Hunting a Detroit Tiger

by Troy Soos

  “Oh.”

  He mumbled something that indicated he wasn’t always happy about Connie Siever’s choice of topics.

  As he ran a comb over his remaining hair, I asked, “By the way, Karl, can you give me Leo Hyman’s phone number?”

  He gave me the number without asking why. After Landfors left—in a suit identical to the one he’d arrived in—I phoned Hyman at home and we arranged a meeting for later in the afternoon.

  Then I placed a more difficult call. To Margie, to cancel our picnic.

  I first tried to get by with saying that “something came up.” Her silence urged me to elaborate. I decided I should tell her all, before she had a chance to read the stories Donner had planted. I didn’t want her thinking that I was betraying my fellow ballplayers.

  Fifteen minutes later, Margie knew almost as much about what was happening with Hub Donner, the IWW, and the players’ union as I did. And I had a new volunteer to help me solve Emmett Siever’s murder.

  The projectionist’s booth of the Empire Theatre was barely spacious enough to hold two people. With three people in it, including Leo Hyman and his belly, it was uncomfortably cramped.

  Stan Zaluski, the old man who took tickets at Fraternity Hall, stood next to the projector, working the machine as it beamed Wallace Reid’s latest movie, Double Speed, for the Friday afternoon audience. I sat on a stack of film cans, Hyman on a low stool that looked like it was about to be swallowed by his butt.

  The dimly lit booth was further crowded by several years accumulation of Motion Picture Magazine as well as posters, heralds, and lobby cards for just about every movie since The Great Train Robbery. The air was thick with smoke from Zaluski’s Cavendish tobacco, and simmering from the heat of the projector’s lamp.

  “This is nicer than the last place we met,” I said. But not by much, I thought.

  Hyman brushed his long white mustache away from his lips. “I rather like it myself.” Pointing to the small window through which the movie was beamed, he added, “If the conversation’s poor, at least there’s entertainment.”

  Zaluski was absorbed in his work, turning the handle of the projector while keeping one eye on the screen and another on a chart in front of him. I knew from a long addiction to movie magazines that the chart told him how many frames per second to crank specific scenes. Chases were supposed to be turned faster and love scenes slower. With a Wally Reid auto-racing picture, just about every scene went at breakneck speed, and Zaluski’s sinewy arm was getting quite a workout.

  Turning my attention from Zaluski to Hyman, I said, “I really want to go after Hub Donner.”

  Hyman’s brow lifted, causing his spectacles to move up as well. “For killing Emmett Siever?”

  “Whether he killed Siever or not—and I think there’s a good chance he did—I want to cause him some trouble. Because that’s what he’s doing to me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not getting involved in your politics or anything. Part of it’s baseball, and part of it’s personal. Donner’s trying to use me to cause friction on the Tigers. And I don’t like being used.”

  “At least you’re being honest,” Hyman said. “So you want to ‘go after’ Hub Donner for purely selfish motives.”

  “Well ... yes.” I didn’t like the word “selfish,” but I suppose it applied.

  “And you want us to help you.”

  “Not help, really, just a little information.”

  “Information is the most valuable asset there is in a war,” Hyman said. His tone sounded like the one Landfors used when lecturing me about politics or history.

  “I’m not in a war. I just have a little battle going with Donner. If you didn’t want me to win it, why did you give me the extra time?”

  Hyman’s face turned implacable. “You have two weeks left.”

  Zaluski sucked hard at his pipe.

  I went on, “You told me both sides spy on each other. So I assume you have somebody who keeps track of Donner. Do you know where he was the night Emmett Siever was killed?”

  Hyman hesitated. “Off the top of my head, no. But then I never thought of him as having killed Emmett. The papers seemed pretty clear on the subject of who did the shooting.”

  “I already told you the papers—and the cops—were wrong. You must have doubts yourself about what really happened; otherwise, you’d have let Whitey Boggs or one of your other guys kill me already.” I gave Hyman a chance to contradict me. When he didn’t, I continued, “Donner gave me an alibi for the night Siever was shot, but I found out he was lying.”

