Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  “I thought it sucked,” he said.

  Even under ordinary circumstances, Harvey was not what reporters called a “good quote.” It irritated him to be the object of grown men’s trivial speculations. His reputation had preceded him to Providence, and Lassiter had approached him at the beginning of the season to propose a truce. Harvey explained that he’d be glad to type up a long list of inoffensive remarks that Lassiter could use freely, as he wished, during the year. Lassiter was not amused.

  “You knew him, Harvey,” Lassiter was saying.

  “What kind of comment is that, Bob? Of course I knew him. You know, you guys’ve got the world’s greatest job, don’t you? Calling me up five minutes after my roommate’s been murdered.”

  “Don’t chew my head, Harvey. Just tell me if you’ve considered the possibility that someone on the team might be involved.”

  “No, I haven’t considered it,” he said, and hung up.

  The phone rang again—Doug Leboutillier of WGNT radio. Harvey was more civil to him, but no one was going to mistake it for a lesson in telephone etiquette. When the phone rang a third time, he left to pick up his Chevy at the garage. The mechanics there hadn’t heard the news. Harvey listened uncomprehendingly to the status report on his carburetor, paid the bill, and drove around the city until it was time to pick up Mickey at the television station.

  He was afraid he’d have to break the news about Rudy. She had been in New York all day for a job interview with ABC Sports. When he had called her last night after the game, and she had told him about the interview, he had replied, “Really?”

  “C’mon, Bliss,” she said, “you’re supposed to say how happy you are for me.”

  “I’m very happy. But it would mean you’d be moving away.”

  “Don’t jump the gun. They’re just sifting the sands for a woman who can do play-by-play, and my only credentials are two years of radio play-by-play in Glens Falls.”

  “You’re good. They’ll hire you. You’ll throw me over for your career.”

  “If I thought you were really serious, Bliss, I’d deliver a withering feminist tirade right now. But since you’re not—”

  “I am too being serious.”

  “As I was saying, since you’re not being serious, I’ll simply suggest you pick me up at the station tomorrow night for dinner.”

  “Only if you promise you’ll start mentioning me on the air.” She had too scrupulously avoided saying his name on the evening news—even when the game-winning hit had been his.

  “You know I feel funny about it, Bliss. This is a small town; people know we’re seeing each other.”

  Harvey could never tell whether the relationship was taking a wrong turn or whether they had never quite been on the same street to begin with. At six-thirty, he sat in his car in front of the portico of WRIP-TV’s low yellow brick building just beyond Providence train station. She emerged in a loose lavender blouse and pleated pants. She walked briskly, rolling her shoulders like an athlete. She had carotene-rich skin that gave her complexion a slight orange tint, not sallow, but perpetually radiant, as though she had just returned from a week in Barbados. Her lips were the color of smoked salmon. There was a faint band of freckles running across her cheeks and nose.

  She got into the car without saying anything, threw her handbag at her feet, and looked straight ahead through the windshield. Harvey had been winding up to throw her the bad news, but she exhaled loudly and said, “Oh, boy. I’ve been a very good girl since I heard about it an hour ago. I even made a couple of phone calls, like a good reporter.” She turned to Harvey. “I think I’m going to have my cry now.”

  She cried with her hand over her face and her shoulders heaving. Harvey reached over and laid his hand on the back of her neck. She made a small choking sound and then found a tissue in her bag and dabbed at a smudge of mascara. “All right,” she said with one last sniffle. “I’ll be all right now.” She leaned toward Harvey and kissed him lightly on the mouth. He kissed back, thinking, She’s competent even when she cries.

  They drove a few blocks to Atwells and passed under the cement archway that marked the beginning of the Italian section. A large bronze pineapple hung upside down from the apex of the arch.

  “Any idea who could have done it?” she said.

  “No,” he said. He backed into a parking place in front of Angelo’s restaurant. The exterior had new fake fieldstone and stucco facing, but inside, the latticework-patterned wallpaper was peeling in the corners. It was the kind of Italian family restaurant that would have an awkwardly executed oil painting of its original location on the wall, and it did, directly over the vinyl-upholstered booth where Harvey and Mickey sat holding hands across the table.

