Prairie Hardball (11 page)

Later, in bed, I tried to get Andy to talk about the case.

“No meddling, in this one,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t meddle.”

“Of course you do. Meddling is your favourite recreation. It’s your prime hobby. It’s your avocation. It’s practically your religion.”

Our disagreement over my curiosity and the trouble it gets me into is one we’ll never resolve. But it’s not a fight either of us takes seriously. It has just become part of who we are, together. Andy always ends up telling me what I want to know eventually, so I dropped it for the moment and enjoyed being with him. It’s a lovely form of intimacy, lying in the dark, talking, until the silences take over and we drift away. I wasn’t ready for that yet, though.

“Talk about meddling, Edna’s sticking both her oars into everything, isn’t she?”

“I’m not sure that Deutsch and the other horsemen appreciate her,” Andy said. “But I do.”

“How come when she does it it’s okay, and when I do it it’s meddling?”

“Because she’s harmless, and you’re not. And I don’t worry about her getting herself into trouble the way you usually do.”

“Don’t fall for that little old lady stuff,” I said. “And you should worry about her. Don’t forget she got letters too.”

“We’ve put the fear of God in her about wandering away from the safety of the hotel. And I’ve told her to report everything she hears to you. That should keep you both out of trouble.”

He snickered. I took advantage of his expansive mood.

“What do you think of the investigation so far?”

“It’s by the book,” he said. “A little uninspired, but certainly thorough. Deutsch has got a bit of a chip on his shoulder about big-city cops, but that’s to be expected. I’ve got my own feelings about the Mounties, for that matter. But we’re feeling each other out gradually.”

“Cop-bonding over a couple of drinks?”

“It’s going to work out fine. I think he’s a good cop.”

“He did a good interview with me,” I agreed. “And he was smart enough to involve you.”

“That was Digby’s doing. But Deutsch can see that my social connection with the victim’s friends can be useful. I did the interview with your mother, for example.”

“What did she have to offer?”

“She seemed uncomfortable, at first,” he said. “Probably because she was seeing me in action as a cop for the first time instead of as her daughter’s beau.”

“Beau?”

“Whatever. Anyway, she relaxed eventually. She’s got a good eye. I can see where you got it from.”

“I don’t think I got much from my mother,” I said. “My curly hair, and my love of baseball, that’s about it.”

“Are you crazy? You’re just like her. You look like her, you sound like her. You insist on folding the damn towels the way she does it.”

“No, I’m like my dad. Sheila’s like my mum. She’s the one who’s Mrs. Perfect, not me.”

“You’re rigid in your judgements of people, just like she is,” Andy continued.

“I am not. I’m not a prude. I don’t go around condemning people for unconventional behaviour.”

“No, you condemn them for being too conventional,” he said, somewhat smugly.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve barely met her. When you know her as well as I do, then maybe I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

He put his arm around me.

“Truth hurts, I know,” he said, kissing the top of my head, gently, in the condescending way that both infuriates and comforts me.

We lay in silence for a while.

“So, who else did you interview today?” I asked.

“Enough with the meddling,” he murmured.

“I’m not meddling, I’m just taking an interest in the man’s interests, like the teen magazines used to tell me.”

“I’ve got other interests, too, you know,” he said, sliding down next to me and reaching up under my T-shirt.

After a few delicious minutes, I slipped out of bed.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back.”

I stumbled through the darkness to the dresser and fumbled around in the top drawer until I found the surprise I’d bought in the washroom in Davidson. Virna’s home town. I unwrapped it and got back into bed, leaving my T-shirt on the floor.

“It’s a Nite-Glow,” I whispered in his ear. “I want to watch the glow grow and grow.”

So we did. We watched it glow, grow, crow, sing, dance, and practically whistle Dixie. Afterwards, we lay tangled together in the sheets.

“You still say I’m just like my mum?”

“You never know, Kate. She and your dad may have been wild in their time. They still might be.”

“Are you kidding? They only did it twice. Once for Sheila and once for me.”

“Then how do you explain your insatiable lust? Who did you inherit that from?”

“Maybe she had a passionate interlude with some passing stranger.”

“Probably,” Andy said. “With the bible salesman.”

