Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  Harvey stopped at the AG’s office to fill out his pistol permit application and get fingerprinted, then got back on 95 South, making Rubino’s Warwick real estate office by eleven-fifteen.

  The house in Exeter was just right: a dark, shingled colonial on the far loop of a high-end development, set well back from the street, protected from its equally affluent neighbors by phalanxes of evergreens. Inside, it was tastefully furnished and boasted a fully equipped designer kitchen. Harvey trailed behind the matronly Rubino, now only faintly reminiscent of the buxom blond he had once wooed, as she led him from one room to another. She pointed out each of the house’s virtues with that absurd zeal only real estate brokers can summon while keeping a straight face. With the possible exception of the first seven years of sex with Mickey, Harvey had never achieved the levels of enthusiasm Debbie Rubino expressed as she pointed out the flagstone fireplace and the northern light in the master bedroom. Harvey occupied himself with mentally calculating the added security arrangements he would have to make to keep them secure at night until Cooley’s hitting streak was over.

  Back at Rubino’s office, Harvey wrote out checks, received two sets of keys in return, thanked her profusely, and retired to his Honda to call a local home security firm with whom he’d had dealings on a few occasions. Within half an hour he was walking through the colonial again, this time with two of the firm’s installers, indicating where he wanted motion and sound detectors, pressure mats, and pressure switches on the stairs to the second floor. He left the men his second set of keys so they could begin work as soon as possible and then took off for the University of Rhode Island’s Crime Lab, glancing over his shoulder now and then to make sure the box containing the lawn jockey was still wearing its seat belt.

  “Don’t see many of these anymore, not even with their heads on,” Professor Roy Hinch said once Harvey had lugged the boxed lawn jockey upstairs and hoisted it onto his office desk. Although Harvey had done all the heavy lifting, it was Hinch who dabbed his forehead with a neatly folded handkerchief, took a plastic comb out of his shirt pocket, where it had been hiding behind a trio of cheap Paper Mates and a rectangular magnifying glass, and carefully tucked the hair on his graying temples back behind his ears. As he groomed himself, he never took his eyes off the jockey and the grinning head that lay gruesomely on the desk next to it. Professor Hinch worked his lips, saying nothing for the longest time. He picked up the head and examined its surfaces, then ran his finger over the severed neck of the figure.

  “What do you want to know?” he said, touching an index finger to his lips. He looked more like a man who knew a lot about wine, which he did, than a man familiar with the microscopic intricacies of crime.

  “How was it decapitated? Blunt object?”

  “Oh, I doubt that, Harvey. I doubt it very much. Cast iron’s very brittle. A blow would’ve broken or shattered the head. Even if it was wrapped in a towel. No, this was done with a Sawzall.”

  “A Sawzall?”

  “An electric reciprocating saw made by Milwaukee.” Hinch indicated a rapid forward-and-backward motion with his hand flattened into a knife’s edge.

  “Oh, of course,” Harvey said, who didn’t know his power tools very well.

  “You can tell by the unevenness of the cut,” he said, again running his index finger over the severed neck. “Cast iron’s hard to cut, and a Sawzall will make reasonably fast work of it, but because the blade moves back and forth at a high speed, it’s a little tough to control, which explains the undulating planes of the cut here. Now, you can cut cast iron with a hacksaw, and you’ll get a cleaner cut because its teeth are finer and the blade’s not shaking like a fat lady without a girdle, but it’ll take you forever.”

  Harvey took the two bottles of Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise 1997 out of his backpack and brought them down, one in each fist, on the professor’s desk.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Hinch said.

  “I take it a Sawzall’s not something you’ll find in your average joe’s garage?”

  “Well, now, that all depends if you’re a plumber, or the kind of joe who has to cut a lot of metal.”

  Harvey was back in Warwick by three, making his way up the crushed stone drive to Marshall Levy’s nouveau French Provincial mansion on Narragansett Bay. The lawn jockey was now locked in his trunk. He was let in the house by Levy’s Cambodian maid, who showed him to a flagstone patio where the hottest hitter in baseball sat shirtless, reading a magazine by the pool in Oakley shades.

