Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  In deep center, the bull pen gate opened in the fence, and a compact figure with long, blond hair emerged, sliding his emerald green nylon warm-up jacket over his left arm. He walked across center field toward the mound, pulling abreast of Harvey, who accompanied him part of the way.

  “How’s the arm?” Harvey said.

  Rudy jutted out his lower lip. “It’s been better. I can’t get my fastball to lay down where I want it tonight.” He stroked his sheathed left arm nervously with his glove, as if to encourage it.

  “Then go with the slider. It’s been looking pretty good to me.”

  “You think so?” Rudy said with his way of giving too much credit to obvious comments. “But this guy creamed the slider last time I showed it to him.”

  “That one was up in his wheelhouse, Rude. Keep this one down.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Rudy said, a little glumly.

  “Now you’re the one who’s worrying too much. Just go out there and get ’em.”

  “Sure,” Rudy said, and they walked a few more yards before he squinted up at the press box and asked, “Seen Slavin tonight?”

  “I don’t think she’s here. I think she’s out covering women’s soccer or something.”

  Rudy spat. “When’re the three of us going to get together again? I have fun with you guys.”

  Harvey looked straight ahead.

  “I tried to call you last night,” Rudy said. “Were you at Mickey’s?”

  “Could be.”

  “She’s pretty good in bed, huh, Professor?”

  Harvey turned to look his roommate in the eye. “You tell me.”

  Rudy pulled twice on his ear. “Did I say something wrong or something?”

  They walked a few more yards without speaking. Then Harvey said, “Go get ’em, and keep the goddamn slider down, will ya?”

  Rudy warmed up on the mound. Dean Levine of Chicago promptly stroked his first pitch deep in the hole at second. Rodney Salta couldn’t make a play on it, and the bases were loaded for Mac Bodish, who swung and missed on a slider, then picked on a fastball at the knees. From Harvey’s perspective in center, the pitch didn’t tail, it didn’t rise, it didn’t sink; all it did was jump off Bodish’s bat and rattle off the wall in left. By the time Rapp chased it down on the warning track, three runs had scored and Bodish was standing on third. The White Sox now led 4-2, and it stayed that way.

  In the clubhouse, the Jewels stripped off their white double-knit uniforms with the depressing black and green trim. Chuck Manomaitis, the shortstop, was once again trying to sell Steve Wilton his digital alarm clocks at a small margin over what he had paid to get them from Ronnie Mateo. Wilton once again suggested to Chuck an unsavory use for the clocks that quickly ended the negotiations.

  Half a dozen reporters trying to corner a few quotes scurried underfoot. The dean of the local baseball writers, Bob Lassiter, of the Providence Journal-Bulletin, accosted Les Byers, the Jewels’ third baseman.

  “Les,” Lassiter said, wagging his pencil. “I make twenty-nine thousand a year. You make one forty-five, and I’m not even going to mention the bonus on signing and deferred annuity. Now, if you ask me, you’re getting paid enough to swing at that called third strike in the ninth.”

  Les stepped gingerly out of his jockstrap, held it for a moment in front of Lassiter’s nose, and let it fall to the floor like a coquette releasing her handkerchief. “Man,” he bellowed, “you expect me to do ever l’il thing? The game’s hard work. Shucks, sometimes we put in six, seven hours a day.”

  Lassiter, who did not excel at getting jokes, stammered, “Well—well, that’s not exactly slave labor.” But Les was already showing him his back.

  “Hey, Furth,” Steve Wilton yelled across the locker room. “Way to handle Bodish. Next time, why don’t you throw it to him underhanded?”

  It was one thing to ride a teammate like that when reporters were not around. “Shove it, A-hole,” Rudy yelled back.

  Harvey caught up with him at the long table in the middle of the locker room where the post-game meal was laid out—hamburgers, fried chicken, french fries, and tossed salad provided by the owner’s, Marshall Levy’s, sister, who operated a catering outfit in nearby Attleboro, Massachusetts.

  “I hear the fried chicken’s good here,” Harvey said.

