Murder at Wrigley Field

by Troy Soos

  And I really didn’t care enough about the name of the park or the team to want to get involved in investigating anything. I’d done it before and had picked up a bunch of scars and broken bones in the process; I had no desire to add to that collection. If my career was going to end with a fatal injury, I wanted it to be from a fastball to the head, not a bullet in the back.

  I finally asked, “But why me? What makes you think I could help you. I’ve never even met William Wrigley.”

  “I don’t want you to check out Wrigley. He didn’t plant them smoke bombs himself. Not the pretzels neither. And he sure didn’t saw them bleacher seats. He’s got somebody working for him. I want to know who it is.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Start by finding out what your buddy Kaiser is up to.”

  “Willie?”

  The scowl again, more severe, telling me that my questions were getting dumber. Hey, if you think I’m so stupid, I thought, get somebody smarter to help you.

  “No, the other one,” Weeghman said sarcastically. “Yeah, your roomie. Willie Kaiser. He went to some German meeting last night.”

  “He did?” But he’d told Fohl he wouldn’t go. “How do you know that?”

  Weeghman gave me a look that showed he didn’t feel obligated to explain anything to me. But he grudgingly said, “These are unusual times. I need to know what my players are up to. So I keep tabs on—them.” He’d almost said “you.”

  So Weeghman had spies working for him, spying on his own players. Surprisingly, I wasn’t bothered by it—it was just one more bit of craziness that fit in nicely with the way the whole season had been going.

  “By the way,” Weeghman added. “Don’t tell Kaiser I said anything to you about it. This is just between us. As far as anybody’s concerned, we never had this talk.”

  “You really think Willie was involved with those smoke bombs?” I asked.

  Weeghman shrugged. “I don’t know. I want you to find out. And make sure you keep him from going to any more of them meetings. Last thing I need is for somebody to find out I got a traitor on my team.”

  Right. As if Willie’s going to listen to what I tell him to do. Weeghman didn’t know Willie Kaiser. I wasn’t sure I did any more either, but I was sure that he was no traitor. “If you think he’s a traitor,” I said. “Why keep him on the team at all?”

  “What are you, crazy?” Weeghman squawked. “He’s hitting .320. Where am I gonna find another shortstop like him?” No scowl this time. Instead his eyes rolled to show how appalled he was at my lack of business sense. The way Weeghman could express himself with his face, he could become a moving picture actor if Wrigley succeeded in putting him out of the baseball business.

  Well, at least I’d learned something new: as long as you’re hitting .320, you can sabotage your team, even be a traitor to your country, and some baseball owner will still want you playing on his club.

  I suppose if Willie was batting .400, Weeghman wouldn’t mind if he’d committed a murder.

  Chapter Four

  Game time was two o’clock. As usual, I was suited up and on the field before noon. What was unusual was that I didn’t have to wait for my teammates to join me. All the Cubs players, as well as the visiting Cincinnati Reds, were going through their warm-up routines. We had to get practice out of the way early because of the pre-game ceremonies that had been planned.

  It was Thursday, the Fourth of July, and Charles Weeghman was using the holiday to full advantage. He seemed determined to single-handedly demonstrate the patriotism of major league baseball, at least that of the Chicago Cubs. To this end, he’d scheduled enough speeches and music and marches for a political convention.

  The Reds were helping ensure that the spectacle took place before a full house. They’d moved Fred Toney up in their pitching rotation to face our Hippo Vaughn in a rematch of baseball’s greatest pitching duel. A year ago in this park the two men had pitched no-hit shutouts against each other for a full nine innings, until Jim Thorpe won the game for Toney and the Reds with a tenth-inning single.

  The two big pitchers were warming up now, showing off, hurling bullets that smacked loudly in their catchers’ mitts. Toney threw to Ivy Wingo in foul territory near the first base dugout and Vaughn to Bob O’Farrell along the third base line.

  Kids outside the park were warming up, too, for the Fourth of July celebration, shooting off rockets and firecrackers that popped more harshly than Vaughn’s and Toney’s pitches.

