Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  It was two days before Harvey understood the meaning of what Norm had told him.

  It had been raining for two solid days in Providence. When the team returned to town on Friday, the city looked like something that had been left out in the yard overnight. On Friday afternoon, in his damp apartment, Harvey opened the sports pages of the Journal-Bulletin; he and his exactly .300 batting average clung to the bottom of the American League’s top ten batters list. Next to it were the standings.

  AMERICAN LEAGUE

  East

  W L Pct. Games Out

  New York 95 63 .601 —

  Boston 94 64 .595 1

  Baltimore 90 67 .573 4½

  Milwaukee 87 71 .551 8

  Cleveland 78 80 .494 17

  Detroit 72 85 .459 22 ½

  Toronto 69 89 .437 26

  Providence 68 90 .430 27

  Harvey counted the satisfactions left to him in the season: spoiling the Yankees’ pennant hopes on this final weekend; helping the Jewels creep out of last place; getting an average of at least three hits in ten at-bats against New York pitching; and finding Rudy’s killer.

  He finally put in a call to Linderman. “Tell me something,” he said.

  “Well, let’s see. We got a guy down here at headquarters right now who might’ve killed those two kids on the East Side. A Brown University senior, no less. I know the Ivy League has had to lower its admission standards to fill its dorms during economically hard times, but child-murderers is really stooping. That is, if this guy’s our man.”

  “Congratulations. Tell me something else.”

  “We had Ronnie Mateo down here the other day, and I showed him the bank statements. Is that what you want to know? He said to show him what he was paying Rudy off to do and he’d consider making a confession. Otherwise, he said, quote quote, leave me the hell alone. We had a couple of men in Wisconsin asking some questions, but anyone who knew Rudy there seems to think he was a gentleman and a scholar. I’m sorry, Harvey. We’re still looking for threads. I’ve got two commissioners on my back about this thing, the police one and the American League one.”

  The clouds broke by game time Friday evening. The Rankle Park crowd, inspired perhaps by Lassiter’s column in the morning paper suggesting that the financially troubled Jewels might be moved to another city before next season, swelled into the low twenties. The weather was balmy. Behind Andy Potter-Lawn, the Jewels rewarded the fans with a 6-0 shutout victory. Boston had already won in Baltimore, pulling the Red Sox into a first-place tie with New York. Toronto beat Seattle at home and remained a game ahead of Providence.

  At eleven-thirty that night, Harvey watched Mickey do the sports wrap-up in his apartment. She narrated a minute of tape showing the Jewels’ fourth inning rally. Harvey saw himself leg out a double, executing a perfect hook slide to the right field side of second base. Then he heard his name again. “During the last month, when the Jewels have been anything but a good baseball team,” Mickey was saying, “one of the few bright spots has been Harvey Blissberg’s race to finish with a three hundred batting average. Tonight’s action left him batting just that. If he finishes the season this Sunday with nothing less, it will be his first three hundred season in six years of major league play. From all of us here at ‘Eleven O’Clock Edition,’ Harvey, we wish you good luck.” Mickey had finally mentioned him on the air. Harvey toasted her image with a bottle of Rolling Rock.

  On Saturday, Providence beat New York for the second day in a row, on Les Byers’s home run leading off the bottom of the tenth. That night, after Mickey made salad and spaghetti carbonara for Harvey at her place, they made slow, anxious love. When Mickey fell asleep, the white bedroom was so quiet that Harvey heard the little numbered metal leaves of her digital clock radio fall into place every sixty seconds. He watched her roll over on her back, clutch a pillow to her breast, sputter dryly, and melt back into a dream. He got up and went to the living room, where he pressed his forehead against the cool window and gazed down at the throbbing sign of the Play Den Disco on the other side of I-95. When he returned to bed, the clock read 3:57 A.M. Behind the clock, propped up against the lamp, was the baseball card that Mickey had taken from him after he found it at Rudy’s place. He stared at it, saw himself smiling back, and closed his eyes, afraid that the mere tension in his body might wake her up.

  Suddenly, a small opening appeared in his thinking, and through it he saw his brother and him eating dinner in Chicago. “Seventeen times,” Norm had said, “your starting pitchers have been taken out of the game with a lead in the seventh, eighth, or ninth inning, and then you guys have gone on to lose the game.” It hadn’t seemed an especially interesting statistic at the time; Norm’s obsession had yielded far better. Seventeen was not an ungodly number of times for relievers to lose a lead in the late innings.

