by R. D. Rosen
In the middle of the room, facing the television and also Harvey, sat Valerie Carty. Crinkly red hair, parted in the middle, fell on either side of a sweet face now set in a timid smile. She had a low forehead, wide brown eyes, and a fresh coat of pink lipstick that ran off her lower lip a bit. She wore a cotton T-shirt, and her legs were covered with a red blanket that fell in folds around the bottom of her wheelchair.
Harvey returned her smile.
“So it really is you!” she said. “I don’t believe it!” She brought both hands up to her face and took them away, like a child playing peekaboo. “It—it’s like a dream or something!” She was quite pretty, but Harvey couldn’t tell if she was closer to fifteen or twenty-five. She breathed deeply and said, “I don’t believe this! I just saw you on TV this afternoon. I can’t believe Dad didn’t know who you were! He doesn’t know anything. Go on, go sit on the bed. I wish I had a chair, but”—she giggled—“I don’t have much use for one. I mean, we could sit in the living room or something, but I think my room is the nicest one in the house. The rest of the place is sort of crummy. Oh, I don’t believe this!”
Harvey sat uncomfortably on the bed, and Valerie pulled her wheelchair forty-five degrees around to face him. “You know, you look a little smaller in person. I don’t know why I say that; I don’t mean you look small or anything, but—but smaller.” She covered her face again. “What, am I dreaming? What are you doing here? Look!” She pointed to the wall over Harvey’s head. “I’ve even got your picture there, right next to Rudy’s. Oh, this is ridiculous! I’m so excited!”
“This is a very nice room,” Harvey said.
“Well,” she laughed, “it’s not exactly Bloomingdale’s.” Harvey figured her closer to twenty-five.
“Well, look,” he said, “I guess I should explain why I’m here, but, well, Rudy—”
“Rudy,” she pronounced. The giggle went away, and she lowered her eyes to the blanket on her lap. “I’ve been so depressed about it. I’m usually pretty cheerful; I guess you noticed. Even Dad started to worry about me.” Her eyes brimmed. “Rudy was fantastic.”
“He talked about you.”
“No, he didn’t!” She blushed even more now.
“Sure.” Harvey slapped his hands on his thighs. “Why do you think I came here? He talked about you a lot. He told me there was a girl named Valerie Carty who wrote to him, and it was such a good letter that he said he was going to visit you someday.” Harvey remembered a line from her letter—“Every time I see you, it makes me want to jump up and dance”—as he looked around at the little television set. “You know,” he told her, “baseball players don’t get as many letters as you would think. So I guess yours meant something special to him. So I figured the least I could do for him was to look you up and tell you that it meant a lot to him and that he was going to visit you sometime. And so here I am.”
She was crying now, without making a sound. Harvey didn’t know whether she really believed him; but what else could she believe? She pulled up a corner of the blanket and wiped her cheeks, revealing two slippered feet, lying thin and dead on the footplates of the wheelchair.
“And here I am,” Harvey said. “He was quite a guy, Rudy. You know, we were roommates, and we used to do a lot of things together.” He wanted to get her a tissue, but didn’t see any in the room. “They don’t make too many like Rudy.”
Valerie sniffed back her tears. “He always looked like he was having fun out there. Why did he always tug his ear before he pitched? Was that a sign?”
“Just a nervous habit,” Harvey said.
“They don’t know who did it, do they?”
“No, they don’t.” Harvey got up and kneeled next to her and put a hand on hers. She put her other hand on top of his.
“I still can’t believe you’re even here!” she said when he released her hand and stood up. “I can’t believe Rudy told you about me! I mean, he didn’t even write back. But it’s true. Why would you be here if he didn’t tell you about me?”
Harvey looked down at her and asked, “Do you need anything?”
She processed the question. “No,” she replied with a slight stiffness, “I don’t need anything. Are you going?”
“I’m in no rush.”
