Murder in the Ball Park

by Robert Goldsborough

  “Now if I may continue,” Wolfe said, “once I came to my senses and felt the issue over the parkway was not the reason for Mr. Milbank’s death, I turned to his private life in search of a motive. It was made known to me that the senator and Mrs. Fentress had become something of an item, at least in the minds of newspaper columnists and gossip mongers.”

  “I like the way you phrased that,” Charles Fentress said sourly, raising his glass in a mock salute as his wife the candidate hunkered down in her chair, probably wishing she could become invisible.

  Wolfe ignored the interruption. “I considered this real or imagined relationship as a possible motive for taking a man’s life but dismissed it as tabloid fodder. Was that a wise decision on my part?” Wolfe asked, flipping a palm. “I do not believe it was, particularly now.” He readjusted his bulk and drank more beer.

  “So then, just who was responsible for killing Orson?” Keller demanded, leaning forward and jabbing a finger in Wolfe’s direction like a prosecuting attorney zeroing in on a witness.

  “Bear with me. Let us return to that fateful afternoon at the Polo Grounds. As we now know, a marksman lurked, presumably unnoticed, in the shadows of the stadium’s roofed and empty upper deck in left field, some two hundred eighty feet from where Mr. Milbank and his party were seated. The marksman, a decorated war veteran named Richard Thompson, was found dead in his Queens home just over a week ago, a suicide.”

  “Who was this Thompson and how do you know this?” Cramer demanded.

  “I will get to that, sir, as well as to how Mr. Thompson happened to be the shooter.”

  “How did Thompson know Orson?” Elise DuVal asked.

  “He did not know him and had almost surely never met him,” Wolfe said.

  “So it was a hit,” Bacelli put in, slapping a palm on his knee. “The guy was a hired gun, plain and simple.”

  “You of all people would know all about that,” Sergeant Stebbins said, reaching under his suit jacket in the vicinity of his shoulder holster.

  “If many of you insist on interrupting, that is all right with me,” Wolfe said. “Clearly, I am not going anywhere.”

  “Okay, okay, get on with it,” Cramer said. “I for one would like to see my bed before the sun rises.”

  “Thank you. The shooter—or alleged shooter if you prefer, Inspector—was a marine known for and cited for his accuracy with a rifle. He was a sniper who had won medals for his bravery on Okinawa. A year ago, he was one of many local veterans who got honored at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria organized by the Gazette. I salute Mr. Goodwin’s resourcefulness in determining that several of you in this room were at that dinner.”

  “Not me!” Bacelli snapped.

  “No, sir, not you. But among those in attendance were Mr. and Mrs. Fentress and Messrs. Keller and Corcoran.”

  “Yes, we both were there,” Mona said, “but so were hundreds of others. By the way, Charles and I were not together at that event. His advertising agency hosted a table, and I sat at Orson’s table. He was a big supporter of the banquet and distributed small flags to all of the veterans.”

  “Sure, I was there, too,” Keller put in, “hosting a table of veterans from Westchester and Putnam Counties, and I’m proud of it. Great young men, every one of them, the hope of our country’s future. It was a privilege to be with them.”

  “And I also was present,” Corcoran added. “I’m active with a VFW post up north, as Mr. Goodwin knows, and I had a table full of medal winners. I agree with Jonah that these young men are the backbone of our nation.”

  “All right, if we are all through congratulating ourselves and one another for honoring our heroes, let’s move on,” Cramer said, turning to Wolfe. “As Mrs. Fentress points out, there were hundreds in that ballroom. Is it so surprising that some of these people were among them?”

  “Not in and of itself,” Wolfe conceded. “Still, it is worth asking these four if any one of them happened to sit at the same table with Richard Thompson.” He looked at the quartet and they all shook their heads. “Was he from Westchester or Putnam?” Keller asked.

  “No, sir,” Wolfe said. “I already have stated his home was in Queens.”

  “So there you are,” Keller snapped. “As I just said, all the veterans at my table were from up north. Now let’s get on with this, as the inspector says. I can’t see that we’re making any progress.”

  “Very well,” Wolfe said. “Because of activities I was involved in long ago almost halfway around the world, I have learned something of the modus operandi of snipers, and—”

  “So now we’re about to get a lesson in gunnery?” Corcoran said, apparently to show he could be just as feisty as Keller.