  Rudy was wearing nothing but shower clogs. He picked up a hamburger, tossed his hair off his face, and said, almost carelessly, “He’s right, you know. I couldn’t have done any worse throwing underhanded.” He took a bite out of the hamburger, handed the rest to Harvey, and shuffled toward the showers.

  Harvey pushed a few french fries into his mouth and followed Rudy, passing the open door to Felix’s tiled office on the way.

  “Gentlemen,” the manager was explaining to a trio of reporters, “we stopped hitting after the fifth inning, the bull pen was not in a positive posture tonight, and at the end of nine we were behind by two runs. And that’s the whole six flavors.”

  OF THE FIVE MOST popular topics of locker room conversation among ball players—hunting, fishing, cars, real estate, and women—only the last interested Harvey, and even then he found there was little to be gained by subjecting his views to clubhouse scrutiny. Yet clubhouses were the closest thing he had known to an office in his life, and he felt protected by their walls. It was with a feeling of returning to his natural habitat that the next morning, on Wednesday, August 29, after dropping off his Chevy Citation for a tune-up, he had a taxi leave him in the players’ parking lot at Rankle Park. Nine-thirty was early to show up for the afternoon game against Chicago that would close out the series, but Harvey felt he needed some extra work against the pitching machine under the left field stands. He liked the ball park early in the morning. Only Dunc would be in the clubhouse. When Harvey swung open the door, Dunc was standing just inside.

  Contrary to the unwritten law that all major league clubhouse managers had to be seriously lacking in human qualities, Dunc was better-natured than twenty years of catering to the whims of young athletes would seem to warrant. He was short, amiable, and had a taste for apricot brandy. Harvey, who occasionally supplied him with a pint, found that in exchange Dunc was more than willing to load baseballs into the pitching machine.

  At the moment, however, Dunc was wearing the distorted expression of someone who had inadvertently swallowed his chewing tobacco. His jaw hung open—revealing that in fact his tobacco was still there, in a mouth full of brownish kernels that had once been his teeth. He stood there in his white duck uniform staring somewhere to the right of Harvey’s face.

  “What gives, Dunc?”

  Dunc said nothing, but raised a stubby arm and pointed behind him toward the center of the locker room.

  “Well, what is it?”

  Dunc didn’t speak, or wasn’t able to, and Harvey went past him into the empty clubhouse.

  The Providence Jewels’ clubhouse was a collection of unattractive rooms beneath the stands along the right field line. Nauseating green indoor-outdoor carpeting had been laid down over the original cement floors; given a choice, however, Harvey would much rather get dressed on an artificial surface than play on one. The lockers, open cubicles, took up three of the locker room’s four walls, and in front of each was an orange or powder blue molded plastic chair like the ones found in Greyhound bus stations; given the team’s operating budget, there was no reason to believe the management hadn’t found them in an abandoned Greyhound bus station. The fourth wall, a stretch of gray plaster, featured various calendars, schedules, bulletin boards, equipment lockers, and a large blackboard for personal messages such as “Stan—call your wife” and “You suck, Rodney,” as well as for inspirational memoranda like “Winners Are People Who Never Learned How to Lose,” usually scrawled by Felix Shalhoub in palsied capital letters.

  By the door to the trainer’s room was a bat rack and next to it stacked cases of soft drinks and beer, which were fed regularly into an ice chest against a pillar in the middle of the room.
A long wooden table supported a Cory coffee machine. Elsewhere, a canvas clothes hamper, piles of newspapers, and a portable television set on a folding table gave the locker room a tenement feel that Dunc and his crew of teenage assistants were unable to reform.

  To the left as you entered was a door to the runway that connected the clubhouse to the dugout. It was a badly lit corridor with exposed steam pipes, and it was littered with balls of used tape, discarded Red Man foil pouches, and generations of tobacco juice. Halfway down the runway on the left was a metal door leading to a system of dark tunnels that ran under the grandstands to several storage areas and the visitors’ clubhouse. The catacombs, as they were called, were home to a colony of brown rats. Impervious to the poisons used by the occasional exterminator, they had lived in the bowels of Rankle Park for as long as anyone could remember, surviving on unfinished hot dogs, peanuts, popcorn, and old lineup cards. The rats rarely ventured into the seats, at least not during games, and only once since the Jewels had moved in had one of the grayish brown creatures wandered into the clubhouse during working hours. The reserve catcher, Happy Smith, had clubbed it to death.

