Murder at Ebbets Field (18 page)

My arm started to tingle, falling asleep under the pressure of her head, but I didn’t want to move it. This felt so warm, so close, so good. I didn’t ever want to move from this position.

The warm breaths that wafted on my neck became louder and more evenly spaced. She was asleep. And my arm was getting numb. I tried to flex my fingers but could barely feel them. If I moved my arm out from under her, I’d wake her. So I decided to remain still, even if it cost me my right arm. I’d just have to learn to throw lefty.

Then a new feeling took hold of my body: hunger. My stomach felt hungrier than it ever had before. I started to picture food. My mouth started to water and my stomach rumble. I began to hope it would growl loud enough to wake Margie. Then I could pull my arm out, and go see what was in her ice box.

I tried to fall asleep, but my stomach was raging inside. I had to get to the kitchen.

Margie moaned in her sleep and suddenly shifted her body. I tried to take advantage of the shift by disentangling myself from her. She moaned again, and this time it wasn’t a sleepy sound. She nibbled my neck, then smoothly swung a leg over my waist. I think she misinterpreted my movements.

That’s okay. My stomach could wait until breakfast. And it was going to have to be a really
big
breakfast.

I
cranked the handle of the new Victrola that now graced my parlor. As the heavy record disk began to spin, I lowered the bamboo needle until it caught a groove. The rippling piano of Eubie Blake’s
“Fizz Water”
started to sound, traveling from the vibrating needle through some hollow brass tubing and out the sound hole in the front of the walnut cabinet.

On the way home from the Polo Grounds, I’d stopped at a music store and bought the best talking machine they had, as well as half a dozen records and several packages of needles. The bamboo needles were something of an extravagance since they lasted for only one play, but they gave a softer sound than steel and didn’t chew up the records. And I was in an extravagant mood.

It was Saturday afternoon after the Giants game and a couple of hours before I was to meet Margie at Vitagraph’s weekly party. The festivities were to be on Coney Island again, this time at Stauch’s Dance Hall next to Steeplechase Park. Margie and I had decided that we should be there, if only to show that the “accidents” we’d had weren’t going to scare us away.

I’d told Margie about the string that was tied to the spotlight. There was no doubt now that she was a target, too. I wanted her to be careful, so I also told her that I suspected the champagne that had made me sick had been poisoned. She took it all pretty well, and we agreed not to let on that we knew someone was trying to kill us. So tonight we would dance, a show of defiance at whoever was trying to harm us.

I started to sway to the rhythm of Blake’s syncopated music. Then I began moving my feet and brought my hands up as if holding an invisible girl. I danced in front of the Victrola, imagining Margie and me as the next Vernon and Irene Castle.

In the middle of the next record, the phone rang. I closed the cabinet doors to lower the volume of the music and picked up the receiver.

“Mickey Rawlings?” The Southern drawl was vaguely familiar.

“Yes?”

“This here’s Billy Claypool.”

“Who?”

“Billy. Virg Ewing’s friend. You told me to call you if I seen Virg with Sloppy Sutherland.”

“Yes, of course.” Actually, I’d almost forgotten about him. “What’s up?”

“The two of ’em just went into a bar together. You think Virg might be in trouble?”

“They look like they’re fighting or arguing?”

“Nah, they look like they’re best buddies. I don’t know what’s going on. I never seen the two of ’em like that.”

This I had to see. “Where are they?”

“Nappy’s. It’s a little place near the Navy Yard.” He quickly gave me directions.

“Wait for me. I’ll meet you outside.”

We hung up and I rang the Vitagraph studio. Margie wasn’t available, so I asked Joe Gannon the guard to tell her that I’d probably be late to the party.

The ornate spires of Wallabout Market’s administration building dominated the evening sky near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The structure looked more like a cathedral than an office building, and one that would have been more appropriately situated in Paris than on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Nappy’s, on the other hand, would have been a blight on any neighborhood. The tavern, just off Washington Avenue, was a dilapidated one-story shack that looked like a Western saloon in a Bronco Billy Anderson movie. Its clapboards were bare of paint, the only color on them provided by streaks of rust from a corrugated tin roof.