  “Only insofar as it helps to explain the events of that afternoon,” Wolfe replied. “My appearance belies this, but at one time in my youth, I was involved in what historians often euphemistically term a revolutionary movement, one that involved guerrilla warfare. I became a good shot with a rifle—indeed, a very good shot. One of the things I learned quickly—and a fact many of you surely also know—is that marksmen are taught to aim at the upper trunk of the victim rather than the head, the trunk being the far broader target.”

  “But Orson was shot . . . in the head,” Elise DuVal said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Wolfe nodded. “Precisely, and in the left temple, not straight on, indicating that he was not facing the playing field when he was shot.” He turned to Ross Davies. “I have been informed that Mrs. Fentress was on the senator’s right, and you were on her right. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, I’ve been asked that several times before, including by him,” Davies said, nodding toward Cramer. “And by you as well, Mr. Wolfe.”

  “Humor me, please, sir. Describe to all of us what happened at the moment Senator Milbank was shot.”

  Davies pulled in air and looked around the room for sympathy. Seeing none, he turned to Wolfe. “Where should I start?”

  “At the time the home run was hit, in—when was it?—the fourth inning.”

  “Yes, the fourth. Reed Mason really nailed the ball, and we all stood to watch it go over the fence. Mona suddenly toppled over against me—we later learned that the heel of her right shoe had snapped off.”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” Mona said, “and I just plain lost my balance.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about that famous so-called broken heel,” Elise cut in, sneering. “But did anyone ever actually see it?”

  “Oh, I did,” Davies said. “It had snapped just like that, a clean break. It was at that moment that we realized Orson had been shot. Oh my God, it was awful.”

  “Is it really necessary to make people relive all this?” Keller demanded, starting to rise.

  “Sit down!” Cramer barked. Keller sat.

  “Now I believe you were on the senator’s left, Mr. Armstrong.”

  The young man nodded. “Yes, and when he got shot, he lurched to the right, away from me.”

  “Or did he lurch to the right before he was shot?”

  “I . . . I really don’t know. Everything happened so fast. Even now, I have trouble reconstructing what happened.”

  “Just what are you getting at, Mr. Wolfe?” Corcoran asked.

  “I am taking the position that the senator reflexively leaned over Mrs. Fentress’s seat to try to catch her as she fell away from him.”

  “We have been over all of this before,” Cramer interjected. “I don’t see the point of it.”

  “The point, sir, is that Mr. Milbank was not the target of the gunshot.”

  Chapter 29

  If the intention of that comment had been to send the group into frenzy, it succeeded in spades. Although Wolfe remained expressionless, I knew he was enjoying the stir he had created, and he was in no hurry to see it end. Not so the case with Inspector Cramer.

&
nbsp; “All right, all right!” the grizzled cop bellowed over the cacophony. “I realize that like the rest of you, I am an invited guest in this house. But I also am an officer of the law with certain fairly well-defined responsibilities, one of which is to identify and arrest—if possible—suspected murderers. Since this is your show, Wolfe, go on. And what comes had damned well better be good enough to have brought us all here.”

  “Before you go any farther with whatever explanation you’ve got,” a suddenly emboldened Musgrove said, “I have to ask why the shooter waited until the fourth inning. We all had been in our seats since the start of the game, which was at least forty-five or fifty minutes earlier.”

  “He was biding his time in the upper deck, waiting for people to stand so he would have a better target,” Wolfe said.

  “But what if nobody hit a home run or did anything else exciting? Then the crowd would never stand up at all,” the little pollster persisted.

  “Even if nothing had happened in the game to bring the crowd to its feet, the shooter would have eventually gotten his chance during the seventh-inning stretch,” I put in. “Everybody stands then.”

  “I would like to hear Mr. Wolfe talk more about who he thinks was the real target,” Elise said.

  “Thank you, madam,” he said. “How tall was your husband?”

  “That’s a strange question, but . . . well, he was six foot three.”

  “And how tall are you, Mrs. Fentress, when wearing your high-heeled shoes?” Wolfe asked.

  “About five eight, why?”

  “As unpleasant as the memories are, let us return once more to that afternoon at the Polo Grounds. The shooter, who had gotten into the ball park undetected and was ensconced well back in the shadows of the upper reaches, was prepared to wait until such time as the crowd rose, including the Milbank party. His job was made all the easier given that they were in the front row, with nothing between them and the barrel of his .30 caliber rifle. When the home run was hit and everyone leaped to their feet, he took aim and fired, but in that millisecond, his target had moved.

  “Me?” gasped Mona, jerking upright, her normally lovely face contorted in disbelief.