“Mr. Cyril Honeycutt. He was a pretty horny guy.”

We both laughed in the darkness, feeling warm and close.

“So, you had drinks with Jack again tonight,” Andy said, too casually.

“Edna and I, both. He’s in pretty rough shape right now. We figured he could use some company.”

“What have you been talking about?”

“His mother, mainly. Growing up with her and Wilma Elshaw. He’s pretty devastated by their deaths.”

“I guess he didn’t happen to mention that he and his mother offed dear Auntie Wilma?”

I didn’t answer for a moment.

“I guess your new best friend didn’t happen to mention that,” Andy said.

“Stop calling him that,” I said. “Edna told me there had been some rumours. Did you talk to him about it?”

“He didn’t deny it. He talked about the pain she was in at the end. How she died holding his mother’s and his hands, with a smile on her face.”

“And you call that murder?”

“What do you call it?”

“Mercy. Love. The kindest and most difficult thing anyone can do. What I would hope you’d do for me if I asked. What I hope I’d have the courage to do for you.”

The next silence was his. He held me very close.

“Who do your horsemen like as a suspect?” I asked, after a few minutes.

“At the moment, my horsemen are going off in all directions,” he said. “Like the musical ride on acid. I think maybe the succession of old dears through the interview room was a bit too much for them. We’re all going to sleep on it and start fresh in the morning.”

He yawned.

“Well, I hope it goes better tomorrow, then,” I said. “There are a lot of frightened people around here. Me included.”

Our next silence lasted a long time. Almost into sleep. Then I remembered.

“Who do you like?” I asked him.

“For the murder?” he asked, sleepily.

“Uh huh.”

“You know what they say. Who gains? I’m not quite ready to write off the next of kin.”

I called my editor, Jake Watson, first thing the next day and told him my plans for a feature on the girls’ league. He told me to go ahead, as long as I hooked it on the murder. Then I called Dave Shury, the Hall of Fame guy, and arranged to have a look at the archives. After checking with the police, he told me to find the key, on a hook under the eaves at the back of the church. I promised to lock up when I was done. By ten-thirty, I was dug in with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League files in the Hall of Fame library. Andy had dropped me off on the way to the RCMP, promising to pick me up in time for lunch.

There were signs of the investigation everywhere. I had to wipe grimy fingerprint powder off the desk and chair before I could use them. But I enjoy research, and quickly got so engrossed in the files that I almost forgot that I was sitting just a few feet away from where Virna Wilton had been found.

I skimmed a couple of turgid scholarly papers on the league, including one by the banquet speaker, and set aside a book that had been published a few years before, which Shury had said I could borrow. What interested me most that day was the primary material, the files and scrapbooks the women had brought with them to the reunion. They hadn’t been catalogued or organized in any way yet. They just sat in cardboard boxes which had been brought over from the banquet hall.

I started with the old
Life
magazine piece from the first spring training in 1943. It was wonderfully politically incorrect, with photographs of Virna ironing in the locker room and Millie Epp of the Kenosha Comets having her hair done.

There was a lot of emphasis in the text on the wholesome aspects of the sport, on the charm school the girls attended, on the beauty makeovers by Helena Rubinstein, and on the credentials of the team chaperones. The other main thread of the piece was true-blue All-American patriotism, bringing entertainment to the home front while the boys were off fighting the war. One full-page photo showed the Racine Belles and Rockford Peaches, later arch-rivals, lined up along the basepaths in a “V for victory” formation, hats held over their hearts. My mother was way out at the far tip of one of the arms of the V.

After I finished that piece, I began to dig into the individual files and scrapbooks. I put aside the ones from the women on other teams and started by concentrating on the ones from the Saskatchewan Belles: Virna Wilton, Edna Adams Summers, Shirley Rosen Goodman, Margaret Kostecki Deneka, Helen MacLaren Henry, and the late Wilma Elshaw.

Virna’s was the fattest file, with articles from dozens of different papers. I could understand why she got the most ink: she was the lazy journalist’s dream—good-looking, well-spoken, and, almost incidentally, a terrific ballplayer. She also had what they then called great gams, which didn’t hurt.