Billy was standing outside the door, his brawny arms folded across his chest. He gave a nod when I approached him.

“They still inside?” I asked.

“Yup.”

I rubbed the grime from a window pane near the front door and looked through. Virgil Ewing and Sloppy Sutherland were hunched over a small table. With them was Peter Kurtz, agent for the Federal League.

So that’s what they were up to.

“What you want to do?” Billy asked.

“Let’s go in and say hello.”

Billy opened the front door and let me enter first. My foot struck an overflowing spittoon, and its fermenting contents splashed onto my shoe. The smoke that hovered in the air wasn’t nearly strong enough to mask the room’s more nauseating stenches. Foul as it was, this was a perfect place to meet somebody without being noticed. It was the sort of joint where no one looked at anyone else—looking at someone the wrong way here would probably end up in a knife fight. The sailors and longshoremen who made up most of the clientele stared down at their whiskeys with total absorption. There was no music and not much conversation.

We weren’t noticed until I pulled a chair up and sat down between Kurtz and Ewing at their table.

“What the hell you doing here?” Ewing demanded.

“I asked him to come,” Billy answered from a standing position behind me.

Ewing looked up at Billy, clearly puzzled, but he said nothing.

Nor did Sloppy Sutherland, who eyed the door as if he urgently wanted to dash out of it.

“Well, if it isn’t Mickey Rawlings,” Kurtz said. “Still think you’re gonna be playing in the World Series?”

“This must be some catch for you,” I said, ignoring his question. “Sloppy Sutherland and Virgil Ewing jumping to the Feds together.”

“Don’t say nothing,” Ewing warned.

Kurtz spread his hands. “I don’t see there’s any reason to talk to
you
about this. If there
was
a negotiation in progress, you could do us some serious harm.” He added with a humorless smile, “Come to think of it, maybe we should make sure you don’t get a chance to talk at all ... ever.”

“Don’t talk crazy,” Sutherland hissed. He didn’t care about his diction now.

“Crazy?” Ewing said. “You’re not the one the owners tried to kill.”

“What owners?” I asked.

“The
owners.
” Ewing’s speech slowed down to the pace of a change-up. “Charlie Ebbets maybe, I dunno. I figure somebody give them the idea I was talking to the Feds about jumping, so they tried to poison me.”

“The tobacco in your locker,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“That
is crazy,” I said. “If they kill you, you can’t play for anybody.”

“Yeah,” said Ewing. “But it’s a warning to anybody else who might be thinking of jumping.”

“Don’t talk to this guy,” Kurtz said.

Ignoring Kurtz, I asked Ewing, “What’s really going on with you and Sloppy, anyway?” I turned to Sutherland. “Or is it ‘Walter’ in here?”

Sutherland dropped his eyes. He’d probably rather have Charlie Ebbets know he was talking to the Feds than have his high-society friends know he was in a dive like Nappy’s.

“My guess,” I went on, “is that feud you guys have going is to keep people from thinking you might be making a deal together. Is that it?”

Ewing downed the rest of the whiskey in his glass. Sutherland coughed. Kurtz cracked his knuckles.

“Look,” I said. “I already know enough to get you in trouble if I wanted to.”

Kurtz growled, “Yeah, like I said, we should take care of that. Take you out back and do some damage to your memory.”

“No you won’t,” Billy said firmly.

Kurtz looked up at him, then shrugged and called to the bartender, “Gimme another Brooklyn!”

“Tell you what,” I said to Ewing and Sutherland. “Maybe we can make a deal and protect each other. If I can guarantee that I won’t tell anybody about you jumping to the Feds, you tell me everything that’s been going on.”

Nobody said yes, but nobody said no.

“You got a piece of paper?” I asked Kurtz.

He ignored me.

“You got a contract?” I said. “I’ll sign a contract to play with the Feds. That should solve it.”

