by R. D. Rosen
Wagner looked down at him, chewing his gum. Harvey couldn’t tell if he even heard what he was saying. Wagner kept turning the ball over in his hand, like a madman mindlessly practicing his tic.
“You made one mistake,” Harvey called out. “Are you listening? You made one mistake. Frances has been making mistakes all summer. Rudy, too. Compared to them, I’d say you look like a prince. Go home. Go home and it’s between you and me. It won’t do you any good if they know you even came after me, so just go home. You’ve got to trust me, Wags. I never saw you this morning. You’re going to be all right.”
Wagner lifted his right hand and wiped his brow with the back of it.
“Go home,” Harvey pleaded.
Wagner dragged his forearm across his face, and it made Harvey think of the famous photo of him, after he had no-hit Kansas City in 1978. Bobby was on his stool in front of his locker at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, his uniform drenched with beer poured over him by jubilant teammates; he had his arm over his face, and he was weeping with joy.
Now, his arm fell away, and there was no expression at all. “You’re through, Professor,” he said.
Harvey felt his bowels begin to loosen.
Wagner put the ball bag at his feet and cocked his arm.
There was a kind of mechanical fluttering noise and then a great whooshing sound. Harvey looked up.
The entire system of sprinklers set into Rankle Park’s outfield turf had gone on. Twelve jets of water rose simultaneously into the air behind Wagner and began twirling slowly in the morning sunlight.
Wagner turned for an instant, and when he did, Harvey scrambled the ten feet to the dugout and dropped onto the wooden duckboards.
Three hundred fifty feet away, a maintenance door in the left field fence opened, and a member of the grounds crew, a tiny figure pushing a wheelbarrow, came out. He spotted Wagner, put the wheelbarrow down, placed his hands on his hips, and yelled “Hey! You!” at the top of his voice.
Wagner looked at the baseball in his right hand as if it were the first one he had ever seen, fixed Harvey with his eyes, then looked over his shoulder at the figure with the wheelbarrow.
He walked in toward the dugout another ten feet, until he could see Harvey cowering on his knees on the dugout floor. He stopped and threw the ball as hard as he could up into the upper deck along the first base line.
Harvey listened to it rattle briefly among the wooden seats.
Then Wagner went past Harvey into the dugout runway and was gone.
THE GROUNDSKEEPER CAME ALL the way across the field to the dugout.
“Oh, it’s you, Harvey,” he said. A tongue of work glove lolled out of his pants pocket. “You threw a scare into me. What in the J.C. are you doing here at this—”
“It’s all right,” Harvey said, kneading the back of his leg. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came out to the park early.”
“Pretty early to be at the park,” the man began, but Harvey held up a hand.
“It’s okay. I get sentimental the last game of the season.”
“Your business, I guess,” the groundskeeper said, shaking his head with an avuncular smile. He didn’t mention seeing a second person; Harvey figured that, from across the field, the groundskeeper had spotted only one. Probably Wagner, since Harvey had hid in the dugout once the sprinklers started up.
“It’s just I’m used to having the place to myself at this hour,” the groundskeeper went on. “Glad to know it wasn’t some kids broke in. Did once, you know. Tore up the infield grass.”
Harvey painfully got to his feet. “Do me a favor, will you, and walk me into the clubhouse. I think I might have heard something in there before.” It was, among other things, too early in the morning to come up with a more original pretext.
“If you say so.”
“Let’s just go see. You never know.” Harvey pushed the man ahead of him down the runway. At the clubhouse door, Harvey said, “You go first.”
Wagner was nowhere to be seen in the locker room. Harvey opened the door leading to the players’ parking lot and peered out. An orange sanitation truck hissed and lumbered past. Nothing. Then Wagner’s champagne-colored Jaguar rolled around the corner onto Roger Williams Avenue. Harvey watched, wondering how long Wagner had been circling the block. As the Jaguar crept past the parking lot, its driver looked in Harvey’s direction, and the car sped away.