  “The food would taste better if we had a little conversation to go along with it,” Harvey said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Let’s talk anyway.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you about New York.”

  “I forgot about that.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It seems far away now.” She cut a wedge out of her veal chop and, without eating it, put down her knife and fork. “They showed me part of an NBA basketball game on a monitor and wanted me to do play-by-play for them, just like that. It was horrible. I kept confusing Cedric Maxwell and Robert Parish, and I couldn’t think of the word for ‘lane.’ I used a lot other lingo, though—‘nothing but net,’ ‘transition game,’ stuff like that—but I don’t know if they were fooled. Christ, did they cross me up. I thought they wanted me for baseball. But let me tell you, it was great fun doing play-by-play in a tiny room with two guys wearing eight-hundred-dollar suits.”

  She picked up her fork, scrutinized the veal impaled on it, and put it back down. “He’s really gone, Bliss. Oh, Jesus, just like that.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Mick.”

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s just—it sounds so selfish, Bliss, but you never think of yourself as someone who knows someone who gets murdered. Jesus, not a guy like Rudy, anyway.”

  Their waiter was suddenly standing over them. “You don’t like?” he said, observing the barely touched plates.

  “No, no,” Harvey said. “It’s all fine. We’ve got to go, though. Something happened. Can we have the check?”

  The waiter glanced at Mickey, who held her face in her hands, and looked back at Harvey. “No check,” he said. “You don’t eat, you don’t pay. Next time you pay.”

  They drove back in silence to Harvey’s apartment and took off their clothes as matter-of-factly as two people removing their coats at a party, and faced each other in the dark living room. Her body was well-tanned except where her bikini had left two pale lozenges across her breasts and a scarf of white across her groin.

  “Do I still look good to you?” she said.

  He held out his arms. “Come here.”

  She moved across the floor, her breasts nodding, and they held each other in the hot apartment, saying nothing, and then, as if it had been a ritual now completed, they turned and walked hand in hand to Harvey’s bedroom.

  “You’re the best one I ever had.” She smiled, pulling him down on top of her.

  Harvey smiled back. “I’d say you’re in my top ten. But moving up quickly.” He had still not grown accustomed to her jaunty references to past lovers, even though he suspected the motivation. She had come into physical beauty, as if it were an inheritance, only in her twenties, and she always needed to reassure herself that she was no longer the gangly teenager whose intelligence, to say nothing of her irritating knowledge of the male world of sports, had not made her one of her prep school’s most sought-after dates. She had told Harvey once about a prep school boyfriend, a pitcher for his school team, who lost interest in her soon after she advised him to mix up his pitches and start more batters off with the curve. Heartbroken, she ran to her father, an athletic New York lawyer, who responded by saying that her boyfriend’s curve was probably not good enough to start batters off with anywa
y; her father thereby proved himself a doubly cruel parent—insensitive to Mickey’s disappointment in love and skeptical of her baseball judgment. At twenty-six, she was now dating another baseball player.

  “Hey, you,” she said beneath him. “Pay attention.”

  “I can’t, Mick. I’m too depressed.”

  “Sure you can. Like this.”

  She was right; they made love, then peeled away from each other and lay on their backs.

  “What’re you thinking about?” she asked. He was drifting away, and she was reeling him back in.

  “You really want to know?”

  “I’m game.”

  “I was thinking about that night at the Sheraton in Boston. Last June.”

  “Hunh,” she said. “So was I.”

  Harvey had gone 3-for-4 against Dennis Winston in Fenway Park that night, one of those hits giving Providence a one-run lead in the eighth. Rudy came into the game and gave up a three-run homer to Tony Jallardio. It cost Bobby Wagner a win, the Jewels the game. Rudy and Harvey took a cab over to La Hacienda in Somerville, which, its name notwithstanding, served the best pizza around. They had a few beers back at the Sheraton Boston bar, where they drunkenly accommodated an autograph seeker by scrawling their names in felt-tip pen all over her bare arm. At one in the morning, they stumbled up to their room and fell into their beds.