“You for real?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. You’re finally getting smart.” Kurtz pulled a folded paper from his jacket pocket. I wondered how many scorecards and contracts he kept in there.

He laid the blank contract on the table and pulled out a pen. He then filled in
$3,000
on the salary line.

“You offered four thousand before,” I said.

“That was before,” he explained. “This is now.”

I took the contract and pen anyway, and signed my name at the bottom. Smirking, Kurtz reached over to take the paper back. I handed it to Billy instead.

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “Billy holds onto this. If I tell on you guys, he gives the contract to Kurtz and I play for the Feds. If I don’t tell, he tears it up. I trust him to do that. Anybody doesn’t trust him?”

Ewing gave in first. “Okay. You’re right. The feud is just to keep people from finding out that we’re partners in this deal with the Feds.”

“What about the rivalry over Florence Hampton? Which one of you was really seeing her?”

Sutherland and Ewing stared at each other. Sutherland finally said glumly, “It wasn’t me.”

“It wasn’t me neither,” Ewing admitted.

Sutherland elaborated, “I thought
he
was seeing her, and he thought I was. We didn’t find out until after she was dead that she was just leading us both on.” He began running a fingertip around the rim of his empty shot glass. “The whole thing started after we got back from the world tour. At first, I thought she was really interested me. But all she wanted to talk about was her dead husband. She asked a million questions about what he did on the tour—who he saw, where he went. Daley died on the ship coming back, you know.”

I nodded.

Ewing piped up, “It was the same with me. She kept asking me questions about the tour, too. It bugged the hell out of me. The papers were printing all these stories about her fooling around with the players, and I thought I was the only one not getting anywhere with her.”

Sutherland said, “Anyway, it just developed that people thought Virg and I were competing with each other for her. It was Kurtz here who said it would be useful to let people think that.”

Peter Kurtz nodded and explained, “Nobody would suspect they’re in a deal together if they’re fighting over some dame.”

“After the party at the Sea Dip, the night Florence Hampton died, where did you guys go?” I asked.

Sutherland sighed. “Right here, at this very table.”

Ewing nodded. “Yeah.”

The bartender came to the table and filled Kurtz’s glass with dark rum, omitting the lime and grenadine that usually went into a Brooklyn. He asked me, “You drinking or just talking?”

“Leaving,” I answered. I’d heard everything I needed to know.

“Well
I’m
drinking,” Ewing said. “Get me another bourbon and a beer to chase it.”

Sutherland said in a soft voice, “The thing is, I got to really liking Florence Hampton. She was a classy lady. I wish there
had
been something between us.” Then he said to the bartender, “Get me a bourbon, too. A double.”

I rose and gave my seat to Billy. He promised me he’d keep the contract safe, and I believed him.

On the way home, I hashed over what must have happened, trying to think from Florence Hampton’s point of view.

She was talking to players who had been on the world baseball tour, investigating her husband’s death. Then rumors about her having affairs with ballplayers start to circulate. She lets them go unanswered, maybe even fosters them, so that nobody will catch on to what she’s really doing. Finding out what happened to her husband was more important to her than her reputation.

Sutherland and Ewing also let the rumors propagate and their supposed rivalry be publicized so that nobody suspects they’re really in joint negotiation with the Federal League.

As far as I could tell, there was no reason for either of them to have killed Florence Hampton. And now they did have an alibi for the night she died.

This case was a strange one—false names, nonexistent politicians, affairs that never happened. If only Florence Hampton’s death hadn’t really happened either. But I’d seen her body, cold and bloated and blue.

Not until I was back in Manhattan did I realize I’d forgotten about the Vitagraph party.

I went to bed, certain that Margie was not going to be happy with me.

I
was right. She wasn’t happy. Maybe I was getting better at predicting what a woman would think.

I phoned Margie at six-thirty the next morning, thinking the sooner I called, the less angry she would be. Launching into my apology, I said, “I’m sorry about missing the party. I called the studio. Did you get the message?”

“I got a message that you’d be
late,
not that you wouldn’t be coming.” She sounded sleepy and grumpy.