“I mean, I feel like I should—I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of friends who don’t even come visit. Ha! Now I can tell them Harvey Blissberg was here in this room.” She smiled the way she had when he first came in. “Could you just do me a favor? Could you come in the front room and let me explain to Dad who you are? Could you? He can really be dense sometimes.”
“Sure. Should I push?”
“No,” she said. “Just get the door for me.”
She wheeled herself in front of Harvey down the short hall and stopped on the edge of the gray living room rug. Albert Carty put down his newspaper.
“Dad.” She said it with mock reproachfulness. “I want you to apologize to this person. This person’s a famous baseball player, and when famous baseball players come to the door, you shouldn’t stand around asking them a lot of questions.”
Valerie’s father rose from his chair and beamed protectively at her. “Let me make it up to both of you,” he said, without eagerness. “How about a beer?”
“No, please,” Harvey said.
Valerie turned her wheelchair toward him.
“You sure?” her father said.
“No, really. I’d love to, but thanks, I’ve got to get back.” Somehow it had been all right in the room with Valerie; now that the most awkward moments were over, he sensed how much he had trespassed, how preposterous his mission had been.
“You’re sure, now?” Albert Carty said.
“Yes. I just wanted to pass on a message from one of Valerie’s fans.” He smiled at her.
She smiled at him. Her father smiled at her. The room was filled with bad smiles.
“Maybe next time, okay?” Harvey said to her.
“Okay, next time,” she said.
He wanted to bend over and kiss her good-bye, but shook her little hand instead. Albert walked him outside and stood with him under the porch light.
“She doesn’t get out much,” Harvey said.
“If you mean dining and dancing, no.”
“How long has she been in that thing?”
“Since she was four. She’s used to it.”
“I know it’s none of my business, but—” Harvey began.
“She didn’t look both ways,” he said, almost brusquely.
“Do me a favor,” Harvey said.
“I gather you’ve done her one.”
“Naw, forget it.” Harvey stared out at the street.
Albert Carty extended his hand. “I’d ask you to come back and see Val sometime, except I’m not that dumb. Thanks for coming this time.”
He shook hands. “You’re lucky to have a daughter like that,” he said and went down the porch steps as fast as he could without appearing to be in a hurry.
On the way home, he got lost and hit a dead end street, which put him in an even worse mood. He had wanted to ask Albert Carty to bring his daughter to a Jewels game. Harvey would leave them a couple of tickets. He knew an usher who would take good care of them. With the ball park ramps, it would be easy. But it was the sort of thing that only worked in the movies.
ON SUNDAY MORNING, HARVEY ground some Brazilian beans in his Salton Quick Mill and was sipping the result when the phone rang.
“So you didn’t have time to call and tell about Rudy Furth?” a voice said.
“Hi, Mom. I was going to, but it’s been too crazy around here.”
“What kind of sport is that, a person gets murdered?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Play something less dangerous. Not baseball.”
“Too late, Mom.”
“Harvey, he was murdered just like that? What do they do now, give you a new roommate?”
“From now on I think I’ll take a single room on the r
oad.”
“That’s good. So tell me—have you found anyone yet?”
“Anyone what?”
“Anyone special, that’s what.”
“Nothing’s changed since last week, Mom. You asked, and I told you I was seeing a woman who’s a sportscaster on the news here.”
“What is she, a tomboy?”
“She’s a very successful journalist, Mom.”
“Maybe you should marry her, dear.”
“Would you like that?”
“You mention a girl once over the phone and I’m supposed to know if she’ll make you a nice wife? What am I, a prophet? Mrs. Bernstein’s daughter lives in Providence, Harvey, a nice girl.”
“No, thanks, Mom.”
“Maybe you’re too picky. Norman’s married.”
“I’m not Norman, Mom. Norman’s also an English professor, which I’m not.”
“You could have been a history professor.”
“I could have been an astrophysicist, too, but I’m a baseball player. Anyway, I make four times as much money as a professor.”