  But Norm hadn’t said which relief pitchers had squandered how many leads held by which starting pitchers. “What can a relief pitcher do?” he had asked Mickey at the batting cage. It was simple: a relief pitcher could prevent a starting pitcher from winning games. But why would he do it?

  The figures on the digital clock changed from 3:59 to 4:00. With what seemed like a series of mental clicks, the leaves of the crime’s logic fell into place. Harvey sat up in bed, sweating profusely, and wondered if it could all possibly be true. It had taken him less than two minutes to finish the work begun almost five weeks ago. Whoever had written the death threat—and he now knew who had—had been afraid of just these two minutes. The whole thing was too incredible, but what little doubt he had could be removed by some quick statistical research of his own.

  He was buttoning his shirt when Mickey stirred, subsided, stirred again, and said hoarsely, “What? What is it? Bliss? What’re you doing?”

  He bent over her. “I’ve got to go to the ball park. Go back to sleep.”

  “What? What ball park?”

  “I’ve got to go to Rankle Park, Mick. I’ve got to see about Rudy.”

  She rose to one elbow and shook red hair out of her face. “What’re you talking about? It’s four o’clock. See what about Rudy?”

  “I think I know now.”

  “Know what?”

  “Know what happened to him. But I’ve got to check on something, and then I’ll know for sure. Go back to sleep, Mick. I won’t be long.”

  “It can’t wait?”

  “No, it can’t wait, Mick,” Harvey whispered as he zipped up his pants. “For nearly five weeks, everyone and his uncle has been trying to get me to forget about this thing. But I just figured it out, and if I wait till morning to do what I have to do, I won’t be able to do it at all, Mick.”

  “Then let me go with you.”

  “No, Mick. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

  She fell back on the bed. “Then be careful, Bliss. I’ve got to protect my investment.”

  “Sweet dreams, Mick.”

  “Oh, Bliss,” she called as he was leaving the room.

  “Yeah?”

  “It was Frances, wasn’t it, who was paying Rudy off?”

  Harvey nodded. “It was Frances. Why?”

  “I just remembered something I have to do.”

  “All you have to do is go back to sleep.”

  “Will do, Bliss,” she said.

  Harvey rode the too-bright elevator down to the little glazed-brick lobby and walked out to the dark parking lot. It was cool and misty; he heard a diesel truck whine into gear two blocks away on the expressway. Somewhere in the Beaumont West lot, a car started up.

  He drove through downtown and up the hill to his apartment. He found the photocopies of Rudy’s bank statements in his sock drawer, got back in his car, and headed for Rankle Park. Norm, he thought, your statistics finally came in handy. Statistics—without them, the game of baseball would float away, a vapor of dimly remembered clutch hits, hot dogs, and traffic jams outside the stadium. If baseball was a religion, as Sharon Meadows had said, then statistics were its bible. T
hey fastened the game to history, made it a science, made its fans technicians, its managers and players probabilists. With numbers, lists, percentages, averages, the game was played constantly, over morning coffee, in bars, in the dead of winter. Statistics everywhere—for Most Times Hit into Double Plays in Single Season, Most Passed Balls in a Career, Ratio of Strikeouts to Walks among National League Relief Pitchers, for, as far as anyone knew, Most Stand-Up Triples when the Moon Is in Virgo.

  But there was one they didn’t keep track of—for Number of Games Lost by a Relief Pitcher in Relief of a Particular Starting Pitcher in a Single Season.

  The streets in the warehouse district around Rankle Park were empty except for a few parked cars and the welter of discarded programs and Pepsi cups from Saturday’s game. The park’s monstrous black silhouette, relieved here and there by security lights, rose ominously over the warehouses. A dog stood under a streetlight near the players’ parking lot, eating popcorn out of a paper cone on the curb.

  The gate in the chain-link fence around the lot was secured by a heavy chain and padlock. Harvey considered scaling the ten-foot fence, but the padlocked chain was long enough so that, by forcing the two swinging sides of the gate as far apart as he could, he made enough room to slip through. The only car in the lot was Steve Wilton’s Honda, and Harvey wondered if his battery had died on him again.