  Harvey saw nothing unusual in the locker room and turned impatiently to Dunc, who was still at the door.

  “C’mon, Dunc,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  Except for a barely perceptible jerk of his head in the direction of the trainer’s room, Dunc did not move.

  The noise was like that made by a motorboat on the other side of a lake.

  “Why’s the whirlpool on?” Harvey said, walking in the direction of the noise. Then he stopped.

  Over the rim of the stainless steel tub, a man’s hand was draped, palm down, as if waiting to be kissed. Harvey took two steps toward it and reached out to grab a corner of one of the trainer’s tables.

  The churning water was the color of rosé wine. Harvey went to the whirlpool and stooped to switch off the motor. As the water settled, it revealed the form crammed into a fetal position at the bottom of the tub. The head was bent over between the knees; its blond hair fanned out and swam along the surface, mingling with flecks of blood and mucus.

  Harvey closed his eyes. He did not have to see the face to know who it was. He lurched to one of the sinks and vomited, clutching the faucets with both hands. When he was through, his face wet with tears, he vomited again.

  Dunc now stood behind him in the doorway to the trainer’s room. He hid his mouth behind the crook of his upraised elbow.

  “It’s Rudy,” Harvey said. “Call the cops.”

  Dunc disappeared, and Harvey plunged his hands into the hot red water and hooked them under Rudy’s arms.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he said, and with all his strength hoisted Rudy’s naked body out of the tub and laid him on his back on the floor. His pale knees would not go down.

  His half-open eyes seemed to watch Harvey warily. Harvey closed them. Straddling Rudy’s stomach, he began pumping his chest furiously. Thick bloody water bubbled out of Rudy’s mouth and ran in trails down his cheek.

  “C’mon, you bastard!” he shouted. He pried Rudy’s jaws apart and breathed into his mouth. “Oh, Jesus,” he said and moved his left hand around to the back of Rudy’s head to steady it.

  He immediately jerked his hand away. Above Rudy’s ear, the skull was sticky and soft, not like a skull at all.

  “He’s gone, Harvey,” Dunc was saying over him, holding a sheet. He was crying, too.

  The next hour passed in a haze. Two uniformed cops arrived first, then two more, then a plainclothes detective in an ill-fitting seersucker suit. He snapped back the sheet as if he meant to surprise the body, examined it with a few efficient movements, and asked Harvey to make an identification. Then he asked Dunc and him to wait outside in the locker room. The cop who ushered them out remained there, thumbs hooked importantly on his belt. Harvey and Dunc slumped in two chairs. A lanky young man with a doctor’s bag passed through the locker room, followed by two more cops with a stretcher, a red-faced man in a brown suit, and after him, two mobile lab technicians with black cases.

  Through the open door to the trainer’s room, Harvey saw the man from the medical examiner’s office touching Rudy’s body here and there and conferring with the detective. Flashbulbs went off, and one of the mobile lab men scraped away at the indoor-outdoor carpeting while the other used large tweezers to pick up rolls of adhesive tape and a pair of snub-nose scissors and drop them into manila envelopes. The cop chaperoning Harvey and Dunc went over and closed the door.

  “I take it you guys found him in the whirlpool, huh?” the cop said. When neither of them acknowledged the question, the cop smacked his lips, said, “Rudy Furth—my kid brother played against him in the minors,” and resumed his post near the bat rack.

  By the time the two ambulance men brought Rudy out on a stretcher in a green zippered body bag and carried him out to the players’ parking lot, the locker room had filled up with members of the team. They stood around in their street clothes with shocked faces, like worshipers discovering the desecration of their shrine. The clubhouse no longer belonged to them. The place was silent except for the crackling of walkie-talkies.

  Felix Shalhoub came in with his wife, Frances. She tried to force her way past the cops into the trainer’s room, where the detective was holed up with the M.E.’s man and the technicians.

  “Officer, would you mind explaining—” she began.