“Since when is money everything? Is that how we brought you up? A good thing Big Al’s not around to hear you talk like that. In three years, you’re not going to be a baseball player. Then what?”
“Seven years ago you said the same thing to me, and I’m still playing.”
“That’s because you choked up and learned how to hit on the average.”
“For the average, Mom.”
“On, for, it’s not easy telling people my son is thirty years old and plays baseball.”
“Look at the bright side, Mom. Not everyone has a son who’s batting three hundred in the majors.”
“Well, excuse me. I didn’t realize I could be so lucky. Here I was all these years, thinking how nice it would be to have a son who used his head for a living, who healed the sick, who taught the uneducated, even, God forbid, who could draw up a will or help with the income taxes. All along, I was ashamed he wore a uniform with the name of a city on the front. And a three hundred average! This I didn’t know what a thing this was! ‘Mrs. Blissberg, so how is Harvey doing these days?’ ‘Fine, Mrs. Schottsky. My son is now hitting three hundred. And how is your son?’ ‘Oh, David is all right, I guess. He just found the cure for cancer.’ So forgive, Harvey, I didn’t know you were such a big deal. I see you’re playing in Boston this week. What night are you coming out for dinner?”
“Not dinner, Mom. They’re night games. But why don’t you drive into the city one day and I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I’ll buy you lunch, boychik. I’m still your mother.”
“How’s Monday?”
“Tuesday.”
“Fine, Tuesday it is. Come by the Sheraton around one or so.”
“Whatever you say, dear, is fine with me.”
There had been a time, when Harvey was younger, when a cunningly timed phone call from his mother almost always caused him to have a hitless game. Now it merely made him queasy. But what caught his eye when he turned to the sports pages in front of him made him particularly ill. He read the paragraph in Lassiter’s column twice:
Blissberg is one of the few players who’ll talk at all about the mysterious death of relief pitcher Rudy Furth. Although he won’t elaborate, the Jewels’ center fielder has suggested two intriguing possibilities—that the murderer may have been a member of the team or that the killer could have been connected with organized crime. That, to say the least, is more than we’ve gotten from the Homicide Division of the Providence Police Department.
When he entered the clubhouse before Sunday’s double-header with Milwaukee, he felt like Menachem Begin walking into an OPEC conference. Les Byers and Happy Smith looked up briefly from their game of Boggle on the table in the middle of the locker room and then quickly bent over the white lettered cubes. Cleavon was just coming out of the trainer’s room naked, with fresh tape on his ankles, and he stopped to run his eyes over Harvey. Rodney Salta and Angel Vedrine were draped over their chairs by their lockers, listening to salsa on a cassette player the size of an American Tourister. The atmosphere was cold enough to skate on.
Harvey went to his locker and undressed. He put on his jock and his shorts and his sweatshirt with the dark green sleeves and then his sanitary hose and his stirrups and taped them around the tops of his calves. When he reached in to yank his jersey off the wire hanger, he saw the rat. It was taped by its spindly tail to the back of his locker at eye level. Its neck was broken, and its head was twisted to the side with the mouth open in a frightened smile of tiny yellow teeth. It was big even by Rankle Park standards. Its horny little feet stuck out stiffly, like escargot forks.
The salsa played on, and Harvey finished suiting up. He pulled his practice uniform over on the rod so he didn’t have to look at the rat. There would be a better time to dispose of it.
No one on the team spoke to him for the entire afternoon. He went 0-for-8 as the Brewers swept the Jewels easily, 9-3 and 6-0. “You guys better start playing some baseball,” Chris Lentini, the Milwaukee first baseman, said when Harvey reached base for the only time all day, on a fielder’s choice late in the second game. “Else they’ll move the franchise to a small island somewhere in the Atlantic next year.”
“Try the Bermuda Triangle,” Harvey said and watched Cleavon strike out to end the inning.