  There was something in Harvey’s. It was Mickey, and she wasn’t wearing much. “What a pleasant surprise,” Harvey said.

  “The station sent me up to cover the game tomorrow,” she said, pulling the covers up just under her eyes. “You know, Boston and Providence, natural rivalry. My crew’s driving up tomorrow morning, but I thought I’d surprise you. You’re not angry, are you?”

  “Do you always hide in other people’s beds?”

  “Don’t you?” Mickey said. “You’re drunk.”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  “I told some nice fellow down at the desk that you were expecting me for an interview, and I showed him my press credentials.”

  “And he gave you a key?”

  “The power of the press,” she said and laughed. “Why don’t you get out of your clothes and come to bed so Rudy and I can get some sleep? Hi, Rudy,” she called out.

  Rudy was lying on his bed with his arms folded behind his head. The smoke from his cigarette curled up into a shaft of blue light thrown up from the street below. “Hi, Slavin,” he said.

  “Tough luck with Jallardio tonight,” she said.

  “I threw dumb.”

  “By the way, Rudy, what’s with Charlie Penzenik?” she asked. Charlie had started the season at second base, but lost the job to Rodney Salta in June because Charlie was rapidly winning the race for lowest batting average in the American League. At Rankle Park, they had stopped flashing his batting average on the scoreboard when he came to bat after Charlie had threatened, only half in jest, to file a defamation-of-character suit against the club.

  “What’s wrong with Charlie,” Rudy replied, “is that the league doesn’t have a designated-hitter rule for second basemen like they got for pitchers. See, like it is now, if you play second base in the majors, you also have to hit. It’s not legal to have someone do it for you.” Rudy chuckled, dispersing a smoke ring over his head. “Outside of that, he’s a great little ball player. But this is off the record, Slavin.”

  “Will you settle for not-for-attribution?”

  “To tell you the truth, Slavin, I’d settle for a good night kiss. Ball players get lonely on the road.”

  “Gee,” Harvey said, “since when are you two such good friends?”

  “Hey, it’s only fair if she’s sleeping with you these days that I get kissed and tucked in,” Rudy pouted. “You got to look after your roomie, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t know that included sexual favors,” Harvey said.

  “C’mon, Slavin,” Rudy said. “My lips are puckered.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said and got out of Harvey’s bed. She was wearing a bra and a pair of pink panties with a white lace border. “But only if you’ve already made pee-pee. I don’t want to have to take you to the toity in the middle of the night.”

  “I already made,” Rudy said.

  Mickey bent over Rudy and planted a soft kiss on his lips. Rudy threw his arm around her neck and held her there for a moment.

  “Naughty boy,” Mickey said. “No tongues.”

  “C’mon, cut it out, you two,” Harvey said.

  “Hey, it’s no B.F.D., Professor. Tell me, how did an ugly outfielder like you land a beautiful television personality like Slavin?”

  “Wait a second,” Mickey said. She sat down on Harvey’s bed. “Nobody’s landed anybody.”

  “What do you call hiding in my bed?” Harvey said, too piously.

  “Jesus, Bliss, will you lighten up? What is it?”

  “Why don’t you get a little less light?” he shot back.

  “You know, you don’t own me.”

  “Fine,” Harvey said. “And I’m not going to sublet you to Rudy.”

  “That’s real cute.” They stared at each other for a moment. “C’mon, Bliss,” she said, holding out her hand to him. He ignored it. “Damn it, Bliss!”

  Rudy faked a loud snore. “Children, please. I’m trying to rest. Show the bull pen some consideration. And, roomie, why don’t you pull the piano wire out of your ass?”

  “Screw yourself,” Harvey said. “You too, Mick.”

  Mickey turned to Rudy. “Do you get the feeling I’m not welcome in his bed?”

  Rudy put out his cigarette. “It’s not the only one in the room.”

  Harvey went down to the hotel bar. It closed half an hour later, and he walked along Boylston Street and sat in the deserted Boston Common. When he got back to the room, he quietly pushed open the door and looked in. Rudy and Mickey were asleep side by side under the covers, his blond hair mingling with her red on the pillow.