  Hyman turned his head to Zaluski. “What do you think, Stosh?”

  Zaluski answered from around his pipe stem. “I don’t see where telling the boy where Donner was can do any harm.”

  “I’ll find out for you,” Hyman agreed.

  “Thanks.”

  “Reel change,” said Zaluski. “Give me some room, fellas.”

  Hyman and I edged back as far as we could while Zaluski prepared to start the second projector when the film in the first ran out.

  Another topic I wanted to explore was Donner’s position at Ford. The only time Donner had shown any worry was about doing baseball business on Ford company time. I wondered if I might use Donner’s moonlighting to get him in hot water with his bosses at the plant. “I went to see Donner at the Highland Park plant,” I said to Hyman. “How much power does he have there? Who does he answer to?”

  “He has all the power he wants. He’s in charge of the Service Department—his own combination police department and spy service. Only one he answers to is Henry Ford, and I don’t expect Ford himself knows all that Donner has going on.”

  “There were men in plain clothes there. Are they his spies?”

  “His goon squad. Were they wearing bow ties?”

  “Yeah, same as Donner.”

  “He makes all his goons wear them—it’s how they dress for battle. A bow tie comes undone in a fight; a necktie can be used to strangle you.”

  Zaluski finished switching projectors. When the next reel was whirring smoothly, he said to me, “Son, you mind cranking this a bit?” Tapping the bowl of his pipe with his free hand, he said, “Need to reload.”

  “Sure!” I agreed. “But I don’t know how.”

  “Just watch the screen and turn the handle fast enough that it looks right.”

  I stood and took over the handle, keeping my eye on the infinitely peppy Wally Reid as he raced around on the movie screen. For several minutes, I cranked away. I first did it so that it “looked right.” Once I got the hang of it, I turned it just a tad slower and faster, enjoying the sense of power.

  With a fresh bowl lit, Zaluski said, “Thanks, son. I’ll take it again.”

  Reluctantly, I gave up the projector and sat back down. I briefly pondered another question I had for Leo Hyman: where had he been the night Siever was shot? Probably best not to put it exactly that way though, I thought. “Does Whitey Boggs always run the meetings?” I asked.

  Hyman smiled. “When I’m not there he does.”

  So much for the subtle approach. Okay, shift focus to make it seem I’m interested in Boggs. “You said he’s head of some committee?”

  “Relief Committee.”

  “How many committees you have?”

  He smiled again. “Several. Stosh here is head of the Welcoming Committee.”

  “Means I take the donations,” Zaluski said. “Damn!” The film had jumped a sprocket and it took him a minute to get it aligned again.

  “How long have you been a projectionist?” I asked.

  “I’m not. I only work here once a week. The regular projectionist has a lady friend he meets every Friday. He pays me to cover for him. Been doing it for a couple years now.”

  Hyman spoke up. “Stosh used to be with Ford. Got fired for unionizing and now he’s blacklisted. Can’t get a regular job. We have a lot of fellows like that.” He added with a small smile, “At least Ford did give him some training for his other career.”
r />   “What’s that?”

  Zaluski answered, “I’m a ventriloquist. Do a little vaudeville and burlesque now and then.”

  “You learned that at Ford?”

  “Show him the Ford Whisper,” Hyman urged.

  Keeping one hand on the projector, Zaluski turned so that I could see his wrinkled face and removed the pipe from his teeth. With his mouth barely open and his lips motionless, he said, “Ford has spotters who watch the men on the assembly line. If they see you talking, they report you. So you learn to talk like this. It’s called a ‘Ford Whisper.’”

  “That’s good!” I said. “Can everybody who works there do it?”

  “Not as good as Stosh,” said Hyman. “Whitey Boggs can’t hardly do it at all. Probably what got him fired was that they could see him talking.”

  “Or unionizing,” said Zaluski. “He was active, too. The Ford Service Department gets any hint you might be union, and your ass is out of there. Boggs got fired just after I did.”