He drove back to his apartment with the intention of spending Sunday evening with the new Grant biography. Next to Mickey, it was the most congenial company he could think of at the moment. As he climbed the darkened, splayed staircase to his apartment, he smelled a sweet burnt odor. He was still trying to imagine what Mr. Hughes on the third floor could be enduring for dinner as he worked his key into his lock. A voice froze him.
“Oh-for-eight, Professor. That’s not like you.”
Ronnie Mateo, in a wine-colored leisure suit, was sitting halfway up the flight of steps to the third floor. He was suckling a blunt cigar.
“I’m still not interested in any of your necklaces,” Harvey said. His key ring was in the lock, ticking softly as it swung against the plate.
“I’m not selling none, but invite me in anyway,” Ronnie said, holding the cigar in front of his face to examine it with exaggerated nonchalance.
“I was thinking of spending the evening reading about General Grant.”
Ronnie put two long hands on his knees, pushed himself up, walked down to the landing, and put his face a foot from Harvey’s. He smelled of sausage and peppers. “Grant’s dead,” he said. “And this won’t take long.”
Harvey took a step back. “What won’t take long?”
“Just open the fucking door before I use your head to do it.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Harvey said gaily. “Come in and have a drink.”
Ronnie followed Harvey into the kitchen. Harvey opened two Rolling Rocks and poured them into tumblers with a trembling hand.
“General Grant,” Ronnie said, helping himself to a club chair in the living room. “To tell you the truth, Professor, I don’t know too much about him. What war was he in?”
“Civil.”
Ronnie plunged the cigar in and out of his mouth a few times. “You’re an intelligent guy,” he said and threw an arm over the back of the chair.
“Not intelligent enough to know why you’re here.”
“Oh, yes you are. And you’re smart enough to know better than to say what you did to Bob Lassiter, and I’ll bet you’re just smart enough to keep your nose out of what you don’t know nothing about from here on out.” He drank half his beer, unaware of the parabola of foam that collected on his upper lip.
“What’s my nose been in?” Harvey was still standing.
Ronnie just stared at him.
“Okay,” Harvey said, “it was a stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I get it. You just felt like making Lassiter’s day.”
“I hardly ever talk to those guys.”
“Yo
u talked loud enough yesterday, Professor.”
Harvey managed his first sip of beer. “Look, I don’t even know what this has to do with you. I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know what you do for a living.”
“I’m a brain surgeon,” Ronnie said. “And if you keep your mouth shut, maybe I won’t operate on you.”
“What’s it to you?”
“You’re getting dumber every second, Professor.” Ronnie got up from his chair. “I don’t know what you think you know, but I want to know about it.”
“About what?”
“Your roomie’s murder. I want to know what you think you know about it.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Then why do I see you in the newspaper this morning? I know you talk to Linderman.” He relit his cigar and was in no particular hurry to suck it back to life.
“I told you I don’t know anything and I don’t know who you are, so why don’t you get out of here?”
Ronnie picked up his glass from the table. “I don’t like this beer,” he said and threw the contents in Harvey’s face.
Harvey stepped up and shoved him in the chest. Ronnie fell back in the chair. He opened his leisure suit so Harvey could see the small automatic under his arm.
“I don’t think you understand, Professor,” he said. “We’re not in the same league.”
It was one of Harvey’s failings that he could never quite believe that anyone truly wished him harm. Only when Ronnie Mateo showed him his gun was he totally willing to accept the fact that someone so pathetic could wield the least bit of power over his life. A bitter juice gurgled in his gut as he wiped the beer off his face with a sleeve.
“Who sent you here?” Harvey said.
“Guys who want to know what you think you’re doing, so why don’t you go ahead and tell me?”
“I don’t know anything.”
Ronnie got up again and came toward Harvey. “I feel myself getting very angry with you.”
Harvey flinched.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to touch you yet. It won’t look good if you go on national TV tomorrow night in Boston with something wrong with your face. I’m just using the gentle arts of persuasion.” He stood in front of Harvey and squeezed out the words: “Tell me what you know.”
