Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  Coffman nodded thoughtfully. “Anyway, rest assured I’m not trying to do your job. My daddy was an army colonel, and I must’ve gotten his gene for maintaining order.” He looked off. “Ladies!”

  He beckoned to a short woman and two teenage girls who were walking toward them on the grass. The woman was fighting middle age in a too-tight summer dress that said too much about a body that wasn’t what it had been. She was in obvious competition with her daughters, who wore matching halter tops, inside of which their breasts trembled like Jell-O molds.

  Coffman introduced his wife, Cindy, to Harvey, who took her plump hand.

  “C’mon, Daddy,” the taller of the two girls said. “I want to say hi to Moss.”

  “My family,” Coffman said to Harvey. “God love ’em. These are my precious jewels, if you’ll pardon the expression, Tara and Tiffany. This is Harvey Blissberg, who used to play baseball.”

  The daughters had no interest in anybody who “used to” anything. “Nice to meet you,” they mumbled without meeting his eyes.

  “You must be big Moss Cooley fans,” Harvey said to them anyway.

  “They’ve been fans since we had some of the ballplayers over for a clambake a while back,” Coffman said.

  “He picked me up and threw me in the pool!” the shorter one said in a voice that sounded carbonated.

  Coffman hugged this one to him and kissed her hair. “I think Tara’s more impressed by that than the streak. You have any children, Harvey?”

  “Sadly, no.”

  “There’s nothing sweeter than family. Nothing sweeter.”

  “Oh, stop pontificating,” Cindy said, elbowing her husband affectionately. “Leave the poor man alone.”

  “Yes, dear,” Coffman said, winking at Harvey. “Nothing sweeter. So you’ll think about being my guest on the pregame show? Don’t fret. I’ll do all the talking. In fact, I insist on it.”

  “As usual,” his wife deadpanned, fondling an earring.

  “Here comes Moss,” Tiffany said as Cooley swaggered slowly out of the batting cage. But he walked right past Harvey and Coffman’s avid, giggling daughters, oblivious to all of them. He kept his eyes down, lost in some deep ritual of mental preparation, some private preserve where the hollering of history could not reach him.

  “Mr. Blissberg.”

  Harvey turned. Now it was a big young man in his twenties standing next to him in a pale blue polo shirt and slacks. He had a hard face and ballpark franks on his breath. His shaggy brown hair was expensively cut, but his shoes—Vibram-soled clunkers—gave him away as a cop.

  He excused himself from the Coffman family and turned to the young man. “Yes?”

  “I wonder if I could speak with you for a moment. My name’s Joshua Linderman. Detective Joshua Linderman of the Providence Police Homicide Division.” He extended his hand.

  Taking it, Harvey felt a smile spread across his own face like a pool of warm syrup. “Oh, my God,” he said. “You’re his son.”

  “Nephew, actually.”

  “Well, I’m a big fan of your uncle.”

  “And he’s a fan of yours.”

  “So, you’re in the business too now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Part of the security detail here?”

  “No, sir. I’m off duty. I came to see you.”

  Joshua Linderman was at the age when youth and authority were awkwardly blended in him, especially out of uniform. Harvey was tempted to cure him of all these yes sirs and no sirs, but he was at the age when he was actually beginning to enjoy a little blind respect. “What about?”

  “I’ll make it quick. I know why you’re here.”

  Harvey’s heart began to sink. “It doesn’t seem to be a secret the team’s hired me temporarily as a motivational coach.”

  “More of a security consultant, I’d say. You’re here as a bodyguard for Moss Cooley.”

  A roar went up as Ross Monkman, the Jewel’s starting right fielder, parked one in the upper deck. “Why do you think that? Did your uncle tell you?”

  “No, actually a member of the force, a friend of mine, who moonlights here at the park. He overheard you and Mr. Cooley talking alone in the clubhouse.”

  Of course. The twenty-something guy who was cleaning up late last night while he and Moss were talking by his cubicle.

  “Who else knows?”

  “Him and me. I thought you might let me in on what’s going on.”

