Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  Harvey studied the box scores over more coffee and had an idea. He turned the page to see where Minnesota, Rudy’s old team, was playing that day. When he got back to his room at noon, he picked up the phone and called Jimmy Skeete, the Minnesota Twins’ catcher, at the team’s hotel in Oakland.

  “I wake you?” Harvey asked.

  “No, it’s all right,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been up for hours. I got hit with a pitch last night in my forearm, and the bugger woke me up at seven.”

  “Speaking of which, sorry about that collision in Providence.” In July, he had run Skeete over, scoring from third on a sacrifice fly, and Skeete had sat out a few games with a bruised shoulder. “You know, I didn’t get off so light, either. I couldn’t turn my head to the left for a week.”

  “It wouldn’t have hurt so much if you’d been out. But I’m warning you, Harvey, next time you come down the line I’m going to be carrying a switchblade.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about a next time, Jimmy, the way we’re playing. I don’t think I’ve been as far as third base in a week.”

  “Yeah, I read the sports pages. I guess a murder in the clubhouse’ll do it to you every time. God, it sounded gruesome. Have the cops figured it out yet? The papers aren’t saying much.”

  “Neither is anyone else. It’s a goddamn mystery. Look, you roomed with him last year, didn’t you?”

  “I still haven’t caught up on my sleep. What a wild man.”

  “Yeah, but did he have any real enemies?”

  “None I can think of. Unless you count Davis in Detroit. There was one season when Rudy must have plunked him in the ribs three times. The third time it cleared the benches. Of course, John does love to crowd that plate.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Harvey said, “Davis was nowhere near Providence the night Rudy was killed. Can you think of anything else?”

  “I wish I could help you, Harvey. But for all his faults, the guy did not strike me as a murder victim.”

  “Did Rudy throw a lot of money around?”

  “Throw it around? Naw. Just the usual, I guess. He sprang for dinner once in a while after a game.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Why’re you asking? Was he throwing a lot of money around before he was killed?”

  “That’s the thing. As far as I can tell, he was generous only with his friends. Nothing more. But he had three thousand bucks on him when he was murdered. In very large bills.”

  “How large?”

  “The kind that only banks’ll make change for you. Listen, do you think Rudy was the kind of guy, you know, who’d want to make some easy money on the side?”

  “No. I mean, he wasn’t the greedy kind. I think it got to him that he was only making fifty, sixty grand here. No one likes playing alongside guys making three, four times that, but the guy wasn’t a criminal. Anyway, he was making good money with you guys, wasn’t he? I always thought of him as just a sort of lonely guy waiting to grow up.”

  “Yeah,” Harvey said. “Listen, thanks. Go put some heat on your arm.”

  “Let me know if I can help, Harvey.”

  Harvey hung up, then dialed directory assistance in New York and got the number of an old schoolmate from the University of Massachusetts who worked in public relations in Manhattan. “Of course,” the old classmate said, “of course I know Frances Shalhoub. Everyone in the business knows her. She was doing so well, we couldn’t figure out why she just packed up and sold the firm.” He gave Harvey what he wanted: the name and number of a former associate of Frances, one Sharon Meadows, who now worked for another public relations company in Manhattan.

  “Ms. Meadows,” he said after introducing himself on the phone, “I have a request of some, uh, sensitivity. I’m going to be in New York with the team on Thursday, and I’d like to take you out for a drink and ask you about Frances Shalhoub. Just general questions. And I’ve got to trust you not to tell anyone I’ve called you. Now, I know that’s asking a lot, but—”

  “But nothing,” she broke in. “I’d love to talk about her. Really, she’s one of my most favorite topics in the world.”

  THE PROVIDENCE JEWELS FILED into the plane late Wednesday night with the air of weary package-deal tourists wondering what city they were leaving and which one they were going to. The Jewels were in fact leaving Boston, where they had lost 3-2 to the Red Sox on Tuesday night and 5-1 on Wednesday night, and heading for New York and a four-game series with the first-place Yankees. An eight-game losing streak had depleted the team’s already small reserve of goodwill, and the players spread themselves out as far apart as they could among the seats. Even the flight attendants shared the prevailing mood. Roaming the aisles looking for unbuckled passengers, they smiled wanly, as if they had been hustled by one too many manufacturer’s rep with an idea about how they would like to be entertained in the next city. Not even Rudy, Harvey thought, could have made any headway with them tonight.

  Harvey found a seat by himself in first class. He hadn’t been there long and was still trying to find his place in the Grant biography when Frances Shalhoub, wearing a white silk blouse and putty-colored blazer, dropped into the seat next to him. When he looked up from his book, she was busying herself with the in-flight magazine. She didn’t say anything until they were somewhere over Connecticut. She was halfway through her martini and on her second bag of smoked almonds, and Harvey was nursing an after-shave sized bottle of California burgundy.

  “I hope you didn’t think I was asking anything of you the other night,” she said.

  “Why would I think that?”

  “Forty-year-old women sometimes do crazy things when they’re drunk.”