The other thing obvious from her carefully organized scrapbooks was that Virna never met a camera she didn’t like, and knew how to give a good quote, even in those less media-savvy times. More power to her. She used what she had to get everything she could. She had a great career, and parleyed it into another one after the league folded. The later scrapbooks, after 1954, were almost as interesting as the ones when she was a star.

I looked closely at a picture of Virna and Wilma standing outside the All-American All-Star Flower Shoppe in 1956. Virna, who must have been in her middle thirties at the time, posed grinning, dressed in a dress that was the height of fifties fashion, with a bat on her shoulder. Wilma stood next to her, in slacks, her hair cropped short. She was smiling shyly, with her baseball and glove looking like props in her hands.

It was a feature article from the Women’s Page of the Fort Wayne
News-Sentinel,
back when women’s pages hadn’t turned into the euphemistic Family or Lifestyle sections. Virna was portrayed as a plucky widow, raising her twelve-year-old son with the help of her old teammate Wilma. There was a picture of Jack with his dog, Morley. He was cute even then, a pre-adolescent hunk.

The post-career book apparently included every mention ever made of Virna, even references to the flowers for a ladies’ tea or social being supplied by the shop. There were also speeches she’d made, community awards she had received, golf tournaments she had played in, and little-league teams she had coached.

By the time I’d put the last book aside, I knew more about Virna than I had before. I think I liked her less.

I skimmed my mother’s scrapbook next. She wasn’t a star, in talent or temperament, so there was less to read. Most of it I half-remembered from my childhood, anyway. Mum was a team player, there’s that to be said about her. Any time she was quoted, it was to praise another player. And when other players talked about her, they applauded her unselfish nature. Having met my share of modern superstars and bench-warmers, I could read between the lines and understand how appreciated she was.

Generally, the young women I read about in the yellowed clippings were very like the older women I had come to know over the past few days. Rosie Rosen, as she then was, was garrulous and self-centred, slightly whiny and always ready with an excuse when she lost. She was also extremely glamorous in her playing days. She retired after the 1950 season. The last clipping in her scrapbook was the announcement of her marriage to “successful businessman Bert Goodman” and their subsequent round-the-world honeymoon cruise.

Edna Adams was then, as now, cute and likable, funny, energetic, and lacking in guile. She was obviously the team cheerleader and a fan favourite. Almost every story about her mentioned the championship home run.

When she retired, also in 1950, the community held an “Edna Adams Day” and gave her a set of matching luggage and a fur stole.

I was particularly intrigued by Margaret Deneka’s file, because she was the one I could least imagine in her prime. As “Meg-the-Peg” Kostecki, she was one of the original Belles, a four-time all-star and, as Edna had implied, a real character. The term “live-wire” was used to describe her in several articles. She even made the gossip columns for pranks she pulled. I assumed they were her pranks. Why else would she have included in her scrapbook an item about ducks found swimming in the chaperone’s hotel bathtub?

In her pictures, Meg was lovely, in an ethereal sort of way, almost angelic, with soft blonde hair framing a heart-shaped face, but mischief lurked in her eyes. In pictures of the Belles’ keystone combination, she and Virna made a wonderful contrast: the one striking and dramatic, the other soft and feminine.

I turned to Wilma’s material last. It was less orderly than Virna’s, little more than a collection of clippings in annual file folders, covering only the years she played. I started with 1944, the year she and Edna joined the Belles. She made an immediate impression, hitting .319 in her rookie season. Sorting the clippings by date, I read a series of increasingly enthusiastic game stories, and a full personality profile towards the end of the season, angled towards women, and written by a woman who was clearly not in the sports department.

“Some say that baseball is a man’s game,” it began, “but Wilma Elshaw shows that a ballplayer can be a lady, too.”

The saccharine story played up Wilma’s domestic side, the needlework she did in her spare time and the warm mufflers she knit for the brave young men, including her fiancé, who were off at war, defending democracy.

“For Wilma Elshaw,” the piece concluded, “all the cheers from all the fans in the baseball park are nice, but she dreams of accomplishments in another field. This Canadian All-American Girl looks forward to the day that a certain Royal Canadian Navy battleship comes in and she can embark on her next career as Mrs. Lieutenant Morley Timms.”

That was an interesting development.