“Things happened, and I couldn’t come. I’m really sorry.”

“Well . . . okay,” she murmured. I was amazed at the way she could tack on the warning “don’t let it happen again” without uttering the words.

To show her that I hadn’t missed the party for a trivial reason, I told her the full story of my encounter with Virgil Ewing and Sloppy Sutherland. “They both denied meeting with Florence Hampton after the party,” I concluded. “She wasn’t having an affair with either of them.”

“And you believed them?”

“Yes, I did.”

“But the way they fought over her . . . it seemed so
real.
If they were just acting, they’re better actors than anybody at Vitagraph.”

I thought of my bat tossing routine with Casey Stengel, when we competed for Florence Hampton in the movie. That was make believe, too, but I’d wanted to win. I tried to explain it to Margie. “Well, even if it’s just pretend, when you’re competing with somebody, you want to win. You just do. Nobody wants to lose.”

“Men,
” she groaned.

I was pretty sure that I was included in her general disgust with the male sex.

In the hope of bringing her around, I switched to another topic. “I thought we could go to Prospect Park this afternoon, maybe take a ride on the swan boats?”

“No, I can’t today,” she promptly answered. “I have something else to do.”

I waited for her to tell me what the something else was, until it became clear she wasn’t going to volunteer it. Well, I wasn’t going to ask. “Maybe another time, then,” I said.

She hesitated, then said, “There’s a filming Tuesday morning. Another big picture. If you want to come, I’m sure Mr. Garvin would like to have you there.”

I couldn’t imagine Garvin liking that at all. Perhaps Margie was trying to tell me that she’d like it. “It’s not at Coney Island, is it?” I asked.

“No,” she chuckled. “At the studio.”

“Sure, I’ll be there. How . . . uh, how has Garvin been to you?”

She snapped, “He’s more concerned about a broken spotlight than about me.” After a pause, she said, “Florence Hampton was my only true friend at the studio. It’s not the same without her. I don’t know if I want to work there anymore . . . certainly not for Mr. Garvin.”

I took some satisfaction in the fact that she now sounded angrier at Elmer Garvin than at me.

“There’s plenty of other movie studios who’d love to have you,” I said. “Or you can do something else. You should do whatever makes you happy.”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do.”

I made one more attempt to suggest that seeing me was the thing to do. “If you’re busy today, can we get together tomorrow?”

“No,” she said. “Not tomorrow. Better wait until Tuesday.”

I reluctantly agreed to Tuesday and we hung up.

The conversation with Margie left me feeling empty. I felt like I needed to talk to a friend. So, a couple of hours later, I called Karl Landfors, the closest thing to it that I could think of.

He wasn’t at his home number, but he was at his office at the
New York Press.
It didn’t seem like he ever went home.

Although what I really wanted to talk about was Margie, what came out of my mouth was, “Virgil Ewing and Sloppy Sutherland are out of it. Neither of them was with Florence Hampton when she died.”

“You sure?”

“Yup. They both have alibis that checked out.” I decided not to tell him what the alibi was. Landfors was still a newspaper reporter, and he might let it slip out about them going to the Feds. “And there’s something else,” I said. “Nobody was having affairs with Miss Hampton. She used the rumors as a cover to question the players about William Daley’s death.”

“I’ll be damned,” Landfors said, in a pleased tone. Then he asked, “You’re sure Ewing and Sutherland weren’t fighting over her?”

I was starting to get annoyed at the way people kept asking if I was sure when I told them things. “Yes, I’m sure. They just played along.”

“Then who would want to kill Virgil Ewing if not Sutherland? Why did somebody try to poison him?”

Jeez. I didn’t think of that. “Are we sure somebody did try to kill him? Did you get the results on the tobacco?”

“Not yet. Assume it was poisoned though. Who would do it?”

“Well.... Ewing thought it was the owners who tried to kill him.”

“The
Dodger
owners?”

“Yeah, he thought they might suspect him of jumping to the Federal League. I told him he was nuts, but he thought they tried to kill him to make an example of him.”