“Looks all clear, Harvey,” the groundskeeper said behind him.
Harvey locked the door. “Good enough. I must’ve been hearing one of the rats.”
“Then I’ll get back to work,” the groundskeeper said. “By the way,” he added, “you know you’re not wearing shoes.”
Harvey helped himself to a Pepsi from the ice chest. On the team blackboard, Felix had scrawled: “Winning Is Better Than Losing, But Losing With Pride Is Better Than Winning Without It.” Underneath, Dunc had written: “Do not take any uniforms home with you. Please clean out all personal possessions from lockers.” Harvey quickly went to Felix’s office, straightened it up, and phoned Mickey. The clock on the wall said 6:10. His mouth tasted of bile and infield dirt.
He woke Mickey up and told her in the fewest possible words who had killed Rudy and why. “Now look,” he told her, “Wags followed me here. He’s been following me for a while.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Fine. I’ve got a little something to show for it, but it could’ve been worse.”
“Where’s he now?”
“I don’t know. He drove away from here in his Jag a few minutes ago. That’s why I want you to get dressed and get out of your apartment. I think he knows he’s beaten, but I can’t be sure what he’ll do. He knows I know, and he thinks you and Linderman know. Don’t ask any questions, just go. Doesn’t that Burger King down the block open up real early? …Then hustle down there, sit away from the window, and I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes. I’ve got to call Linderman.”
“Sorry to wake you,” he told Linderman a moment later.
“Not as sorry as I am. What is it now?”
“I thought you might be interested in picking up a couple of people. One of them killed Rudy Furth, and the other made the whole thing happen.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Let me go to the other phone. Shirley’s asleep. So am I, I think.”
Ten long seconds later, he was on the line again. “Where are you?”
“I’m sitting at Felix Shalhoub’s desk at Rankle Park. I’ve got to talk fast, so listen.”
“I listen fast, so talk.”
Harvey talked. He told Linderman everything he needed to know and left out the parts that could wait.
“That’s a helluva story, Harvey,” Linderman said.
“Is that all I get? A helluva story? Whaddya need—a formal presentation with slides? For chrissakes, Linderman, I’m telling you. That’s the way it happened.”
“It sounds like a lot of neat circumstantial evidence. I’ve got to have something more.”
“You don’t need any more, Linderman. This is your lucky day. I got a confession.”
“You what?”
“Wagner confessed it to me. And if you get off your ass, he’ll confess it to you.”
“What do you mean, confessed? Where? When?”
“Right here a few—Just believe me.”
“At the park? When, goddamn it?”
“This morning. Don’t ask me any more now.”
“I hope you’re ready to tell it to the judge. Where’s Wagner now?”
“I don’t know, but he can’t be far away. He left here about ten minutes ago in his goddamn champagne Jag. He lives over on the East Side, somewhere off of Blackstone Boulevard.”
“Where you going to be?”
“I’m going to pick up Mickey and get some sleep.”
“I want you around today, Harvey.”
“Where am I supposed to go? We play two against the Yankees today, and by the way, Wagner is scheduled to pitch the se
cond. And Linderman, if I were you, I’d send some of your boys out to Frances’s house right away. Just in case Wagner has some crazy ideas. Not that I really give a shit.”
“Okay. Now look, Harvey, I know you want to be a hero, but I don’t want you to say a thing about this to anybody until I see you later. Got that?”
Harvey removed his wet socks and tossed them in Felix’s wastebasket. He put the statistics book back on the file cabinet. He got some shower clogs out of his locker and walked out to the tunnel and found his loafers. Then he locked up the clubhouse behind him, slipped through the parking lot gate, and drove to the Burger King three blocks down from the Beaumont West.
A few men in quilted vests and work clothes, fewer in business suits, and a couple of old women sat at tables strewn with cardboard coffee cups and Styrofoam containers. Two Providence patrolmen in brown nylon jackets were killing time by the window. There was no Mickey.
Harvey approached the service counter and asked a kid whose face had no color in it if he had seen her. “Mickey Slavin,” he said. “You know, the woman who does the sports on TV.”