  Through the booth’s window, I saw that he was cranking too fast. Angry shouts started coming from the crowd below. Zaluski returned the pipe to his mouth and his attention to the projector.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” I said to Hyman. “Most of the Wobblies are workingmen, right? Factory workers and guys like that. Wouldn’t real workers be upset about Emmett Siever, a baseball player, getting involved—and getting so much attention?”

  Hyman shook his head. “Not at all. We have writers, artists, all kinds of people in the IWW. That’s the point: one big union made up of everyone who works, no matter what kind of work it is.”

  “Even baseball?” I still had trouble sometimes thinking of baseball as “work.”

  He laughed and nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “So none of the Wobblies had a personal problem with Emmett Siever?”

  “No,” Hyman insisted. “Everybody liked him. He was an upstanding fellow.”

  “Maybe recently. But I heard he was trouble back in his playing days. Even abandoned his daughter after his wife died.”

  Hyman shrugged. “Not many of us could pass muster if we were judged by what we did when we were young.”

  “Siever was a hell of a ballplayer,” put in Zaluski. “Saw him when he was with the old Wolverines, and again when he came to the Tigers in ought-one. Played with his head. Seemed he knew just where a ball was going to be hit, and he’d be there. Box scores don’t give you credit for brains, but he had ’em. Guts too. I was at a game in Bennett Park where I saw just what he had.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He took a couple of brisk puffs on his pipe. “Tie game, it was. Bottom of the ninth, one out. Emmett Siever—he must have been forty years old by this time—was on first base and Kid Elberfeld on third. Next batter—Ducky Holmes, I think it was—hits a grounder to second. Easy double play. Second baseman tosses it to the shortstop to get one out, and he relays it to first. But Siever wouldn’t get out of the way of the throw. He even jumped a little and took it smack on the forehead. Broke up the double play, Elberfeld scored, and Tigers won.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yep. Siever was out for a week with blurred vision, but that’s the kind of player—the kind of man—he was.” Turning to look at me, he added, “So you can see why friends of his aren’t go to let the man who killed him get away with it.”

  “I’m not gonna let him get away with it, either,” I said.

  Hyman spoke up. “I got another place to be. You have any more questions for me?”

  I thought a moment. “Yeah, one. Who’s taking Siever’s place? Who’s organizing the players’ union now?”

  Hyman shook his head in a way that said he wasn’t going to tell me. Whether or not he knew who it was wasn’t clear from the gesture. “I’ll get back to you if I find out where Hub Donner was that night.” With that, he stood to leave. “Coming?”

  I asked Zaluski if I could stay and watch the movie for a while and he agreed. Hyman reminded me that my grace period had only fifteen more days to run, then he left the two of us alone in the booth.

  My impulse in wanting to stay was to ask Zaluski why Hyman hadn’t been at Fraternity Hall that night. I realized, though, that Zaluski wouldn’t tell me anything Hyman didn’t want me to know.

  So we settled back and talked baseball. I took over on the projector a few times and Zaluski told me stories about the old Detroit teams—the National League champion Wolverines of 1887, with Dan Brouthers, Sam Thompson, and Charlie Bennett; and the three-time pennant-winning Tigers of 1907 to 1909, with Sam Crawford, Davy Jones, and George Mullin. In return, I told him a few things about Ty Cobb that he hadn’t heard before.

  The conversation, and the smell of Zaluski’s pipe, sent me back to when I was a kid, sitting in my uncle’s general store while men gathered around the stove for cracker-barrel baseball talk. My Uncle Matt smoked a pipe, too, and sometimes he’d let me put an unlit one in my mouth.

  By the time I left the theater, I was hankering for a pipe of my own and thinking that both Leo Hyman and Stan Zaluski knew more than they would ever reveal to me. The question was: how much of what they knew had to do with the circumstances of Emmett Siever’s death?

  Chapter Fifteen

  I’d thought it a clever idea at the time. Now I was stuck with the result and not at all comfortable about it.