  “Don’t take personal offense at this, Josh, but if something’s going on and the police haven’t been brought in on it, it’s for a reason. And it’s not my decision. For the time being, it’s important for me to be able to operate alone.”

  “That’s not always a good idea.”

  “Let me make a deal with you. If you and your friend will keep quiet about this for now, I promise you that if the situation changes and I need help, I’ll come to you for it. Give me space now, I’ll make sure to cut you in on the action later.” Harvey held out his hand. “Shake?”

  Young Linderman hesitated. “I don’t like it.”

  “Of course you don’t like it. If I were you, I wouldn’t, either. Look at it this way, Josh. If I get lucky, you get lucky. Ask your uncle about that.”

  “All right.” He took Harvey’s hand. “As long as you don’t break any laws, Mr. Blissberg.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Here’s my card.” The detective gave it to Harvey.

  “And don’t put anyone on my tail. You can’t begin to imagine how badly that would fuck everything up. Okay?”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, sir.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  As Harvey watched the young detective vault the low wall by the dugout and disappear into the stands, he saw Terry Cavanaugh sitting on the bench talking to Andy Cubberly. Cubberly looked straight ahead, nodding once or twice, as Cavanaugh talked.

  High in the owner’s skybox, Marshall Levy, general manager Felix Shalhoub, and Harvey watched the grounds crew drag the infield in preparation for the game.

  “Tell me about Cubberly,” Harvey said.

  Marshall and Felix exchanged enigmatic smiles.

  “What?” Harvey asked. He felt like a child at the dinner table whose parents shared a secret.

  “You thinking about the soup can, Marshall?” Felix said.

  “Yep.”

  Felix laughed, turning to Harvey. “Andy was rehabbing a little problem in his right shoulder last season, and the team doctor told him to take a soup can in his right hand and perform a certain series of exercises every day.”

  “So a couple of weeks later,” Marshall said, “Dick asks Andy how it’s going, and Andy says his shoulder’s no better. Well, Dick says, are you doing the exercises? Well, no, not exactly, Andy says. Well, why not? Well, Andy says, because I don’t have a soup can.”

  “He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier,” Felix said.

  “How long has he been here?”

  “Second year. We got him from Cincy for two young pitchers in our system.”

  “All in all,” Marshall added, “he’s held down center field pretty well for us. Last season he sprayed the ball around pretty good. Unfortunately, word’s got around the American League that he can’t hit the high stuff, and his average has suffered.”

  “What about his political activities?” Harvey asked.

  “What political activities?” Marshall said.

  “Are you talking about that thing a few years ago with that nutcase,” Felix asked, “the catcher who killed himself?”

  “Al Molis.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He was arrested with Molis and another guy for disrupting a Black Pride parade in Denver when he was with the Rockies,” Harvey explained for Marshall’s benefit.

  “Andy’s a cracker,” Felix said.

  “Who twice last week tried to sabotage Cooley’s streak.” Harvey recounted the two incidents for them.

  “I
missed that,” Marshall said. “I wasn’t on the road trip.”

  “So you’re trying to put two and two together,” Felix said.

  “I was just wondering whether you knew anything about his life up here in Rhode Island.”

  Felix spoke. “I think he’s got a condo in Wayland Square. His family stayed in Cincy.”

  “What about the minorities on the team? Owens? Barney? Ferreiras? Guercio? Who’s that black middle reliever you’ve got?”

  “Arnell,” Felix said. “Wakeen Arnell.”

  “Cubberly friends with any of them?” Harvey said.

  “I’d say he keeps his distance,” Felix said.

  Marshall looked out the skybox window. “I think you’re pressing, Professor.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know, a baseball team’s just a microcosm of society,” Marshall said. “People stick to their own kind.”

  “I don’t suppose you could get me a list of the players’ phone numbers and addresses?”

  “It’ll just take a second.” Marshall picked up the phone next to his chair and pecked out an extension. “Martha,” he said, “would you mind walking a players’ telephone and address list up here? Thanks.” After hanging up, he dug in his pants pockets and brought out two sets of car keys. “Before I forget,” he said, tossing them to Harvey, “the Subarus are in the players’ lot. License numbers are on the keys.”