  Harvey found the clubhouse key on his key chain. Inside, the locker room was filled with dark bluish light. The ice chest hummed. A uniform hung sadly in each cubicle. A scratching sound stopped him; one of Rankle Park’s rats. Harvey walked slowly across the room to Felix’s office. The door was unlocked. Everything was going his way. He reached in through the doorway and turned on the light. Felix’s office sprang to fluorescent life.

  From the top of the metal filing cabinet in the corner behind Felix’s desk, he took down a heavy three-ring notebook with a piece of adhesive tape across the cover that said, SEASON STATS. He sat down at Felix’s desk and opened it. The old General Electric Telechron clock over the door read 4:32.

  EACH PAGE OF THE notebook contained a detailed box score of a Jewels’ game, beginning with the season opener at home on April 9. All of them had been neatly typed and Xeroxed by Ray Spanner, the team statistician.

  Bobby Wagner had pitched the opener, a complete game victory over Toronto, 4-2. Harvey flipped the pages until he found the next game Bobby had pitched, on April 16 in Cleveland. Rudy had relieved him in the eighth, with one out, one man on base, and Providence leading 3-1. Rudy had retired five straight batters to pick up his first save of the year. Final score: Providence 3, Cleveland 1. Winning pitcher: Wagner (2 wins, no losses). Bobby was off to a good start.

  Harvey turned pages furiously. Rudy did not pitch again in relief of Bobby until May 6, against the Angels in Anaheim. When Bobby was removed in the seventh with one out and two men on, the Jewels led 6-4. Rudy gave up a double to the first Angel batter, and both baserunners scored. The two runs, of course, were charged to Bobby. With the score 6-6 in the eighth, the Jewels scored twice and went on to win 8-6. Winning pitcher: Furth (1-0).

  On May 23, Bobby was losing badly to Minnesota in the fourth, 7-1, when Rudy went in to pitch two innings and gave up one run. Rudy was in turn replaced by Marcus Marlette in the sixth. Final score: Minnesota 11, Providence 4. Losing pitcher: Wagner (4-2).

  No, that wasn’t what Harvey was looking for. He leafed through the pages of the notebook. He finally found what he wanted, on June 18 in Boston.

  It was the same night that Harvey had found Mickey in his bed at the Sheraton, the night he thought that Rudy slept with her. At Fenway Park, Bobby Wagner had been hanging on to a 3-2 lead over the Red Sox in the eighth. He had two men on base and two outs when Rudy was called in. He gave up a three-run homer to the first batter he faced, Tony Jallardio. Two of the runs were charged to Bobby, hanging him with the eventual 5-3 loss.

  Harvey took the folded photocopies out of his pocket and laid them next to the notebook. On June 25, a week after the Boston game, Rudy had made his first deposit in the Industrial National Bank checking account. Harvey found a loose cigarette in one of Felix’s desk drawers and lit it. In another drawer, he found a fifth of Smirnoff vodka and helped himself to a long swallow.

  The next time it happened was on July 14, against Kansas City. With the Jewels ahead 2-1 in the seventh, Rudy came in to relieve Bobby with one out and the bases loaded. By the time the inning was over, Rudy had allowed all three baserunners to score. All three runs were charged to Bobby. Final score: Kansas City 4, Providence 3. Losing pitcher: Wagner (7-9).

  Harvey checked Rudy’s bank statements. On July 19, five days after the game, he had deposited another three thousand dollars in the account.

  All a relief pitcher had to do was get his fastball up a little or hang a curve or telegraph a change-up or take too much off the slider so that it just sat there over the plate like a plump curve that forgot to break. Maybe in the minors a pitcher could get away with a bad pitch, or two, or three. But the majors were filled with ball players who had gotten there precisely because they knew how to make pitchers pay for mistakes. And if the pitches weren’t really mistakes—if you knew, as any major league pitcher had to, the batters’ strengths and weaknesses—then you could almost always manage to make a fatal error.

  Harvey kept going. In a game with Texas on July 26, Rudy relieved Bobby in the ninth inning with two men on and nobody out. Providence was clinging to a 2-1 lead. Rudy gave up a run-scoring single to Neal Atlas, then another run-scoring single to Mason Meyer. Final score: Texas 3, Providence 2. Losing pitcher: Wagner (7-11). On August 2, a week later, there was another three thousand dollar deposit in Rudy’s account.