  A cop interrupted her in a voice louder than necessary, “Lady, I don’t know what you’re doing here in the first place, but you’ll have to wait with the others.”

  The door opened at last, and the man in the seersucker suit lumbered out to introduce himself in a bored, gravelly voice as Detective Sergeant Linderman of the Providence Police. He had a graying crew cut and a heavily stubbled face. Under his jacket, he wore a yellow and maroon paisley shirt. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief and stuffed it in a pants pocket, from which he pulled out a small notebook.

  At this gesture, several voices erupted. The detective held up both hands in front of his face, as though protecting himself from flying objects.

  “The way I understand it,” he began, “Rudy Furth’s body was found in the whirlpool by”—he consulted the notebook—“Duncan Frye and Harvey Blissbaum.” Those latecomers to whom it was news gasped in unison, then produced a trickle of Oh-Jesus’s.

  “Blissberg,” Harvey heard himself say. “Harvey Blissberg.” They were the first words he had spoken in an hour.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blissberg,” the detective said. “You found him in the whirlpool?”

  “Dunc found him first.”

  “Please, Detective,” Frances Shalhoub blurted, “will you just tell us what you know?”

  “Patience,” Linderman said. “Where’s Duncan?”

  Dunc rose, the front of his white duck shirt splotched with pink stains from the whirlpool water. He steadied himself against the ice chest. “I saw somebody in the whirlpool when I opened up the clubhouse at nine. That’s what happened. Then Harvey came.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, so who took him out of the whirlpool?”

  “I did,” Harvey said.

  “Why?” Linderman said.

  “I thought he might be alive, I guess.”

  “My guess,” said Linderman, “is that he’d been soaking in there since last night. Who saw him last, alive?”

  Apparently Dunc had been the last—or next-to-last—person to see Rudy alive the night before. After the rest of the team had cleared out, Dunc explained to Linderman, Rudy remained in the whirlpool. He liked to soak for a long time after he’d pitched; he had a bad back, and Felix had authorized him to have his own key to the clubhouse. At eleven-thirty, Dunc had turned off the lights in the locker room, poked his head in the trainer’s room to remind Rudy to lock up, and fetched him a beer from the ice chest. Dunc remembered nothing strange. He locked the clubhouse door behind him and told Jack Fera, the uniformed guard in the players’ parking lot, to kno
ck off; Rudy would let himself out. The only cars left in the lot were Dunc’s, Rudy’s, and right fielder Steve Wilton’s, which had been there for days with a dead battery.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Linderman finally asked.

  “Me,” Felix said, running his hand through his strands of silver hair.

  Linderman was pacing a little, biting on his pen. “You let all the players have their own keys to the clubhouse?”

  “Maybe two or three,” Felix said. “I’d have to think about it. It’s not a common policy, but—”

  “That’s all right; it can wait.” Linderman closed his notebook. “You gentlemen have a game today?”

  When Felix nodded, Linderman added, “You plan on playing it?”

  Felix looked around at the faces in the locker room. “That would probably be a bad idea,” he said.

  The M.E.’s man came out of the trainer’s room, spoke briefly in the detective’s ear, and left. “Then maybe you should put in a call to the commissioner’s office, or whatever you’re supposed to do, and explain that there’s been an accident,” Linderman said.

  “You think this was an accident?” Felix said.

  “Not unless the man just happened to club himself over the head with a blunt object, knocking himself unconscious, and then drowned.” He stroked the plane of his crew cut. “What about his next of kin? Does he have a wife?”

  “He’s single,” Felix said. “But he’s got foster parents somewhere in Wisconsin, I think.”

  Felix’s wife, dressed in a skirt and blue blazer, hopped off the ice chest. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

  “Okay, then,” Linderman resumed. “Now, as long as I’ve got most of the team here, I’d like to ask you to bear with me and stay here until me and Detective Bragalone’ve had a chance to talk to each of you. Briefly. Just routine.” He ran his hand over the butt ends of a few bats in the rack. “That is”—he threw a thumb over his shoulder—“unless someone already knows what went on in there and is just keeping us all in suspense.”