  The Reds were taking infield practice. The tall fellow hitting them easy grounders was Christy Mathewson, my old teammate with the Giants, now the manager of Cincinnati. He took care not to drive any up the middle to avoid hitting the carpenters working behind second base.

  The workmen were putting the finishing touches on a small platform that had been built for the visiting dignitaries. Their hammering added to the percussive din in the park, making it almost impossible to hear the chatter of the crowd.

  Already there were more people in the park than we’d had for the previous five games combined. They were here to see a ballgame, to enjoy a day of leisure, to forget about the war. For a couple of hours, the most important battle in the world would be fought between two teams of nine men each, with nothing more deadly than ball, bat, and glove as weapons.

  Charles Weeghman strolled around near the backstop, cheerfully giving interviews to a clutch of reporters who trailed behind him. As he spoke, the beaming Weeghman kept his eyes on the stands, occasionally waving to individuals in the crowd.

  There was a side to Charles Weeghman that I admired: he genuinely liked the fans. As much as he wanted their ticket money, he also wanted them to have a good time in his ballpark. Other men owned shares of the Cubs, but the park was really Weeghman’s. He’d built it in 1914 for his Chicago franchise in the outlaw Federal League. When the Feds folded after only two years, Weeghman was allowed to buy the National League Cubs and move them into his North Side showplace. From the beginning, Weeghman catered to the wishes of the fans. He was the first club owner to build concession stands so that patrons wouldn’t have their view blocked by vendors, and he was the only owner to let fans keep baseballs hit into the stands.

  Then there was the side of Weeghman I had seen Sunday. I never did agree to help him, but I didn’t refuse either. He’d never asked me for a direct answer, simply assuming that his threat would have the desired effect and I would do his bidding. It occurred to me after he’d left that it might have been Weeghman who’d had the water tank stolen from my cellar, just to show me how it felt to have my home sabotaged.

  When the Reds left the infield, Shufflin’ Phil Douglas shuffled out to the mound to throw batting practice for us. Douglas, a heavy-drinking pitcher whose specialty was the spitball, was stamped from the same large mold as Hippo Vaughn. Despite the prohibition on liquor, Douglas’s spitters had enough alcohol on them that they could almost disable a batter by intoxication.

  I picked up my bat from the ground in front of the dugout and went to join the Cubs lining up at the plate.

  Willie was already there, first in line—until Wicket Greene elbowed his way in front of him. Greene was within his rights this time since the tradition was veterans before rookies. But it bothered me that Willie gave up his spot without a word.

  I had to get some life in that kid. I also had to find out what he’d been up to lately—not for Weeghman’s sake, but for his own. I was going to help Willie whether he wanted me to or not. The problem was breaking through his shell of silence.

  I suddenly dropped my bat and went to the bench for my glove instead.

  After Greene took his hits, Willie stepped up to the plate. I walked to the mound with my mitt open. “Let me pitch him, Phil.”

  Douglas turned his blood-shot eyes to me. “Sure, what the hell,” he said with a chuckle as he flipped me the ball. “Give him the spitter.”

  I didn’t have a spitter. Nor a curve, nor a fastball. I wasn’t a
pitcher, and I hadn’t thrown batting practice since I was in the minors.

  Willie stepped away from the plate and lowered his bat, obviously disconcerted by my appearance on the mound.

  “Get in there busher!” I barked at him. “Afraid you can’t hit me?”

  He gave me a vacant smile and took a tentative batting stance.

  I wound up for the first pitch and let the ball loose—straight for his head.

  Willie fell on his rear to avoid it. I didn’t have a major league fastball, but I could throw hard enough and I could put it where I wanted.

  Willie cautiously stood back up and took his stance again.

  My next pitch went just behind his head, causing him to stumble forward. Angry rumblings came from the players crowded around the batting cage, and Fred Merkle hollered, “If you can’t pitch, get the hell off the mound!”

  After straightening himself, Willie slowly rubbed his palms on the front of his jersey and eyed me with a mixture of anger and disbelief. I could see him thinking: Brushbacks during batting practice?