  “You know what a Sawzall is, Moss?”

  “You fixin’ to cut some pipe?”

  “You know anyone who’s got one?”

  “Not offhand. Oh, I get it. The jockey.”

  “I met with a forensic friend who’s pretty sure that’s what they used.” Harvey checked his watch and said, “C’mon, we should probably head over to the park.”

  “Whatever,” Cooley said, trying to appear indifferent, although Harvey could sense Cooley’s anxiety—and his own—gathering like an angry crowd outside the gates.

  “Where’s Marshall?”

  “Massah Levy, he out da house.”

  “Very funny,” Harvey said.

  Cooley put the magazine on the matching redwood table next to his chair and rose. “I’ll get my stuff.”

  In the driveway, he walked to the rear of the car, opened the trunk, put on his cross-draw holster inside his waistband, and stuck his .38 into it, illegally for now. He also pulled a soft straw hat out of his duffel. When he got into the driver’s seat, he told Moss to put it on. Cooley didn’t protest.

  “Noticed any strange behavior in any of your teammates?” Harvey asked as he pulled out of the driveway.

  “Yeah, I notice strange behavior in them all the time. Ross Monkman has to smoke a cigar before every game. J. C. Jelsky has to spend an hour in front of the mirror checking for hair loss. Craig Venora’s got to kiss his wristbands before he can step in the batter’s box. And Hugh Croker, he’s always spitting in the first-base coach’s box. By the eighth inning, he’s knee deep in his own saliva.”

  “I think you know what I mean, Moss. How about Cubberly? You get along all right with him?”

  “Andy? He’s a harmless cracker. Grew up around a million like him. He was probably so poor growing up, he was afraid he might wake up black one day.”

  “You know he cost you a couple at-bats last week?”

  “He stole second in Cleveland, then stretched a single into a deuce in Detroit. Both times I get a free pass. You can bet I talked to the Cub Man about that.”

  “You don’t think it was deliberate?”

  “Cub Man’s too stupid to think that far ahead.”

  “Here—read this.” Harvey handed Cooley the printout and waited for him to finish.

  “Goddamn,” Cooley said, “I didn’t know that about the Cub Man. I wasn’t even in the league back then.”

  “Does that change your mind about him?”

  “Let’s say he is trying to undercut me. Goddamn it, let Cavanaugh drop him down in the batting order so he isn’t batting in front of me. Hell, the Cub Man can do my streak more damage on the field, and maybe that’s exactly what he’s been doing.”

  “Maybe he’s got friends,” Harvey said, winding through leafy streets. He pulled his cell phone out and speed-dialed Jerry Bellaggio’s number. “Excuse me,” he said to Cooley.

  “Jerry, it’s Blissberg. One more thing for you. A rogue white supremacist group called Izan Nation, based in Virginia as of six or eight years ago. Thanks.” He turned to Cooley, who was slumping noticeably in his seat. “As I was saying, Moss, maybe he’s got friends.”

  “You want to know something, Bagel Boy? I’d feel a lot better if I knew you were carrying that hardware you were referring to last night.”

  “It’s right here.” Harvey patted his Detective’s Special. “How’s your mood now?”

  Cooley smiled, gold bicuspid catching a bit of the afternoon sun through the windshie
ld. “Improving.”

  “So’s mine,” Harvey said.

  8

  IT WAS TWO HOURS before game time against the Orioles, and the Jewels players were enjoying the asylum from the real world that is baseball in general and the clubhouse in particular.

  “What do you think?” Moss whispered to Harvey at his cubicle.

  Harvey took another look at the glossy photograph of Cherry Ann Smoler in his hand, shielding it from the view of Cooley’s clubhouse neighbors. She was wearing only a spangled thong and appeared to be fornicating with a brass pole on the stage of a strip club. She eyed the camera lasciviously under blond bangs, lips parted, her mind elsewhere. The name “Ivette” was printed at the bottom of the photo, but the handwritten inscription read: “To M.C. with love, C.A.S.”

  “You’d go for some of that, wouldn’t you?”

