“Yeah, sure. We got about everything.”
“Okay, and put a lot of salt on the rim,” she said.
She sat on one of the big armchairs opposite the couch, kicked her sandals off, and tucked her feet up under her. “Tell me about this book you’re writing, Mr. Spenser.”
“Well, Mrs. Rabb—”
“Linda.”
“Okay, Linda. I suppose you’d say it’s along the lines of several others, looking at baseball as the institutionalized expression of human personality.” She nodded and I wondered why. I didn’t know what the hell I’d just said.
“Isn’t that interesting,” she said.
“I like to see sports as a kind of metaphor for human life, contained by rules, patterned by tradition.” I was hot now, and rolling. Rabb came back with the Margarita in a lowball glass and the ale in Tiffany-designed goblets that said COCA-COLA. I thought Linda Rabb looked relieved. Maybe I wouldn’t switch to the talk show circuit yet. Rabb passed out the drinks.
“What’s patterned by tradition, Mr. Spenser?” he said.
“Sports. It’s a way if imposing order on disorder.”
Rabb nodded. “Yeah, right, that’s certainly true,” he said. He didn’t know what the hell I had just said either. He drank some of the ale and put some dry-roasted cashews in his mouth, holding a handful and popping them in serially.
“But I’m here to talk about you, Marty, and Linda too. What is your feeling about the game?”
Rabb said, “I love it,” at the same time that Linda said, “Marty loves it.” They laughed.
“I’d play it for nothing,” Rabb said. “Since I could walk, I been playing, and I want to do it all my life.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Rabb said. “I never gave it any thought. When I was about five my father bought me a Frankie Gustine autograph glove. I can still remember it. It was too big for me and he had to buy me one of those little cheap ones made in Taiwan, you know, with a couple of little laces for webbing? And I used to oil that damn Frankie Gustine glove and bang my fist in the pocket and rub some more oil until I was about ten and I was big enough to play with it. I still got it somewhere.”
“Play other sports?” I didn’t know where I was going, but I was used to that.
“Oh yeah, matter of fact, I went to college on a basketball scholarship. Got drafted by the Lakers in the fifth round, but I never thought about doing anything else but baseball when I got out.”
“Did you meet Linda in college?”
“No.”
“How about you, Linda, how do you feel about baseball?”
“I never cared about it till I met Marty. I don’t like the traveling part of it. Marty’s away about eighty games a season. But other than that I think it’s fine. Marty loves it. It makes him happy.”
“Where’d you two meet?” I asked.
“It’s there in the biog sheet, isn’t it?” Rabb said.
“Yeah, I suppose so. But we both know about PR material.”
Rabb said, “Yeah.”
“Well, let’s do this. Let’s run through the press kit and maybe elaborate a little.” Linda Rabb nodded.
Rabb said, “It’s all in there.”
“You were born in Lafayette, Indiana, in nineteen forty-four.” Rabb nodded. “Went to Marquette, graduated nineteen sixty-five. Signed with the Sox that year, pitched a year in Charleston and a year at Pawtucket. Came up in nineteen sixty-eight. Been here ever since.”
Rabb said, “That’s about it.”
I said, “Where’d you meet Linda?”
“Chicago,” Rabb said. “At a White Sox game. She asked for my autograph, and I said, yeah, but she had to go out with me. She did. And bingo.”
I look at my biog sheet. “That would have been in nineteen seventy?”
“Right.” My glass was empty, and Rabb got up to refill it. I noticed his was less than half gone.
“We were married about six months later in Chicago.” Linda Rabb smiled. “In the off-season.”
“Best thing I ever did,” Rabb said, and gave me a new bottle of ale. I poured it into the glass, ate some peanuts, and drank some ale.
“You from Chicago, Linda?”
“No, Arlington Heights, a little bit away from Chicago.”
“What was your maiden name?”
Rabb said, “Oh for crissake, Spenser, why do you want to know that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You ever see one of those machines that grades apples, or oranges, or eggs, that sort of thing, by size? They dump all sizes in the hopper and the machine lets the various sizes drop into the right holes as it works down. That’s how I am. I just ask questions and let it all go into the hopper and then sort it out later.”