  “Really?” Harvey said, closing his book and putting it in the seat pocket. “I thought by the time they reached forty they lost all interest in sex.”

  “You must be thinking of fifty-three-year-old men,” she said, creasing her empty foil smoked almond bag into a fan. “What’re you doing in New York?”

  Across the aisle in the row ahead of them, Felix was asleep with his head on his chest and his chin bunched up in grayish folds. “As far as I know, I’m playing four against the Yankees,” Harvey said.

  “You can be a creep, Harvey.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I try to hide it behind a devil-may-care demeanor.”

  “What’re you doing in New York when you’re not playing the Yankees?” She was now smoothing out the cocktail napkin on her tray table.

  “I plan to stuff myself with culture. Museums, galleries, foreign films, Nathan’s hot dogs with a lot of sauerkraut.”

  “Would you like to do something together?”

  “If it doesn’t involve sex, I might consider it.”

  Frances placed the olive from her martini on the tip of her tongue, and then both olive and tongue disappeared between her lips. “Why?” she said. “Is there something wrong with sex?”

  “No, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just that I’m spoken for at the moment.”

  “Oh, how quaint,” she said. “You mean Mickey Slavin?”

  “Is there something wrong with Mickey Slavin?”

  “Nothing a little seasoning wouldn’t improve,” she said. “Forty-year-old women have experience on their side.”

  Harvey emptied the rest of the wine into his plastic cup. “Except when it comes to the subject of Rudy, you’re an extremely blunt person, Frances.”

  “When you get to my age, it’s the only way to be. I could always be coy, but I’d be fifty by the time I got you in the sack, and neither of us would enjoy it as much.”

  “You really want me in the worst way, don’t you?”

  “No, Harvey, what I really want is an autographed baseball.”

  “Why so interested, Frances?”

  “Let’s see,” she said, clapping her hands. “You’re tall. You’re single. You’re reasonably good-looking. You have a trace of sophistication. You’re one of the few people on this plane who doesn’t think that mussels marin
ière has something to do with bodybuilding at the Coast Guard Academy. And it doesn’t hurt that you’re batting three hundred.” She laughed.

  Harvey didn’t. “Is there a chance you might also be interested because you know something about Rudy’s death that you’re not saying and you don’t like it that I’m so curious and you’d like to buy me off by getting me to fall in love with you?”

  Frances picked up the foil bag and squeezed it into a ball. “I’m glad this is only a thirty-minute flight,” she said.

  “The way I look at it, Frances, is that you were sleeping with Rudy and you also sit in the dugout, and those are two pretty good positions in which to learn something. Maybe you don’t know anything, but I’m not convinced. You act as if you want to hide something from me, and what I can’t figure out is why you would.”

  “I told the police what I know, and that’s all you need to know.” Her voice had iced over. “Don’t forget whom you’re talking to, Harvey. If you keep it up, you could find yourself sitting on the bench for the rest of the season.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” Harvey said, forcing a laugh. “One minute you’re propositioning me, and the next you’re benching me. I thought Felix managed this ball club.”

  She tried to drink out of her martini glass, but there was nothing left in it. “Felix listens to—” She stopped and broke into a smile as genuine as one of Pro-Gem’s three-dollar charm bracelets. “You do have a way of yanking my chain, don’t you? Look, I don’t blame you for being upset. I am, too. I can’t tell you how sad it was to pick up Rudy’s foster parents at the airport. It was heartbreaking. They were such a lovely couple, and they acted as if they had lost a real son.” Frances patted her skirt. “And I don’t blame you for being put out with my, uh—advances, but I do like you. I was afraid it was”—her voice was girlish now—“because you don’t find me attractive. I should’ve thought of that.”

  “You’re right. You should’ve thought of that, Frances. But it’s not the reason.”

  “It’s really Mickey?”

  “Just call me old-fashioned.” Harvey reached forward to retrieve his book. “By the way, Frances, do you happen to know anybody who has a thing about rats?”

  “Rats?”

  “You know, who likes to break their little necks and hang them up by the tail to dry.”

  She made a disgusted face. “Harvey,” she said, “have you ever considered getting professional help?”

  It was the last thing they said to each other for some time.

  On Thursday afternoon, September 6, at four-thirty, Harvey walked into the visitors’ dugout at Yankee Stadium in his street clothes and looked out at the cavernous park with a childlike awe that six years in the majors had failed to diminish. He considered himself a connoisseur of old ball parks. He appreciated them in the way that a carpenter admires the beauty of a well-crafted—but now rotting—piece of furniture. Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, the Polo Grounds, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Philly’s Connie Mack Stadium, St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park, D.C.’s Griffith Stadium, Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium—he had never played in those great historic structures. There were only a few of that generation left. The rest had made way for too many symmetrical suburban parks with candy-colored seats and parking lots you could land a DC-10 in. Harvey couldn’t understand why people enjoyed watching the game in places that looked like they had popped out of a giant injection-molding machine. Baseball itself was an asymmetrical game, full of randomness and decisive accidents. Line drives were caught while apologetic short flies fell for extra-base hits. One weak ground ball found its way through the infield and brought in the winning run while another, harder hit, became the game-ending double-play. The new ball parks—big, perfect concrete chafing dishes—looked as if they wanted to deny that the game was unfair.