  Sexual vulgarity was the coin of the clubhouse realm. During his playing days—and, to be honest, after them as well—Harvey had enjoyed his fair share of uncensored exchanges about the vagaries of the female body. Under the circumstances, however, he found Moss’s comment inappropriate.

  “She’s your girlfriend, Moss. Not something on the dessert cart.”

  “Forget it, Bagel Boy.” Moss smirked, snatching the photo from Harvey’s hand and sliding it facedown on the top shelf of his cubicle beneath some folded undershirts.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Harvey said. “She’s a fox, but I don’t think you should have that photo in your locker.”

  “But she’s my good luck charm,” Moss said, turning his attention to his sanitary hose. He worked them on with womanly care, smoothing the wrinkles out of the toe before unrolling the sock up his calf. Most ballplayers were slaves to rituals of preparation; suiting up for games had a religious quality to it. The cubicles were shrines to personal grooming, with their neat rows of deodorants and powders, vitamin jars and cans of protein supplements, hairbrushes and blow-dryers.

  Harvey wandered off toward the office of Jewels manager Terry Cavanaugh. It was time to make his presence felt as the team’s motivational coach.

  The Jewels clubhouse, renovated and enlarged with the rest of the ballpark, no longer resembled the seeping grotto of Harvey’s one year with the team. Now it combined the attributes of an inner-city health spa with those of a Store 24. The effect had been accomplished with wall-to-wall carpeting, harsh fluorescent lighting, and two large refrigerated cases containing soft drinks, fruit juices, and mineral water, quart containers of half-and-half, even a plastic tub filled with baby carrots floating in ice water. Although it was only an hour before game time, one long counter was already covered with chafing dishes of rice, beans, spare ribs, and fried chicken. Another counter was devoted to coffee, condiments, and commercial-size boxes of David sunflower seed packets, Bazooka bubble gum, Twizzlers, and Total cereal. Considering that after the game, win or lose, another spread would be awaiting the players, it was no wonder that baseball players had the biggest asses in professional sports.

  Jewels players in various states of undress, most of them wearing plastic shower clogs, kept coming by to lift the lids off the chafing dishes to check on, and sample, their contents. Other players stretched their hamstrings in the middle of the floor or slid new bats out of the Louisville Slugger boxes over their cubicles and took a few slow-motion swings. A few disappeared down a hallway to the team’s new fitness room filled with Cybex equipment and free weights. Still others sat at a table in the dining area, signing balls, or reading and answering mail. A few sat on a sectional sofa beneath a TV, tuned to ESPN, bolted high on the wall. The great variety of body types was a testament to baseball’s democratic nature: Height, weight, strength, and speed did not get you to the majors as fast as some quirky genius—learned as easily in a cornfield as a city lot, as easily by a slow, squat kid as a scrawny one—for throwing a nasty little curve, or putting the fat of the bat on it, or making perfect throws from the shortstop hole, or, like Harvey in his prime, vacuuming up everything hit in your direction.

  As game time approached, the chatter subsided. Some men sat meditatively on their folding chairs, staring into their cubicles. Despite the competing strains of hip-hop and salsa pouring out of ghetto blasters in opposite corners of the clubhouse, Harvey was aware of an underlying silence he remembered all too well: the sound of ballplayers taking refuge from their vulnerable public lives, taking advantage of the last few moments before battle.

  When Harvey poked his head into the manager’s office, Cavanaugh was striking the classic Baseball Manager in Repose pose: stocking feet on his desk, Diet Pepsi in one hand, the lineup card before him. Harvey remembered Terry as a utility infielder from the Florida panhandle who played primarily in the National League and later worked his way up the managerial ladder in the minor leagues. His last job before making it to the majors was managing the Jewels Triple A farm club, the Evansville Emeralds.

  “Excuse me, Terry.”

  Cavanaugh raised his tired eyes over the frames of his dime store reading glasses. He still had a youthful mop of sandy hair, but the weathered face beneath it gave his hair the air of a toupee.

  “Reporting for duty as your motivational instructor.” Harvey flung two fingers off his forehead.