“Well, you’re not sorting eggs now, for crissake.”
“Oh, Marty, let him do his job. My maiden name was Hawkins, Mr. Spenser.”
“Okay, Marty, let’s go back to why you love baseball,” I said. “I mean, think about it a little. Isn’t it a game for kids? I mean, who finally cares whether a team beats another team?” It sounded like the kind of thing a writer would ask, and I wanted to get them talking. Much of what I do depends on knowing who I’m doing it with.
“Oh, Christ, I don’t know, Spenser. I mean, what isn’t a game for kids, you know? How about writing stories, is that something for grown-ups? It’s something to do. I’m good at it, I like it, and I know the rules. You’re one of twenty-five guys all working for something bigger than they are, and at the end of the year you know whether or not you got it. If you didn’t get it, then you can start over next year. If you did, then you got a chance to do it again. Some old-timey ballplayer said something about you have to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game, but you gotta be a man too.”
“Roy Campanella,” I said.
“Yeah, right, Campanella. Anyway, it’s a nice clean kind of work. You’re important to a lot of kids. You got a chance to influence kids’ lives maybe, by being an example to them. It’s a lot better than selling cigarettes or making napalm. It’s what I do, you know?”
“What about when you get too old?”
“Maybe I can coach. I’d be a good pitching coach. Maybe manage. Maybe do color. I’ll stay around the game one way or another.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I’ll still have Linda and the boy.”
“And when the boy grows up?”
“I’ll still have Linda.”
I was getting caught up in the part. I’d started to lose track. I was interested. Maybe some of the questions were about me.
“Maybe I better finish up my Labatt Fifty and go home,” I said. “I’ve taken enough of your time.”
Linda Rabb said, “Oh no, don’t go yet. Marty, get him another beer. We were just getting started.”
I shook my head, drained my glass, and stood up. “No, thank you very much, Linda. We’ll talk again.”
“Marty, make him stay.”
“Linda, for crissake, if he wants to go, let him go. She does this every time we have company, Spenser.”
They both walked with me to the door. I left them standing together. He towered over her in the doorway. His right arm was around her shoulder, and she rested her left hand on it. I took a cab home and went to bed. I was working my way through Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, and I spent two hours on it before I went to sleep.
6
It was dead quiet in my bedroom when I woke up in the morning. The sun vibrated in the room and the hum of my air conditioner underlined the silence. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head for a while and thought about what was bothering me about Linda Rabb.
What was bothering me was that she’d said she knew nothing about baseball till she met Marty but that she’d met Marty at a ball game when she’d asked for his autograph. The two didn’t go together. Nothing much, but it didn’t fit. It was the only thing that didn’t. The rest was whole c
loth. Middle American jock-ethic-kid and his loving wife. In the off-season I bet he hunted and fished and took his little boy sliding. Would he be going into the tank? “It’s what I do,” he’d said. “I know the rules.” I could understand that. I knew about the need for rules. I didn’t believe he’d dump one. I never believed Nixon would be President either. I got up, did 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, took a shower, got dressed, and made the bed.
There’s a restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which makes whipped cream biscuits, and I got the recipe once while I was up there having dinner with Brenda Loring. I made some while the coffee perked, and while they baked I squeezed a pint of orange juice and drank it. I had the biscuits with fresh strawberries and sour cream and three cups of coffee.
