EVERY JEWELS’ GEM ON WRIX WITH SNOOT COFFMAN.” A cartoon bubble coming out of Snoot’s mouth contained his signature “Now how ’bout dat?”