Landfors said excitedly, “You know, he may have something there. I’ve been checking around myself, and it turns out the other Dodger owners didn’t like my sister. Besides being a woman, she was in favor of players’ rights. She said publicly that baseball players should be free to work for anybody they wanted to.” He sighed. “She should have been a labor organizer.”

I noticed when Landfors was proud of her he referred to Florence Hampton as his sister. Maybe he was finally feeling a little closer to her.

I also remembered Charlie Ebbets throwing her friends out of the ballpark. Humiliating her, yes. But committing murder? No. That was too far-fetched. “I don’t know who else would have wanted to kill Virgil Ewing,” I said, “but it wasn’t the owners.”

“Don’t be so sure. Just because they’re baseball owners, they’re still bosses and they play dirty. They shoot down strikers, starve their families—”

“Okay, okay, Karl.” I didn’t want to hear another one of his political sermons.

He calmed down. “I’m going to look into this,” he said.

“If you want to. Go ahead.” Landfors was fond of working out grand conspiracy schemes, and I knew I couldn’t dissuade him. He once told me some convoluted theory about Tammany Hall, Allen Pinkerton, and Ulysses S. Grant all having plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

But let Landfors think about it. At least it would keep him out of trouble.

Monday afternoon, we opened a three-game series against the Braves at the Polo Grounds. We were tied for the league lead, so when the series was over only one team would be in first place.

Just after my teammates and I completed our pregame march from the center field clubhouse to the dugout, I heard Landfors’s voice calling my name.

I stepped out to the side of the dugout. Landfors was at the rail, sunlight glinting off his spectacles. He was holding a scorecard, two boxes of Cracker Jack, and—I couldn’t believe it—a New York Giants pennant. Could it be? Could Karl Landfors be turning into a baseball fan?

Before I could say anything to him, John McGraw called for the start of infield practice.

“Sorry, Karl,” I said. “I can’t talk right now.”

“That’s okay. I’m ... uh, staying for the game.” He sounded sheepish about it. “I got the results on those tests for you. How about dinner after the game and we’ll talk then?”

“Sounds good.” I took a few steps toward second base, then spun and added, “You rooting for the Giants today?”

“Sure, why not.”

Landfors was making a lot of progress. If he kept it up, he might turn out to be a regular human being someday.

What he saw turned out to be less a baseball game than a war. And it was the generals who were the highlights.

John McGraw engaged in guerilla warfare between the dugouts with tactics intended more to torment the Braves’ manager George Stallings than to defeat the team. I don’t think McGraw liked the idea of Stallings usurping his throne as baseball’s shrewdest manager.

McGraw had enlisted help from some local boys to take advantage of Stallings’s superstitious streak. He’d given free passes to the kids in exchange for them throwing a steady stream of litter in front of the Braves’ dugout. Stallings scampered about, frantically collecting every bit of rubbish that fell in front of the bench. His pockets were soon crammed with scraps of paper, and the air was blue from the profanities he hurled at McGraw.

Unfortunately for Christy Mathewson and Dick Rudolph, the antics of McGraw and Stallings overshadowed their pitching performances. Through five innings, they were both working on shutouts, Mathewson giving up one hit and Rudolph throwing a perfect game.

In the sixth inning, with Boston at bat and Braves on second and third, McGraw pulled out all stops. He signaled a boy near the visitors’ dugout; the kid leaned over the railing and opened a sack, releasing a black cat onto the field, the ultimate bad luck omen, almost a death knell.

The terrified cat raced back and forth in front of the dugout. Stallings let out a bellow and chased him. Then he screamed for his players to help, and a swarm of Braves was trying to grab hold of the feline; they fell over each other as they scrambled, looking like boys trying to catch a greased pig at a county fair. The cat meowed, Stallings cussed, and I couldn’t tell which was more scared. John McGraw roared with laughter at the trouble he’d caused.

But when the animal was finally captured and taken away, the Braves continued where they left off. Hank Gowdy hit a sacrifice fly to put Boston ahead 1—0.