It was nearly ten o’clock when I got out onto the street. There was a bright smell of summer outside my apartment house. Across Arlington Street the Public Garden was a sunny pleasure. I strolled on past the enormous Thomas Ball statue of Washington on horseback. The flower beds were rich with petunias and redolent of pansies against a flourish of scarlet snapdragons. The swan boats had begun to cruise the pond, pedaled by college kids in yachting caps and trailed by an orderly assemblage of hungry ducks that broke formation to dart at the peanuts the tourists threw. I crossed the bridge over the swan boat lake and headed toward the Common on the other side of Charles Street. At the crossing there was a guy selling popcorn from a pushcart and another selling ice cream and another selling balloons and little monkeys dangling from thin sticks and blue pennants that said BOSTON, MASS., in yellow script. I turned right, walked up Charles toward Boylston. At the corner was the old guy that takes candids with a big tripod camera; faded tan samples were displayed in a case on the tripod. I turned up Boylston toward Tremont and down Tremont toward Stuart. My office was on Stuart Street. It wasn’t much of an office, but it suited the location. It would have been an ideal spot for a VD clinic or a public exterminator.
I opened the window as soon as I got in. I’d have to remember not to do push-ups on the days I had to open that window. I hung up my blue blazer, sat down at my desk, got my yellow pad out, and pulled the phone over. By one thirty I had pretty well confirmed Marty Rabb’s biography as stated. The town clerk’s office in Lafayette, Indiana, established that Marty Rabb had in fact lived there and that his parents still did. The office of the registrar at Marquette confirmed his attendance and graduation in 1965. I called a cop I knew in Providence and asked him if they had anything on Rabb when he was at Pawtucket. He called me back in forty minutes to say no. He promised me he’d keep his mouth shut about my question, and I half thought he would. He was as trustworthy as I was likely to find.
Linda Rabb was more of a problem. There was no record of her marriage to Rabb at the Chicago Hall of Records. As far as they knew, Marty Rabb hadn’t married Linda Hawkins or anyone else in Chicago in 1970 or any other time. Maybe they got married by some JP in a suburb. I called Arlington Heights and talked with the city clerk himself. No record. How about any record of Linda Hawkins or Linda Rabb? None, no birth certificate, no marriage license. If I’d wait a minute, he’d check motor vehicles. I waited. It was more like ten minutes. The air blowing in from Stuart Street was hot and gritty. The sweat had soaked through my polo shirt and made it stick to my back. I looked at my watch: 3:15. I hadn’t had lunch yet. I sniffed at the hot breeze. If the wind was right, I could catch the scent of sauerbraten wafting across the street from Jake Wirth’s. It wasn’t right. All I could smell was the uncontrolled emission of the traffic.
The Arlington Heights city clerk came back on the phone.
“Still there?”
“Yep.”
“Got no record of a driver’s license. No auto registration. There’s four Hawkinses in the city directory but no Linda. Want the phone numbers?”
“Yes, and can you give me the number of the school administration department?”
“Yeah, one minute, I’ll check it here.”
He did and gave it to me. I called them. They had no record of Linda Rabb or Linda Hawkins. There had been eight children named Hawkins in the school system since 1960. Six were boys. The other two were named Doris and Olive.
I hung up. Very cooperative.
I called the first Hawkins number in Arlington Heights. No soap. Nor was there any soap at the next two. The fourth number didn’t answer. But unless they were the ones when I finally got them, I was going to have to wonder about old Linda. I looked at my watch: 4:30. Three thirty in Illinois. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I went over to Jake Wirth’s, had some sauerbraten and dark beer, came back to the office at five forty-five, and called the fourth Hawkins again. A woman answered who had never heard of Linda Hawkins.
I swung my chair around and propped my feet on the windowsill and looked out at the top floor of the garment loft across the street. It was empty. Everyone had gone home. There are a lot of reasons why someone doesn’t check out right off quick when you begin to look into her background. But most of them have to do with deceit, and most deceit is based on having something to hide. Two pigeons settled down onto the window ledge of the loft and looked at me looking at them. I looked at my watch: 6:10. After supper on a summer evening. Twilight softball leagues were getting under way at this hour. Kids were going out to hang out on the corner till dark. Men were watering their lawns, their wives sitting nearby in lawn chairs. I was looking at two pigeons.
Linda Rabb was not what she was supposed to be, and that bothered me, like it bothered me that she met Rabb at a ball game even though she wasn’t interested in baseball till she married him. Little things, but they weren’t right. The pigeons flew off. The traffic sounds were dwindling. I’d have to find out about Linda Rabb. The Sox had a night game tonight, which meant Rabb wouldn’t be home. But Linda Rabb probably would be because of the kid. I called. She was.