  When the public address announcer announced the starting lineups just before the game, Andy Cubberly was no longer batting second in front of Moss Cooley. On the Jumbotron in center, the Jewels’ lineup looked like this:

  Ferreiras 2B

  Venora 3B

  Cooley LF

  Guercio DH

  Barney IB

  Monkman RF

  Cubberly CF

  Owens SS

  Costa C

  Harvey wondered if Cavanaugh had been talking to Cubberly about the lineup change in the dugout, and that was all.

  “Your doing, Felix?” Harvey asked.

  “Didn’t say a word to Terry, swear to God.”

  Harvey sipped his beer and looked at the haystack. Technically, his job wasn’t finding the needle. It was keeping Cooley alive while Cooley kept his hitting streak alive, which he did in the bottom of the first with a standup triple—his first triple of the streak—down the right-field line.

  Forty-seven games. For the first time, Harvey sensed, Joltin’ Joe was looking over his shoulder.

  10

  HARVEY EXCUSED HIMSELF IN the second inning and made his way down from the skybox and out to the players’ parking lot.

  “Is that Cubberly’s car?” he asked the parking lot attendant, pointing at random to a black Mercedes.

  “No,” the attendant said, “that’s his over there. The Jeep Cherokee Laredo.”

  Harvey went to his own car and took out of the trunk his dark blue coveralls with “Stanley” stitched on the front. He wiggled into them in his car, checked the players’ address list again, and drove the short distance to Wayland Square on the city’s residential East Side, not ten minutes from the ballpark.

  A drive-by showed that Cubberly’s residence was better for his purposes than the condo Felix had described. Cubberly was in fact renting a small stucco-and-timber Tudor a block from the business district, an old house that would provide easier access. Harvey circled the block and parked on the street just down from Cubberly’s driveway. It was now after eight and getting dark, and the streets were empty except for four kids playing street hockey with an orange Day-Glo ball. A few lights in neighboring houses signaled the transition from dusk to night. With a metal toolbox in hand and a pretext in mind—if stopped, he’d say that Cubberly had left him the key so he could measure for some built-in bookshelves—Harvey walked boldly up the driveway and around the back, where a freestanding garage, an unpruned boxwood hedge, and two maples in full foliage gave Harvey excellent cover as he used his lock-pick set to easily open the latch-bolt on the door into the kitchen. Cubberly hadn’t even bothered with a chain lock.

  With its avocado appliances and sheet linoleum, the Tudor’s antiquated kitchen evoked a vague and dreary series of memories from Harvey’s childhood. In the fading light, he would have to work fast or risk turning on suspicious lights. A glance at the uncluttered Formica countertops suggested that Cubberly didn’t spend much time in the kitchen. Harvey walked through an arch into the dining room, depressing with its yellowing wallpaper, scratched mahogany table, and narrow casement windows. Again, no signs of Cubberly’s current life. With his family back in Cincinnati, Cubberly had more important things on his mind than nesting.

  In the living room there was a pile of unopened mail on the coffee table—bills and circulars and credit card offers—addressed to Andrew Cubberly. Next to it sat a half-drunk cola, the brown beverage having drifted to the bottom of the glass beneath a layer of water formed by long-melted ice cubes. There was a Mission-style easy chair with cracked leather cushions facing a television. An almost empty bag of pretzel rods on the coffee table completed a sad tableau that lacked only Cubberly himself, killing an evening in front of the tube. There was a pile of sports, business, and entertainment periodicals on the floor near the television, and with a burst of hope Harvey quickly leafed through them, looking for clipped-out headlines. It was too much to ask that Cubberly was dumb enough to try intimidating Cooley into ending his streak prematurely and dumb enough to leave the evidence lying around the living room.

  The entire first floor was disturbing in its otherness, a musty museum of brown furniture and cheaply framed prints. What could explain a highly paid baseball player choosing to live in such secondhand squalor? Perhaps he had grown up in poverty so overwhelming that he could still not escape it and re-created it as best he could out of the raw material of these rentals. Harvey’s emotions swung wildly between paranoia and unwanted compassion. He felt some simple relief as he climbed the olive-green-carpeted stairs to the second floor, with its promise of more light.