“I don’t watch TV,” the kid said, wiping off the side of the computerized cash register with a rag. “But hey—I know you.”
“Look, maybe you saw her. Red hair, about five-eight.”
“No, man. But then I don’t look at the customers much. You’re Harvey Blissberg, aren’t you? How ’bout an autograph?” He ripped a napkin from a dispenser and plucked a pen from behind his ear.
Harvey wearily obliged him, then went to the cops near the window and described Mickey.
“Buddy,” the smaller of the two said, “where’d you spend the night, in a sewer?”
Harvey looked down at his damp clothes. The armpits of his blue shirt were arced with sweat. His pants were streaked with grass stains. He had lost a button, and he wasn’t wearing socks. “Look,” he said, “could you just help me out?”
“Redhead?” the small cop said.
“Yeah.”
“Sort of tall, with fullish red hair?” He wriggled his fingers on either side of his head.
“Yeah.”
“Does the sports on channel four?”
“That’s her.”
“Haven’t seen her.” The cop laughed. “And here’s some advice. Say you really got a date with Mickey Slavin at this hour of the morning, then I’d suggest you go home and take a shower first. You smell like hell.”
“Gimme a break,” Harvey said.
The bigger cop looked up from his cup of coffee. “Something you don’t like about us, buddy?”
Harvey caught sight of Mickey coming in the door in a purple sweat suit. “There’s plenty I don’t like about you,” he said to the cop. “Unfortunately, my date’s just arrived and I don’t have time to discuss it.”
He ran over to hug Mickey. “I was worried about you,” he said, burying his face in her blowzy hair.
“Those cops over there,” she said. “Did Linderman send them?”
“Hardly. And where’ve you been? I thought I told you to get out of your apartment immediately.”
“I was on the phone.”
He didn’t seem to hear her and dragged her down into a booth by the door. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too, Bliss.” She smiled for a second before it drained off her face. “How could Rudy do it?”
Harvey thought about it for a second. “Love and money,” he said. “I don’t think he would’ve gone for it if he hadn’t somehow loved Frances, or really thought he did. That’s how bad the guy needed to love someone.”
“Poor, poor Rudy,” Mickey said.
“I’ll say this for the guy, though. He took the money because he was stupid and lonely and he loved her and he was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t take it, but he knew the money was no good. He had to get rid of it. A sports jacket for me, a stereo for you, the trip to Maine. Typewriters for the orphanage.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mickey said.
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“No, Bliss, I mean there was too much of a chance it wouldn’t work. Some wealthy baseball owner might have been dying to get his hands on Wagner, no matter how poor a season he had with the Jewels. Someone could’ve outbid Levy, no matter what. Also, Wagner could’ve simply called it quits after a frustrating season, and the scheme would’ve worked too well for its own good.”
“But you’re forgetting one thing, Mick. It wasn’t that the scheme was foolproof, which it wasn’t, but that it satisfied that thing in Frances—that need to have people where she wanted them. That she might not be able to keep Wagner with the Jewels next year just because she wanted him—that was a personal insult to the woman. At all costs, she had to have the edge.” Harvey tried to rub out the pain in the back of his shoulder. “It’s all so goddamn stupid, Mick. And Frances paying Rudy off at the park on the night of the game he’s just thrown? It’s almost like she wanted to be caught. And Rudy keeping the money in a bank, instead of a sock? Of course, if he hadn’t—”
“That’s right, Bliss. If he hadn’t been that dumb, we’d never have known anything. Think of it as his last act of friendship. He left you a faint trail of bread crumbs.”
“Yeah, what are friends for?” Harvey said sourly. “You know”—he stopped, feeling the whole thing seep in—“I keep thinking about what he said the night Wagner killed him. He came in from the bull pen to pitch for Wagner, and I walked with him part way to the mound. I asked him how his arm felt, and he said something like, ‘I can’t get my fastball to go where I want.’ And I thought, ‘Poor guy, he’s not having the kind of year he deserves.’” Harvey dropped his head into his hand for a moment. “Mick,” he suddenly said, “Who’d you call?”
