Murder at Wrigley Field

by Troy Soos

  Jackson chuckled. He graciously avoided pointing out that Fenway had a short left field. “Anyway,” he went on, “Bennett Harrington paid me a visit at our hotel that night—the Sherman House, I think we were staying in.”

  He paused longer than I could take. “And...” I prodded.

  Jackson rapidly said the words, “He wanted me to jump to the Feds.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Having spit out the big secret, the pace of his speech slowed again. “Nope. For real. He told me he had a big share of the Federal League team in Baltimore. A ‘silent partner’ he called it. Said if I joined them, they could be as good as the old Orioles. He was a nut on the old Orioles.”

  “Talked about seeing McGraw and Keeler and all them play?”

  “Sure did. Anyway, I said I ain’t interested. So he offered me cash. And he had it with him, in a big envelope. A cash bonus—five thousand dollars—to sign with them. On top of what my salary would be.”

  “You still turned it down?”

  “Damn right. I wasn’t keen to jump to the Feds anyway. And there was no way I was gonna do it like this. Smelled fishy to me. You don’t offer somebody cash in his hotel room if it’s an honest deal.”

  “But why so mad at Harrington? He made you an offer, you turned it down, end of story. What’s the problem?”

  “The son of a bitch didn’t leave it there. After I told him no dice, he said he was gonna tell people that I took the money anyway and get me in trouble.”

  Blackmail. Or “negotiating,” as Harrington liked to think of it.

  Jackson added sadly, “He told me nobody would take the word of an illiterate over his. Caused me a lot of worry. Was months before I realized it was just a bluff.”

  No, Harrington would have had to go public with his own Federal League involvement to accuse Jackson. “Thanks Joe. Sorry to bring all this up.”

  “You’re not gonna tell anybody about it, right?”

  “Nope. You got my word.”

  I had another piece of the puzzle. Or I had the first piece of a new puzzle, I wasn’t sure. Harrington wasn’t punishing Weeghman on behalf of the National League for having helped start the Federal League. Harrington wanted revenge on Charles Weeghman for betraying the Feds.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Karl Landfors met me outside Cubs Park after the Saturday game. “New shortstop looks quite promising,” he said. I never expected to hear Landfors appraising baseball talent. And, even more surprising, he was right. Though his choice of words was poor—Dillard looked “real good,” not “quite promising.”

  “Name’s Wally Dillard,” I said. “Covers a lot of ground, good hands. Hits better than I expected.” Wicket Greene’s fielding had improved, but he was in a batting slump, so Dillard had got his first start at shortstop. He went two-for-three with a sacrifice and a stolen base. “Once he gets some experience under his belt, he’ll be real solid.”

  “He could use a nickname, too,” said Landfors.

  “I’ve been working on it,” I said with a grin. “You got any dinner plans tonight?”

  “No. But I couldn’t eat anything for a while, anyway. Overdid it with the peanuts, I think.” He patted his stomach for emphasis.

  The weather was clear and mild, so we decided to spend the rest of the evening at Jackson Park—go on some rides, eat some ice cream, perhaps meet a couple of young ladies...

  On the trolley ride down Cottage Grove Avenue, Landfors said, “A baseball game is a good way to relax.”

  “Not if you’re playing in it,” I snapped at him. Not in the big leagues, anyway.

  He laughed. “I don’t expect to ever play in one. No, I’ll just be a fan, thank you.”

  It was more than I ever thought he’d be, and I was happy that he’d developed such a fondness for the game. “What are you relaxing from?”

  “Writing. I’ve been working with some fellows who used to publish The Masses. We’re putting out some pamphlets for the Socialist Party.”

  I dug an elbow in his ribs and tried to shush him. There were too many passengers on the car for him to say that aloud. We immediately fell into a whispered argument about freedom of speech. My point was that there was no more freedom of speech.