“I wonder if I could drop by just for a minute,” I said. “Just want to get the wife’s angle on things. You know, what it’s like to be home while the game’s on, that sort of thing.” What a writer I’d make, get the wife’s angle. Slick. Probably should have said “little woman’s angle.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Spenser, I’m just giving the baby his bath. If you drop around in an hour or so, I’ll be watching the game on television, but we can talk.”
I thanked her and hung up. I looked at the window ledge on the garment loft some more. My office door opened behind me. I swiveled the chair around. A short fat man in a Hawaiian shirt and a panama hat came in and left the door open behind him. The shirt hung outside his maroon double knit pants. He wore wraparound black-rimmed sunglasses and smoked a cigar. He looked around my office without saying anything. I put my feet up on my desk and looked at him. He stepped aside, and another man came in and sat down in front of my desk. He was wearing a tan suit, dark brown shirt, and a wide red-striped tie in browns, whites, and yellows. His tan loafers were gleaming; his hands were manicured; his face was tanned. His hair was bright gray and expensively barbered, curling over his collar in the back, falling in a single ringlet over his forehead. Despite the gray hair, his face was young and un-lined. I knew him. His name was Frank Doerr.
“I’d like to talk with you, Spenser.”
“Oh golly,” I said, “you heard about my whipped cream biscuits and you were hoping I’d give you the recipe.”
The fat guy in the panama hat had closed the door behind Doerr and was leaning against it with his arms folded. Akim Tamiroff.
Doerr said, “You know who I am, Spenser?”
“Aren’t you Julia Child?” I said.
“My name’s Doerr. I want to know what business you’re doing with the Red Sox.”
A master of disguise, the man of 1,000 faces. “Red Sox?” I said.
“Red Sox,” he said.
“Jesus, I didn’t think the word would get out that quickly. How’d you find out?”
“Never mind how I found out, I want answers.”
“Sure, sure thing,
Mr. Doerr. You any relation to Bobby?”
“Don’t irritate me, Spenser. I am used to getting answers.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know you had anything against Bobby Doerr, I thought he was a hell of a second baseman.”
Doerr said, “Wally,” without looking around, and the fat man at the door brought a gun out from under his flowered shirt. “Now knock off the bullshit, Spenser. I haven’t got a lot of time to spend in this roach hole.”
I thought “roach hole” was a little unkind, but I thought the gun in Wally’s hand was a little unkind too. “Okay,” I said, “no need to get sore. I was a regional winner in the Leon Culberson look-alike contest, and the Sox wanted to talk to me about being a designated hitter.”
Doerr and Wally looked at me. The silence got to be quite long. “You don’t think I look like Leon Culberson?” I said.
Doerr leaned forward. “I asked around a little about you, Spenser. I heard you think you’re a riot. I think you’re a roach in a roach hole. I think you’re a thirty-five-cent piece of hamburg, and I think you need to learn some manners.”
The building was quiet; the traffic sounds were less frequent through the open window. Wally’s gun pointed at me without moving. Wally sucked on one of his canine teeth. My stomach hurt a little.
Doerr went on. “You are hanging around Fenway Park, hanging around the broadcast booth, talking with people, pretending you’re a writer, and not telling anyone at all that you’re only a goddamned egg-sucking snoop, a nickel-and-dime cheapie. I want to know why, and I want to know right now or Wally will make you wish you’d never been born.”
I took my feet off the desk, slowly, and put them on the floor. I put my hands, slowly, on the desk and stood up. When I was on my feet, I said, “Frank, baby, you’re a gambling man, and I’ll make a bet with you. In fact, I’ll make two. First one is that you won’t shoot because you want to know what’s happening and what I’m into and it’s lousy percentage to shoot a guy without being sure why. Second bet is that if your pet pork chop tries to hassle me, I can take away his piece and clean his teeth with it. Even money.”
Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Page 76