  Yankee Stadium had escaped, more or less. The renovations it had undergone in the 1970s had marred its original grandeur, but it was still strange and lop-sided and full of echoes. However, Harvey had another reason to stand in the dugout watching the nearly empty field. It was where Rudy Furth had pitched his best game of the season, maybe the best of his career. In late May, he had come in for starting pitcher Stan Crop in the third, and for seven innings Rudy had pitched one-hit baseball and picked up a 4-1 victory.

  “Just think, Professor,” he had said to Harvey on the bench before the team went out for the bottom of the ninth. “Only fifty or sixty more games like this one and you can reserve a seat for me in the Hall of Fame.”

  Harvey knew what it was like to play so far over your head you could look down and see yourself in action. Three or four times in his career he had enjoyed a string of games when he actually believed he could will his bat to hit the ball anywhere he pleased. For three days in Texas in July, he had gone 11-for-13 at the plate, and the two outs had been the result of sparkling catches of line drives in the outfield. He felt he was drawing on such remarkable, neglected powers that he had had to ask Campy Strulowitz to verify that his whole style and batting stance had not been inexplicably altered by something beyond his control. When the team left Texas, he had turned back into just another ball player.

  “This park gives me the chills.” Harvey started at the voice next to him.

  “Well, well. Detective Linderman. What brings you to New York, business or pleasure?”

  “I’m mixing them,” he said. His crew cut was shorter than before, and his crusty scalp showed through the bristles. Under his seersucker jacket he was wearing a navy blue polo shirt with little white sailboats all over it and a lilac collar. Where his stomach was, the boats sailed farther apart.

  “What’s the business part?” Harvey said.

  “Tell me about this Steve Wilton.”

  “Keep the ball up and in, and if you get ahead on the count, play chin music. He scares easily at the plate.” Harvey smiled.

  Linderman matched the smile in size but not spirit. “He didn’t scare too easy a few years ago in the minors. He was booked for malicious assault when he punched out the lights of a guy on the other team. The guy’s jaw was wired for six months. Wilton wriggled off with a fine, a public apology, and a dozen roses. He’s the only guy on your team with any kind of criminal record.”

  Harvey hawked. “That doesn’t surprise me. Steve’ll never make the diplomatic corps.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all what?”

  “All you have to say about him?”

  “You’re running the investigation, Linderman. I’m just trying to finish the season at three hundred.”

  “I’m wondering if there isn’t something you’re not telling me, Harvey. I know ball players have loyalties, not that I think the jerk who crammed Furth in that whirlpool is a teammate of yours.”

  “Rudy was my best friend on the club. That’s my loyalty right there. As for Wilton, if you want me to suggest a motive, you’re out of luck.”

  Linderman petted the top of his crew cut with a palm. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, the market in motives is very depressed these days.”

  “Where do typewriters fit in?” The two of them stood side by side watching a member of Yankee Stadium’s grounds crew water the yellowing path of grass between home plate and the mound.

  “Typewriters?” Linderman said. “Oh, the boys are tracing them back in Providence. What’s the talk in the clubhouse about all this?”

  “No talk in the clubhouse. At least not where I’m concerned. Someone put a dead rat in my locker in Providence last weekend.”

  Linderman’s eyes brightened. “You could’ve told me about it.”

  “I’m a big boy now,” Harvey said.

  “Only one of your teammates would do something like that, right?”

  “I guess. I wonder who the naughty boy was.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s funny, Harvey.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about my thinking anything’s funny at this point,” Harvey said, too sharply
.

  Linderman worked his mouth; he didn’t appear to be listening. “What a way to make a living,” he finally muttered.

  “Yours or mine?”

  “You ever feel silly out there, wearing knickers at your age?”

  Harvey unwrapped a stick of gum and chewed it around before answering. “How I look at it, Linderman, is that there’re some guys who know how to fix car engines. It may be all they know how to do, but they do it better than anyone else. It may not take any great genius, but they took the time to learn how to do it well, and you could offer them a big job in an office and they wouldn’t take it because they’re happy fixing cars. I’m a guy who knows how to catch baseballs better than almost anyone else. It’s what I do, and I’m lucky they pay guys more for being good at catching baseballs in the twentieth century than they do for fixing cars. But I’d do it anyway, knickers and all.” It was only half true, but he wasn’t going to ruin the effect by telling Linderman he could actually think of several jobs he would gladly take now, jobs where he’d be able to wear pants that went all the way down to his shoes. “It’s good to be good at what you do.”

  “That’s touching, Harvey. Very touching.”

  “How good are you at what you do, Linderman?”

  The detective’s expression split the difference between a grin and a sneer. “I’m like these Bic pens,” he said, touching his breast pocket. “They’re not fancy, but they always work.”