“Huh?”
“When you came in, you said you were late ’cause you were on the phone. Who’d you call at six-thirty in the morning?”
“I called Stanley L. Brolund. I thought you’d never ask.”
“Who’s Stanley L. Brolund?”
“Stanley Brolund,” Mickey said, “is the gentleman Frances Shalhoub sold her public relations company to.”
As she talked, Harvey forgot about his throbbing shoulder and leg. When Mickey finished, she leaned over the table to wipe some dirt off of Harvey’s forehead. “Now will you tell me what just happened between you and Wagner at the park?”
Harvey looked at her. “It was just a couple of guys playing with a bat and some balls. You know, the great American pastime.”
THE YANKEES CRUSHED THE Jewels in the opener of the doubleheader that afternoon, 12-5. With one game to go in the season, New York and Boston were tied for first place, Providence and Toronto for last.
Between games, the public address announcer informed over twenty-three thousand fans that the scheduled starting pitcher for the nightcap, Bobby Wagner, would be replaced by rookie left-hander Eddie Storella. The actual decision had been made several hours earlier, when Detective Linderman explained over the phone to a bewildered Felix that Wagner would soon be indisposed by handcuffs.
So far this had proven wishful thinking on Linderman’s part; Wagner had eluded both the state and city cops who were fanning out across Rhode Island.
“Find him, damn it,” Harvey told Linderman, when he had phoned him from Felix’s office. “I’ve got another goddamn game to play, and I’m crapping my pants.”
“Don’t worry, Harvey. We’re looking,” Linderman said. “We’ve got a net over the state. He can’t go too far.”
Harvey exhaled loudly into the mouthpiece. “Did you tell Felix about Frances?”
There was a pause on the other end. “I didn’t have the heart yet. Besides, you know all we’ve got is circumstantial evidence.”
“I’ve got more than that, Linderman. Mickey—”
“Save it for later,” Linderman said abruptly. “Harvey, you haven’t told anybody about this, have you?”
“Just a reporter named Mickey Slavin who’s going to
break the story tonight at six and eleven. So don’t start having any ideas about being nice to Frances Shalhoub, Linderman.”
Fifteen minutes before the second game, Harvey anxiously walked the grass in front of the Jewels’ dugout, where ten hours before Wagner had tried to kill him. He would have loved to get his hands on Frances now, but she hadn’t turned up at the park, in or out of custody. There was nothing to forgive in her; she had turned a triple play, taking Rudy, Wagner, and herself out of baseball, and all on the off chance of paying a twenty-seven-year-old pitcher $250,000 a year instead of letting someone else pay him half a million. Bobby Wagner would go down in history as the first major leaguer to kill a teammate. Rudy would be remembered mainly as Wagner’s victim, and, by those with exceptional memories, as a victim of Frances. Poor Felix. The whole thing seemed to have gone right by him, splattering him with mud. In all likelihood, the Providence Jewels themselves would be the answer to a fairly difficult baseball trivia question in twenty years. Harvey felt sick to his stomach again.
“Hey, Professah, ova heah, Professah.”
Ronnie Mateo was a few feet away from him in a first-row box seat. He was wearing a black sports jacket with white stitching around the lapels and pockets, and a yellow knit shirt with red and black diamonds running up the left side.
“Professor,” he said, “I bet you don’t have a tape deck in that jalopy of yours.”
“You win,” Harvey said.
“I’ve got overstock on some first-class ones. Nice merch. Nice price, too.”
“Get lost.”
“But, Professor, you can’t lose when it’s the music you choose.”
“I said get lost.”
“I’m doing you a favor, Professor,” Ronnie said.
Harvey closed the distance between them and put his face where Ronnie could get a good look at it. “You wanna do me a favor?” he said in a low voice. “Then take those tape decks, pop in some music you like, and shove the whole thing up your ass.”