  After Landfors and I had gone back and forth about it for a while, I quietly told him, “A week before the season opened, there was a lynching.” My words caught in my throat, and it was a long moment until I could squeeze them out again. “It was right here in Illinois—Collinsville. A miner named Robert Prager gave a speech on Socialism. He didn’t say anything disloyal, wasn’t recruiting or advocating or anything; he just gave a lecture about what it was. And a group of patriotic citizens strung him up for it.”

  “I heard about that,” Landfors said. The eyes behind his spectacles were downcast.

  I continued, my words coming loud and angry now. “They caught the guys that hung him, which was real easy because they were so proud of it that the whole town knew who they were. And they put the lynchers on trial. Their defense was ‘patriotic murder.’ Can you believe that? Like it’s self-defense or something. Patriotic murder!” It was Landfors’s turn to try to hush me, without success. “And they were acquitted in twenty minutes.” For me, the Prager lynching was the single event that had started me questioning all things patriotic and nationalistic.

  Landfors and I agreed to not talk about politics for the rest of the day and instead concentrate on having fun. Fortunately, no one on the streetcar was inclined to do their bit to enforce the Sedition Act, so we got off the train at Sixty-Third Street without incident.

  Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance had been the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The vast, majestic “White City” introduced to the world such delights as the Ferris wheel and the exotic dancing of Little Egypt.

  Much of Jackson Park was later turned into golf courses, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. Near the park’s lagoon was the attraction Landfors and I had come to enjoy: the White City Amusement Park. In keeping with its name, all of the structures in the park were painted white. Tiers and spires dripped with every sort of architectural embellishment, causing the buildings to look like frosted wedding cakes.

  If there was a place for fun, this was it—a Chicago version of Coney Island, with rides like a Shoot-the-Chutes and balloon races. There were dance halls, food vendors, bandstands, and a roller skating rink.

  Landfors and I ambled about the grounds. We didn’t go on any rides ourselves, nor did we meet any young ladies. But we did consume enormous quantities of vanilla ice cream while we watched the kids who were on the rides and discreetly observed the ladies who passed us by.

  After an hour or so, we sat on a bench to let the ice cream settle.

  Back when the Columbian Exposition was here, there were buildings for cultural exhibits from different countries—a Persian palace, a Japanese bazaar, an Egyptian temple, and a German village. That’s back when differences were considered interesting, not threatening.

  “What do you think of the war?” I asked Landfors.

  He exhaled slowly. Our moratorium on such conversation hadn’t lasted long. “I hate it,” he said. “What else can I think about it?”

  “You think it was right for the U. S. to get involved?”

  There was no hesitation. “Yes.”

  The answer surprised me. “I thought you’d have been against it.”

  “No. The whole thing is a monumental exercise in stupidity. But it will be over faster with us in it. And it is justified. Most of the atrocity stories are fabricated, but there are valid reasons for the United States to be involved. Germany has been sending arms to Mexico for years, trying to get them to go to war against us. And they have been sabotaging American plants and sinking American ships.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d enlist if it was that clear to me. But now it seems everything we’re supposed to be fighting for ‘over there’ has been abandoned back here.”

&
nbsp; “A lot of it has,” Landfors said with a sorrowful shudder. “But sometimes you can’t play by the rules. Lincoln broke a lot of them during the Civil War, you know. He suspended habeas corpus, for one thing.” In answer to my frown, he explained, “Basically, it’s imprisoning people without charges and without a trial. It’s blatantly unconstitutional, but quite a few politicians and newspaper editors who were pro-Confederacy were put in jail that way. If Lincoln hadn’t done it, the Union might not have held together. Extreme situations sometimes require less than desirable actions. Oh, the Emancipation Proclamation was probably unconstitutional, too. Worth doing, though, don’t you think?”

  “Of course. Look, I’m not a stickler for playing exactly by the rule book, but I do know what’s fair. And putting people in jail for disagreeing with the government, or for playing the ‘wrong’ kind music for chrissake, that just ain’t right.”