McGraw showed another of his tricks in the eighth with the Giants at bat. He was coaching third base, his little black fielder’s mitt on his left hand. Chief Meyers was on second base with a double that broke up Rudolph’s no-hitter.

Fred Merkle singled up the middle and Meyers was off with the crack of the bat. Rounding third, Meyers tripped on the bag and stumbled toward home. McGraw shrieked, “Back! Back!”

The throw from center was relayed home, and Meyers scrambled to get back to third base. The catcher snapped a throw that got there ahead of him and Meyers was caught in a rundown. Merkle saw it and did just what he was supposed to, going on to second base. The Braves’ shortstop Rabbit Maranville did what he shouldn’t, going to second to take a throw instead of covering third.

The third baseman ran Meyers toward home, then flipped a throw to the plate. Meyers quickly did an about-face. McGraw saw Maranville hadn’t yet broken to cover third, so he ran to third base from the coach’s box. Pretending to be an infielder, he held his glove high and yelled, “Throw it already!” Taken in by the ruse, Gowdy snapped a toss to him; McGraw ducked and let the ball fly over his head into left field. Meyers ran home to score.

But the umpire was McGraw’s old nemesis Bill Klem who would have none of McGraw’s deceit. He ruled Meyers out and ejected McGraw.

The score ended 1—0, and George Stallings came out ahead of John McGraw. The little Napoleon lost out to the Miracle Man, and for the first time this season the Boston Braves were in first place.

We picked an Italian restaurant with red checkered tablecloths and dripping candles stuck in empty wine bottles. It was dimly lit and romantic, a place I’d have rather come with Margie Turner than Karl Landfors.

Landfors ordered chianti and calamari marinara. To the waiter’s chagrin, I opted for steak, well-done, and a beer.

After proposing a toast “to the valiant Belgians: may they soon have their country back,” Landfors commenced guzzling his wine faster than I downed my beer. Shifting from the war to baseball, he said, “That McGraw is something else. The way he pretended to play third base. That was sure something.”

“Yeah, McGraw likes trickery, all right.”

“Why does he wear the glove?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it makes him feel like a player still.” I chuckled. “Or maybe he’s been waiting all along for a time like today when he could use it. Can never tell with John McGraw.”

I was happy that Landfors was developing such a liking for the game. It took awhile before I sensed that his enthusiasm about baseball was forced. It also became clear that his rapid drinking had more to do with nervousness than thirst. Red color was starting to creep into the black, white, and gray that usually dominated his appearance, as his face flushed from the alcohol and spatters of tomato sauce trickled from forkfuls of squid onto his shirt front.

It was time to learn what he’d found out while he was still sober enough to speak. “You said you got the test results,” I prompted him.

“Yes, yes I did.” Landfors took another gulp of wine, spilling a few ruby droplets on his tie. He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out two bulging small brown envelopes. “They both have arsenic in them,” he said. “The tobacco
and
the cork.”

“So it’s arsenic for everybody!” I exclaimed. As the words left my lips, I realized it sounded as if I’d just ordered a round of beers. “Miss Hampton, me, and Virgil Ewing—somebody tried to kill us all with arsenic.”

“And possibly William Daley,” Landfors added. He opened one of the envelopes and dumped pieces of cork on the table. “Something else about this: there’s a needle hole through it. That’s how the poison got in.”

“I was curious about that, how you could get poison in a sealed bottle.”

“That’s how. It was injected. The big question is who.”

I picked up the envelope with the tobacco. “I did come up with a reason why somebody might want to kill Virgil Ewing . . . besides the owners, that is. What if somebody
thought
Ewing killed Miss Hampton. People didn’t know that he wasn’t having an affair with her. Maybe somebody thought he did kill her and wanted to get revenge for her.”

Landfors lifted the chianti bottle to replenish his glass, but there was nothing more in it. He picked up the empty wine glass and absentmindedly rolled the stem in his fingertips. He said seriously, “Lately, I’ve been thinking more about why somebody would want to kill
you.
”