  Cavanaugh pulled his legs off the desk and pointed Harvey into the chair across the desk. Harvey pushed the door shut behind him and sat. It was a windowless office, a cinderblock bunker of a room whose salient feature was a gray array of metal file cabinets. On Cavanaugh’s desk was a copy of the current issue of Sports Illustrated with Moss on the cover and the headline “Cool Stays Hot.”

  “At ease, Coach.” Cavanaugh turned his head to fire a sizzling stream of tobacco juice into a metal wastebasket near his feet.

  “So,” Harvey said, “are there players in particular you’d like me to motivate?”

  “Not that I can think of,” Cavanaugh said, tipping some Pepsi down his throat.

  “Or would you prefer that I motivate en masse?”

  “I don’t think it really matters either way.”

  “Then how would you like me to proceed?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to motivate anybody.”

  “No?”

  “The way I look at it, all that matters is that everybody knows you’re the motivational coach. It doesn’t matter if you do anything. Everyone will think you’re motivating someone else. Just the fact that you’ve been hired to motivate them will suggest to them they are not sufficiently motivated, and that in itself will be a motivating factor.”

  “What should I do in the event I get the sudden urge to motivate?”

  “I’d avoid sudden urges to motivate, Harvey. Look, let’s cut the bullshit. I know why you’re here. Felix told me this morning.”

  “Oh.” It would be nice if Felix kept him abreast of the expanding circle of cognoscenti.

  Cavanaugh sent another stream of blackened saliva into the wastebasket. Harvey wondered whose job it was to empty it at the end of the week. The manager picked up the lineup card and scowled at it. “If you were me, what would you do with Cubberly?”

  Funny how all roads so far seemed to lead to Cubberly. “Meaning?”

  “He’s not hitting. His on-base percentage is still decent, since he draws a lot of walks despite his problems with the high pitch, and I hate to juggle a good lineup unnecessarily. But he’s hurting Cooley.”

  “You mean, on the base paths?”

  “And at the plate.”

  “Is something eating him?” Harvey asked.

  “Personal problems?”

  “Yeah.” Harvey nodded, waiting for Cavanaugh to take the bait.

  The manager pressed his lips together thoughtfully and looked off. “Well, his wife and kid are back in Cincinnati. Sometimes that gets to a guy, living alone. But my view’s always been that the slump gods are irrational.” He picked up a pencil and gnawed on the eraser. “I could bat Verona in the two spot,” he said, mostly to himself.

>   “Cubberly got something against Moss?” Harvey asked.

  Cavanaugh looked at Harvey. “What?”

  “Something against Moss?”

  “Cubberly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Interesting you say that.”

  “How come?” Harvey said, bracing himself for a revelation.

  “Well, Moss has always been a bit aloof, from blacks and whites. And Latinos, for that matter. It’s his nature. As I recall, you were a bit like that yourself, Harvey.”

  “And without the talent.”

  Cavanaugh smiled. “See, with the year Moss is having, that exacerbates how he rubs some guys the wrong way. Now that he’s having a career year, what used to be just keeping his distance now strikes some people as a superiority complex.”

  “Is Cubberly one of those people?”

  “Are we talking now about the lawn jockey?”

  “We are.”

  “Say it is someone on the team,” Cavanaugh said. “What’s the motive?”

  “Maybe somebody’s got a mean streak that’s a hell of a lot stronger than his team spirit.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a paranoid streak.”

  “Terry, since I’ve been out of baseball I’ve seen people do far worse for far less rational reasons than making sure some record doesn’t fall into a black man’s hands.”

  “I would caution you against stirring things up on the team,” Cavanaugh said. “There’s a pennant I’m still trying to get my hands on. I’ve got mouths to feed at home. I didn’t claw my way back to the majors to see my team’s chances destroyed by suspicion and allegation.”

  “It’s hardly my intention.” For all of Cavanaugh’s apparent reasonableness, he was getting Harvey’s back up—not that he wasn’t born with his back already in the upright position.

  “I wonder how Monkman would do in the two spot,” the manager mused, squinting at the lineup card. “I think that’s too much beef high in the order.”