  One more—at his chin.

  He leaned back just far enough to avoid it. Then he pointed his bat at me and yelled, “Put one over the plate and I’ll take your goddamn head off.”

  Yeah? Let’s see.

  I threw it down the middle, letter-high. He took an angry rip trying to kill the ball and tipped a weak pop up.

  He got more of the next pitch, hitting a hard grounder to short. He came closer and closer to me on subsequent hits until he nailed a line drive that forced me to duck. It flew over second base and rattled onto the platform, sending the workmen scurrying for cover.

  As I kept pitching, Willie got into a groove, hitting line drives up the middle that kept me hopping and the construction workers swearing. His face was alight now. None of the Cubs tried to oust him from the box, and their angry rumblings at me had turned to compliments on Willie’s hitting.

  Eventually I dropped the ball on the ground and announced, “That’s it for my pitching career.”

  Phil Douglas pulled himself off the dugout bench, where he’d stretched out to “rest his eyes,” and took the mound again to pitch to Fred Merkle.

  Willie took Douglas’s spot in the dugout. I followed him to the bench, leaving a few feet of space between us as I sat down.

  “Pretty good hitting,” I said, looking out at Douglas and Merkle.

  Willie spat and kept his eyes on the field. “Hell, Edna could hit your pitching.” A smile broke over his face. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen such a grin on him.

  I turned to him. “Felt good taking those rips, didn’t it?”

  He still didn’t look at me. “Yeah,” he conceded. “Damn good.”

  “Nice to see you fight back. You might try that with Wicket Greene sometime.”

  Willie’s smile faded a bit. “I am fighting back. In my own way. You just don’t see it.”

  “Okay.” Should I push it? I decided no. I’d opened him up a bit; best to leave him that way for now and pry a little more later. “Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I might just.... uh, how ’bout we talk later?”

  “Sure,” I quickly agreed. Maybe then he’d tell me what the hell he’d been doing at Hans Fohl’s meeting.

  At one o’clock, a twelve-piece brass band led off the festivities with something by John Philip Sousa. I wasn’t sure if it was “Stars and Stripes Forever” or “The Washington Post March.” It sounded like the musicians didn’t know either. They were playing for volume rather than accuracy.

  The band stood near second base, in front of the platform that held the VIPs. Weeghman sat in the center of the stage, looking as rapturous as Rube with a bone. Attendance exceeded anything he could have hoped for: the grandstand was packed to standing room only and fans who overflowed the bleachers were herded into roped-off areas in foul territory. Since every square inch of space in the ballpark had been sold out, not even the freeloaders on the rooftops across Sheffield Avenue could spoil Weeghman’s mood.

  Seated to Weeghman’s left was the mayor of Chicago, Big Bill Thompson. The rest of the chairs were occupied by half a dozen of the city’s most powerful businessmen, each of them a part-owner of the Cubs. Among them were J. Ogden Armour of the meatpacking family; Bennett Harrington, who owned the Dearborn Fuel Company; and William Wrigley, the chewing gum man. The Cubs’ ownership had enough collective influence to get the lucrative Fourth of July game scheduled for Chicago’s National League team. To Charlie Comiskey’s chagrin, his World Champion White Sox were playing their holiday game in Cleveland.

  After the noise from the band came to a merciful end, Weeghman rose and stepped up to a huge brown megaphone set upon a tripod. I hoped the speeches weren’t going to last long. Holding a bat at “shoulder arms” was an uncomfortable position to maintain for any length of time. That’s how the two teams stood, the Cincinnati players in formation at third base and the Cubs behind first.

  I knew we didn’t look like soldiers, but at least our home uniforms had a patriotic color scheme: CUBS spelled across the chest of our white pinstripes in red and blue letters and socks with bright bands of red, white, and blue. The Reds, in their road flannels, were limited to red and gray.

  To his credit—and my relief—Weeghman made only a few brief remarks regarding “this great game of ours” before introducing the mayor.