  Eager to see her again, I had phoned Margie the first thing in morning and asked her to the Saturday game at Navin Field. She begged off, with the excuse that she needed to do some shopping. I knew that she’d been a bit annoyed with me yesterday—not for canceling the picnic but because I hadn’t told her earlier about the trouble I was in. I then asked her something that I didn’t think she’d decline: I told her that we’d been invited on a double date by Karl Landfors and Connie Siever, adding that Landfors was an old friend I very much wanted her to meet. After a slight hesitation she agreed to go. When I tried once more to talk her into coming to the game as well, she firmly said she couldn’t make it to the ballpark today.

  I attributed my subsequent 0-for-5 batting performance to her absence. To Hub Donner, I attributed the Tigers’ coldly hostile attribute toward me. I was sure that every one of them had either read or heard about the newspaper stories. Not one of the players said a single word to me before, during, or after the game. I suspected that the only thing that kept them from committing outright violence was the fact that I’d been helping the team win games. That reprieve was probably soon to end, however, since I’d gone hitless and Dutch Leonard ended up on the short end of a 6-4 score.

  At least Karl Landfors came through for me. After I’d explained to him about my story to Margie, he checked with Connie, and they agreed to back me up and join us for dinner.

  Hence my present anxiety. Landfors and I were still in my apartment and the mere prospect of him seeing me with Margie had me already feeling self-conscious. The two of them had never met before; I didn’t know what they would think of each other. My only consolation was that Landfors would also be with his sweetheart, so he might be equally ill at ease about the double date.

  He was certainly concerned about something. I watched Landfors as he fumbled with his necktie. He stood in front of the mirror above the phone stand, tying knot after knot, mangling each attempt, and angrily pulling the tie loose to try again. It was almost six o’clock and we needed to be leaving soon.

  I had already primped myself to perfection and put on the new double-breasted blue worsted. “Want me to tie it for you?” I offered.

  “No.”

  Letting the tie hang loose around his neck for a minute, he picked up a yellow paper from the parlor stand. For the fifth time in the hour since the Western Union messenger delivered it, he reread its message, his face darkening the same as it had each time before.

  Ever since the delivery boy gave it to him, I’d been badgering him to tell me what it said, to no avail. Landfors looked so troubled that I asked again, “What is it? Anythi
ng wrong?” I assumed somebody had died; why else a telegram?

  He shook his head the same as he had the previous times I’d asked. “It isn’t anything. I hope.” Then he turned to me. “And what is it that you’re so wrapped up in?”

  I’d been looking over a scrap of white paper as often as he’d looked at his yellow one. “Mine’s nothing, too.” No matter how many times I reviewed my calculations, my batting average had definitely dropped more than a hundred points in one day. It was still over .300—either .315 or .316—and any other time I would have considered that to be a terrific mark. But that brief period of batting over .400 had spoiled me.

  Landfors took up the ends of his tie again.

  I gave up trying to figure out my exact batting average and directed my thoughts to a subject almost equally depressing: Emmett Siever. “Has Connie said anything about her father yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “She was his only next of kin, right?”

  Landfors paused from his battle with the necktie, which was never going to look right anyway because it was so twisted and wrinkled. “I believe so ... why?”

  “So she inherits whatever he had?”

  His eyes grew wide. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. The reason I’m asking is: if she inherits his possessions, shouldn’t she get whatever Siever had on him when he died?”

  Landfors directed his attention back to the mirror and the necktie. “I suppose. Perhaps she’s already gotten his effects from the police. Why?”

  “The cops claim Siever had a revolver on him. But I know he didn’t—not when I saw him, anyway. I figure if Connie could get it back, we might be able to find out where it came from. There must be a serial number on it.” The Colt .45 I’d brought home from the war had such a number, and I assumed it must help somehow in tracking a firearm.

  “I doubt if the police will release the gun. It will probably have to stay in the evidence room.”

  “What’s it evidence of? There was no crime as far as the police are concerned. Remember?”