  NOW SHE WAS IN Harvey’s bed and Rudy was dead.

  “I never thought we’d get back together after that night,” Harvey said.

  “Why not? Everyone’s entitled to act like an idiot once in a while. It comes with the dinner.”

  “All I meant was you didn’t have to sleep with him.”

  Mickey jolted up on one elbow and stared at him. “I cannot believe you,” she said tightly.

  “Believe what?”

  She fell back on the bed and pressed the heels of her hands to her eye sockets. After a moment she said, her voice wobbling, “Number one, my dear: Rudy has just been murdered, and all you seem to care about is if I slept with the guy. What’s wrong with you? You were his best friend. At least he thought you were.” Her voice broke.

  “You’re right, Mick. I’m sorry.”

  “I mean, what is it with you?” She glowered at him. “The guy is dead, and you’re angry at him and—”

  “I said I’m sorry, Mick—”

  “Let me finish. Number two: there was never anything to be angry about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I never slept with Rudy.”

  Harvey squeezed his eyelids together. “Wait….You mean you got into his bed, and then the two of you just fell asleep? Like a couple of puppies or something?”

  “I can’t believe you thought I’d—what’d you take me for anyway? I was just pissed at you. And what’d you take him for?”

  Harvey said nothing.

  “I see,” she said. “You simply assumed the worst and then never bothered to say anything. Now I know why Rudy felt you weren’t always the friend you could’ve been.” She snorted. “The guy really liked you, Bliss. He looked up to you. So you turned him into a rival. I guess boys will be boys. That’s just great, Bliss.”

  “I cared about him. I did. I just—” He felt no emotion at all right now.

  “Well, if you’d cared about him a little more, you’d have given him a little credit. He wouldn’t do something like that to you, any
more than I would.”

  Harvey tried to hang on to what she was saying, but all he could do was lie there looking at the oak dresser in the shadows. He felt her turn away from him and draw into herself at the far edge of the bed. Ten minutes later, she turned halfway toward him.

  “He never had a lot of breaks in the first place. At least you could’ve given him this one,” she said. “Look, if you’d cared a little more, maybe you’d know who his enemies were.”

  “He didn’t have a lot of friends, but I don’t think he had any real enemies.”

  “That seems a bit optimistic.”

  “For a guy who talked so much, he didn’t say a lot,” Harvey said. “What do you know about him?”

  “I know he was in love.”

  “Mick, all the players are in love with you. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”

  “Bliss, I know this is hard for you to absorb, but not only did I not want to sleep with Rudy, he did not want to sleep with me. He was in love with someone else, for God’s sakes.”

  “It’s very difficult to believe Rudy was serious about a woman.”

  “So he never told you about her?”

  “No. Who was she?” Harvey asked.

  “I don’t know. He never told me, either. All I know is that he said he loved her.”

  “So when did he tell you all this?”

  “Remember our little excursion to Maine?” He thought back to the time in June, before the scene in the hotel, when the team had had an off-day. Rudy called Mickey and Harvey at eight in the morning and told them to be ready in half an hour, without saying why. He came for them in his MG, drove to Green Airport, and put everyone on a twin-engine plane to Bar Harbor, Maine. By two in the afternoon, the three of them were drifting in a rented motorboat, fishing for pollack and squid off Northeast Harbor, and drinking bottles of Grolsch beer from a Styrofoam cooler. By four, they all had their arms around each other in the boat and were singing show tunes. At six, they were eating dinner at the kind of roadside lobster pound where they throw lobsters, steamers, and corn-on-the-cob into a net and lower it into a trash can filled with seaweed and boiling seawater. Rudy talked about his brief marriage, in his early twenties, to a dental hygienist. Mickey did impersonations of the anchorpeople on WRIP-TV’s “Eleven O’Clock Edition.” After dinner, Rudy checked them into the Asticou Inn, and they trooped down to the deserted beach and stripped for a moonlight swim. Rudy slept in one room that night while Mickey and Harvey, too sunburned to make love, slept nine hours in the next. By eleven the next morning, they were back in Providence, in time for an afternoon game against the Detroit Tigers.