  Landfors thought. “No, it isn’t right. But you have to get people riled up to go to war, especially to a war that’s an ocean away. So you feed them tales about horrid atrocities, you convince them that the enemy is already on these shores undermining our way of life. You tell them whatever it takes to get them to send their boys off to battle.”

  “Problem is,” I said, “you can’t rile them back down once they get going. You get groups like the Patriotic Knights of Liberty and the Anti-Yellow Dog League and the Ku Klux Klan and the rest of them. They go lynching people and burning houses. It ain’t right.”

  “No. No it ain’t.”

  After sitting a while longer in silence, we strolled around some more, then went to the Midway Gardens to get something more substantial than ice cream in our stomachs. Both of us picked at our dinners, thoroughly in the doldrums.

  “You mentioned ‘sending their boys to battle.’ Mrs. Tobin, my neighbor you saw, her boy Harold just got killed.”

  “Damn.”

  “All those boys dying in France,” I said, “and all I’ve been thinking about is Willie’s death. I suppose that’s kind of stupid of me, isn’t it?”

  “One death is all it takes,” Landfors said softly. “That was enough for me.”

  Damn. I’d forgotten. “You, uh, you haven’t told me much about her.”

  “That’s true. I haven’t. So, how are you doing with the Willie Kaiser investigation?”

  Maybe it was still too soon for him to talk about his wife. “I think I’m making progress,” I said, following his lead. “I’ve pretty much figured out why he was killed, anyway.”

  Landfors didn’t ask me what the reason was; I don’t think he much cared. He did say, “Oh, I checked some on that Bennett Harrington.”

  “And?”

  He pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. “He is originally from Baltimore, like you said. Had a string of businesses there—trucking company, hotel, fish market; every one of them failed. Moved to Chicago about ten years ago, almost broke. His brother owned the Dearborn Fuel Company, mostly dealt in heating coal back then. Took Harrington into the business. The brother died a year after Harrington joined him.” Answering my raised eyebrows, Landfors said, “No, it was tuberculosis. Nothing suspicious.”

  “That it?”

  “So far. Bennett Harrington has done quite well for himself since then. Nothing illegal as far as I know.”

  “Huh. Could you do a little more digging in Baltimore?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Check on Terrapin Park. It’s where the Baltimore Federal League team played. See who owns it.”

  “Terrapin? Like a turtle?”

  “Yeah. Stupid name, huh?”

  “Not for baseball,” Landfors chuckled. “Okay. I’ll check it out.”

  When dusk came, we left the park. As we were walking out, Landfors said to me, “By the way, don’t be too hard on people being taken in by propaganda. You’ve been, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You always refer to him as Willie.”

  “Well, he was my friend. Of course I call him Willie.”

  “You refer to everyone else by their last name. You sure it’s not that you don’t like saying Kaiser?”

  I hadn’t thought about it, but he could be right. After all, I always thought of Landfors as Landfors.

  If Wicket Greene had earned any money for throwing games, he sure wasn’t spending it on rent. The dilapidated wood-frame boarding house he called home was on South Halsted, in the Near West Side, not far from Jane Addams’s Hull House. It didn’t look like it would be there for long. The question was whether it would fall apart of its own accord before the wrecking ball got to it.

  The interior showed the same signs of decay. In the shabby dark parlor where Greene and I sat Sunday morning, the wallpaper bulged from the crumbling plaster behind it. In some spots it had erupted through, leaving piles of white dust around the baseboards.

  Wicket Greene sat in an overstuffed chair that no longer had any stuffing. Layers of different colored blankets draped over the seat and backrest provided the only cushions. I sat in a straight-backed pine chair that wasn’t comfortable but was solid enough to hold my weight safely.

  “About Bennett Harrington ...” I began.

  Greene grunted something that I took to mean “go on.”

  “Did he talk to you directly about... doing things to hurt Weeghman?” I didn’t even like to say “throwing games.”

  “Directly?” A frown of ignorance creased Greene’s immense forehead.

  “Yeah, did he talk to you himself or was it through somebody else?”