  Mayor Thompson was a large man with a large cigar clamped between his teeth. Before the U. S. entered the war, he’d been so openly pro-German that he was dubbed “Kaiser Bill.” Since then, he kept a low profile, especially during patriotic events such as this. Thompson took the cigar from his mouth long enough to say a few words about “this great game of ours” and quickly went on to introduce Bennett Harrington.

  Harrington was the ideal speaker for this occasion, a link between baseball and the military. His Dearborn Fuel Company was one of the leading industries producing weapons and ammunition for the war effort.

  The other men on the platform were dark-suited and looked every bit the businessmen and politicians they were. Bennett Harrington, a tall slim man whose age was somewhere between thirty and sixty, affected the look of a Southern gentleman: white linen suit, black string tie, and a Panama hat.

  As Harrington started speaking, the wind picked up, giving ripples of life to the red, white, and blue bunting that had been slathered around the park. Above the scoreboard, the flag perked up and flew straight out.

  Harrington’s voice was different from the others, too. He lacked their bluster, speaking softly and slowly. The content of his speech was the same though—that of a politician. And since I’d never heard a politician’s speech that was worth listening to, my attention quickly wandered.

  I looked at moonfaced William Wrigley seated at the end of the platform. I’d given a lot of thought to Wrigley and to Weeghman’s suspicions of him. I came to the conclusion that it didn’t make financial sense for Wrigtey—or any of the other Cubs owners—to try to hurt the club. Sabotaging the team would only end up hurting themselves. There had to be another explanation for the strange events at Cubs Park.

  I was starting to juggle my bat and had to force myself to stop. The pre-game practice had worn off long before and I was starting to stiffen. With a glance over my shoulder, I saw that my teammates were fidgeting more than I was.

  Harrington’s words caught my ears again, “... more than just a game. By allowing these fine young men to continue playing baseball, we will provide entertainment to boost the nation’s morale and the training necessary to provide for the nation’s defense. As General Pershing himself has said, ‘The soldier who is best at throwing grenades is the one who knows how to throw a baseball’ ...”

  Good thing Black Jack Pershing didn’t see me throw batting practice, I thought.

  Harrington came to his close. He paused to place his hat over his heart, then uttered the phrase of the day, “this great game of ours.�
�� The move looked insincere and the words rang hollow. Yup, he was a politician at heart. But if Bennett Harrington could help keep the War Department from closing down the season, he was all right with me.

  After a few final words from Charles Weeghman, the band launched into a slow, cautious version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” President Wilson had declared it to be the country’s national anthem for the duration of the war, so the musicians gave extra care to playing the notes as written.

  The anthem ended with a raucous burst of rockets and firecrackers. Our adolescent lieutenant ordered, “Forward... march!” and we began moving toward second.

  The Cincinnati squad marched toward the same destination from their place behind third. Seeing the Reds squad, I realized what a ridiculous appearance both teams must be making. The knobs flaring at the ends of the bats made it look like we were armed with toy blunderbusses.

  As the Cubs and Reds converged toward the VIP platform, Bennett Harrington stood. He put his hat over his heart again and lifted his right hand in salute. The rest of the dignitaries scrambled to follow his lead.

  Our lieutenant squealed, “Right turn . . . march!” and Cincinnati’s leader gave the same order for a left turn. Both squads executed the maneuver smoothly. The Reds veered off toward left field, while we marched toward the cheering fans in the right field bleachers.

  I stole a look at Willie, tempted to congratulate him on the successful turn. I could tell from his satisfied smile that he’d sufficiently complimented himself on the feat.

  Willie’s face suddenly froze. A fountain of red erupted from his chest, spurting from the “U” in CUBS. He gave a soft grunt and blood bubbled from his lips. I dropped my bat and moved to catch him as he began to collapse. In the back of my mind, the sound of thunder registered. I threw my arm around his back to hold him up.

  Teammates stumbled into us, then quickly stepped away.

  Willie’s eyes were wide, white, and sightless. He felt nothing as I laid him down on the grass, still supporting his head.