  On August 9, Rudy relieved Wagner in the seventh inning with two men on and two outs. Providence led Baltimore 5-4. Rudy gave up a three-run homer to Rob Dorsey. Final score: Baltimore 8, Providence 5. Losing pitcher: Wagner (8-12). Two days later, on August 11, Rudy deposited, for the fourth time, three thousand dollars.

  On August 28, Rudy relieved Wagner in the eighth with two men on and nobody out. Providence led Chicago 2-1. Rudy gave up a single to load the bases, then a triple to Mac Bodish that scored all three baserunners. Final score: Chicago 4, Providence 2. Losing pitcher: Wagner (8-15). Rudy didn’t live to deposit that three thousand.

  Between June 18 and August 28, on five occasions Rudy had come into the game to replace Bobby, blown his lead, and hung him with the loss. Only an extreme optimist would attribute the pattern to coincidence—an optimist who did not have photocopies of Rudy’s bank statements in front of him and who did not know how badly Frances Shalhoub wanted to win—and how badly she wanted Bobby Wagner to lose. It all made such horrifying sense that for a moment Harvey regretted having insisted on finding out the truth. He found another cigarette and smoked it with a trembling hand in the greasy fluorescent glare. He took another gulp of Felix’s vodka.

  There was a crinkle of nylon in the doorway, and a soft, deliberate voice said, “And he would’ve kept doing it if I hadn’t figured it out. He wasn’t a smart pitcher, Professor, but I knew he could throw better than that.”

  Harvey’s back was to the door. He swiveled around with the bottle of vodka in his hand.

  Bobby Wagner’s six-foot-four frame filled the doorway. He was wearing jeans, running shoes, and an unzipped navy windbreaker. One hand was in a windbreaker pocket, the other concealed behind him. He was chewing gum with a leisurely, lateral motion, glowering at Harvey from under his single black eyebrow with a kind of dull satisfaction. Behind him, the row of louvered windows high on the clubhouse wall strained the dawn light into the locker room.

  “So now you’ve figured it out, too,” Wagner said quietly, as if afraid he might wake somebody up at so early an hour. “Congratulations.”

  “You’ve been following me,” Harvey said in a whisper.

  “I have,” Wagner agreed, not moving from the doorway.

  So the car he had heard startin
g up in the parking lot of Mickey’s building had been Bobby’s. Harvey ran his eyes over Felix’s office to confirm the obvious: there was only one way out and Wagner was standing in it.

  “You didn’t just happen to be at Leo’s the other night, did you?” Harvey felt strangely serene; it was as though they were both on their best behavior. Maybe it was Wagner’s faint drawl, Harvey’s exhaustion, the hour, the inevitability….

  “I sure didn’t,” Wagner said. “And I also didn’t just happen to see you go in and pay Linderman a little visit the other day. I’ve watched you do a lot of little things.”

  Harvey’s throat tightened. “So why’d—why’d you save my ass at Leo’s?”

  Wagner brought his hand out of the windbreaker and picked briefly at his nose with it. He gave the odd impression of simply passing the time of day. “Maybe I was hoping you would turn out to be dumber than I knew you were. Maybe I wanted you all to myself,” he said.

  “What do we do now, Wags?”

  Wagner brought his other hand from behind his back, and Harvey’s whole body seemed to make a fist.

  Wagner was holding a baseball bat, one of Harvey’s. He leaned forward on it, like a vaudevillian resting on his cane. “I’m in kind of a spot, Professor,” he said.

  Harvey realized he was still holding the bottle of vodka; overmatched, he put it down carefully on the desk behind him. He pictured himself dead in the whirlpool and Dunc finding him in a few hours. Linderman was standing over him, shaking his head, saying, “You had to be the hero, didn’t you, Harvey?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Wags.”

  “You know the whole story,” Wagner said.

  Harvey closed the statistics book on the desk. It was true—and he was the only one who did. Bobby could only know that someone had put Rudy up to it, but not who it was; and Frances could deduce who it was that waited for Rudy somewhere in the dark tunnels beneath the stands. But only Harvey knew now for sure.

  “Maybe I know the whole story, but you don’t,” he told Wagner.