  On the landing, where the stairs turned, he passed an antique sword leaning against the wall. He stopped to pick it up. With his right hand on the leather grip and his left on the worn leather scabbard banded and tipped with brass, he pulled the sword out, its long and gently curving blade emerging like a deadly snake. The metal had tarnished to a dull gray but held its edge. Stamped at the base of the blade was “Hyde & Goodrich” and underneath it “New Orleans” and underneath that “1862.” He hefted it in his hand, marveling at how a Confederate soldier or, more likely, given the ornate guard, an officer—smaller than men of today—could wield such a heavy weapon effectively. Harvey doubted that the sword had come with the house, leaving him to wonder whether Cubberly collected Civil War memorabilia or the sword had passed down to him through the generations from a rebel ancestor. He carefully replaced it against the wall, thinking that, whatever its provenance, Cubberly probably kept it there in case of intruders just like Harvey himself.

  On the second floor he was met by a spindly floor lamp with a fringed mustard shade and a telephone table on which he was hardly surprised to find a rotary-dial telephone. The rest of the floor consisted of three bedrooms, each one smaller than the next, and a bathroom with a shag bath mat and a shower curtain cloudy with scum and mildew.

  Almost all the evidence of Cubberly’s occupancy was concentrated in the largest of the bedrooms, overlooking the street. It was the only room that had been altered by his presence, although his additions were few: a Torso Track exercise machine; a set of dumbbells; a CD player and a CD storage tower filled with a mix of rock and country-and-western music; and a king-size bed with a black lacquered metal headboard. Atop the painted pine bureau was a pharmaceutical skyline of Tylenol PM and Motrin bottles, aerosol shaving cream and deodorant cans, and skin cream dispensers.

  Whatever Harvey thought he might find as he went through Cubberly’s drawers—white supremacist literature; scissors, tape, and unused letters clipped from mag
azines; iron dust and a Sawzall—he found only clothes and an X-rated videocassette called The Better Bosom Bureau, whose box cover guaranteed that all the women featured within were in possession of their original breasts. He sifted through the detritus: paper clips, receipts, blank stationery, pens, and a roll of first-class stamps. A fistful of Providence Jewels schedules. A rubber mouth guard. A snapshot of an unsmiling brunette and a boy who looked like Cubberly. There was nothing lying around, not a scrap of evidence, to indicate he was still involved in racist groups or activities. An address book, closely examined, might tell a different story, but Harvey couldn’t find one. Cubberly probably had it with him. Perhaps he had told him the truth, that he wasn’t into that shit anymore.

  The bookshelves held one surprise: a smattering of serious Civil War history books and novels—McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, Channing’s A Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina, the eyewitness accounts of Gettysburg by Lieutenant Frank Haskell and Colonel William C. Oates, and Keneally’s Confederates, among others.

  A bookmark protruding from McPherson’s book caught his attention. Harvey took the volume down and opened it.

  It was a chapter, heavily underlined, called “South Carolina Must Be Destroyed,” and it detailed the final Union offensive of the war, in the spring of 1865, after Sherman had completed his “march to the sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah. In February Sherman turned north and began moving his sixty thousand men through one of the last Confederate regions spared Yankee invasion: the interior of South Carolina. Harvey, who, like most aficionados of the Civil War, had read McPherson’s history when it came out in the late 1980s, stood near the bedroom window and read the copious underlinings in the dying light.

  “As his army had approached Savannah in December 1864,” McPherson wrote, “Georgians said to Sherman: ‘Why don’t you go over to South Carolina and serve them the same way? They started it’… Destroyed it was, through a corridor from south to north narrower than in Georgia but more intensely pillaged and burned. … The war of plunder and arson in South Carolina was not pretty, and hardly glorious, but Sherman considered it effective. … ‘My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.’ …Sherman was confident that the war was nearly over and that his destruction of enemy resources had done much to win it.”