  “Oh!” The creases softened. “Direct.”

  Same as what I’d gathered from Lefty Rariden: Harrington did know exactly what was happening.

  “You know of anybody else Harrington had working for him?”

  He nodded. “There were some others.”

  “Who? What were they doing?”

  Greene hesitated, then said emphatically, “No. I told you what I done, and I’ll stick by it. But as far as anybody else, I don’t know nothing.”

  “You don’t want to get them in trouble? Or you don’t want them causing trouble for you if it gets out that you told?”

  “Right.”

  Right to which, you jerk? I was starting to have the sense that I was talking to an ugly male version of Edna Chapman. Okay, if Greene wasn’t going to volunteer the information, the next best thing was to tell him what I suspected and see if he’d at least confirm it. “When you told me about Harrington, it was the day after Curly Neeman was killed.” I paused to give Greene a chance to jump in.

  He smiled nervously; at the sight of his teeth, I realized how well he fit in with his surroundings. But he said nothing.

  I went on, “Neeman getting killed put a scare into you.”

  “I don’t scare,” Greene growled.

  “Sure you do. You were scared about Willie Kaiser taking your job from you. You’re scared about what’s going to become of you when you can’t make a living playing baseball.” Greene shifted in his chair in obvious discomfort, and it had nothing to do with the upholstery. “And after Neeman got killed, you were scared that you might be next. That’s why you wanted to put me onto Bennett Harrington. You wanted somebody to know about him, just in case.”

  Greene bobbed his head slowly. After a minute, he said, “Curly Neeman was the one who sawed the bleacher seats. That’s how he got his job as a guard in Harrington’s plant.”

  “And you think Harrington killed him?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But that’s a damn good way to shut a guy up, ain’t it?”

  “And you were worried he might’ve wanted to shut you up, too.”

  “Still am. Because one thing I do know is Curly Neeman told me he was going to see Harrington the night he got killed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The problem was, with Curly Neeman dead, I’d have a tough time proving anything about Willie’s murder. And I would need incontrovertible evidence to go public wi
th what I now suspected: that Willie Kaiser was killed on orders from Bennett Harrington.

  This predicament had me thoroughly discouraged until I hit upon an alternate approach: if I couldn’t prove Harrington was behind Willie’s death, I might at least be able to prove that he had Curly Neeman killed, and the penalty for either crime would be the same. The sentence could even be more severe for Neeman’s murder since killing a “Kaiser” might qualify as “patriotic murder.”

  Only three weeks were left in the season, and I knew I had to step up my efforts. First thing Monday morning, I went straight to the source of the trouble.

  The source granted me only five minutes this time, and no courtesy other than allowing me to sit. “What’s on your mind now, Mr. Rawlings?” Bennett Harrington demanded. No more “Mickey.” The chummy approach was definitely over.

  Borrowing Wicket Greene’s fears and passing them off as my own, I said, “I don’t want to end up getting killed like Curly Neeman did.”

  Harrington leaned back. His right eye stared up at the ceiling, while the weak left one remained on me. I was wondering if he was going to ask, “Who’s Curly Neeman?” He decided not to play coy. “And why would you be worried about that?” he asked.

  “What we were talking about last time. You know, about doing things to hurt Charles Weeghman. That’s what Curly Neeman was doing, and he got killed. If that’s what’s gonna happen to guys after they do their ‘work’ for you, I want out of the deal.”

  With a bemused smile on his lips, Harrington asked, “What have you done to keep your end of the bargain?”

  “Well, nothing yet. But—”

  “And you have no intention of doing anything, do you?”

  “Sure I do. If—”

  “Tell me something. What makes you think I had anything to do with Mr. Neeman’s unfortunate demise?”

  “Hey, I go to the Knights meetings. Guys talk. I think I know what’s up. I just want to know what Neeman did to get you mad. I’ll make sure I don’t do the same thing.”

  “Are you armed, Mr. Rawlings?”