  “You, madam,” Wolfe pronounced. “You were indeed the target, but when you fell sideways after your heel had snapped, Senator Milbank reached across to catch you, and as he bent over, his head was precisely where your chest had been only an instant before. He was facing you, not the field, and the bullet entered his left temple.”

  “This is ridiculous speculation!” Charles Fentress bayed. “Of course, Milbank was the target.”

  “Don’t interrupt,” Cramer said. “Let him go on.”

  “The shooter was hired to kill Mrs. Fentress by someone in this room,” Wolfe said, looking at the picture of the Washington Monument and rubbing the right side of his nose with his index finger. A signal.

  Seconds later, the door to the hall opened and Saul Panzer stepped in, followed by a stone-faced Marguerite Hackman.

  “What is all this about?” Cramer demanded, scowling at Panzer and Mrs. Hackman.

  “Your forbearance please,” Wolfe said, holding up a hand. “Madam, thank you for coming. Did you hear a familiar voice?”

  She nodded and pointed to Charles Fentress. “That’s the one.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fentress shouted, getting to his feet. Sergeant Stebbins quickly moved behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder and pushing him back into his chair.

  “This woman, Marguerite Hackman, is the sister of Richard Thompson, who for the last year or so lived in her house in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens,” Wolfe said. “Thompson had received several telephone calls and a visit from a man I believe hired him to shoot Mona Fentress. Mrs. Hackman answered these calls on several occasions, and she has been observing—and hearing—our conversation from a vantage just outside this room.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Fentress ranted. “Trying to blame someone based on a voice. Hellfire, there have to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of men in the area who sound like me.”

  “That is him,” Mrs. Hackman insisted. “I know it.”

  A shaken Mona Fentress turned to Marguerite Hackman. “I have a question for you,” she said in a halting voice. “Did your brother stutter?”

  “Yes, yes, he did, badly, but that happened only after he came back from the Pacific. The war had made him a different person, and not in a good way.”

  “You bastard!” Mona screamed, standing and slapping her husband across the face as he put up an arm to protect himself. “You miserable bastard!” She slapped him again and stopped only when Sergeant Stebbins wrapped his arms around her and pulled her away.

  She ran a hand through disheveled hair and looked down at the cowering advertising executive. “Three different times, a man with a stutter called at home to talk to you when you were away. He wouldn’t leave his name, but if you remember, I told you about it and even mentioned the stutter. You claimed he was an artist your agency had hired. Hah!”

  The fire had gone out of Charles Fentress, who sat rubbing his red cheek and shaking his head. “Why?” his wife said to him in tears. “Why?”

  “Inspector, you will, I am sure, fill in the details, but let me suggest this scenario,” Wolfe said. “Mr. Fentress had wanted to marry another woman, Caroline Jackson Willis. This meant getting rid of his current wife.”

  “For God’s sake, Charles, I would have divorced you in a minute!” Mona screamed. “I . . . I . . .”

  Wolfe waited several beats before continuing. “There is more to this. Mr. Fentress also wanted to inflict the ultimate punishment upon his wife for her suspected affair with Senator Milbank, never mind that he was conducting a liaison of his own. He could not stand the idea that he was being cuckolded, and his anger manifested itself in public outbursts against Mr. Milbank, purportedly because the senator was working Mona Fentress too hard.”

  Wolfe paused to drink beer, then went on. “Somehow, perhaps at that Waldorf Astoria dinner, Mr. Fentress met Richard Thompson, a decorated sharpshooter whose life since the war had been in a downward spiral. It is likely that Charles Fentress saw in this deeply troubled young man someone whom he could use in the future, and someone who was in need of money.

  “The opportunity to put the sharpshooter’s skill to use came when Mr. Fentress learned of the visit to the baseball game by Senator Milbank and his staff. He called Mr. Thompson and even visited him once at his home in Queens. It may have taken some persuasion on Charles Fentress’s part, probably in the form of promises of ever-increasing amounts of money, but eventually, Mr. Thompson was worn down and agreed to the assignment. It was at this time that the former marine confided to his sister that ‘something big’ was in his future.”

  Marguerite Hackman, still standing rigidly next to Saul Panzer, nodded, expressionless.

  “How Mr. Thompson was able to enter the Polo Grounds so easily was not a problem, given that he had once been employed at that stadium, albeit briefly, in a custodial capacity,” Wolfe said. “It turns out that he had kept a key during his brief time working for the Giants, a key that would grant him entry into the outfield grandstands. This explains how he got into the stadium so easily.

  “In his fragile emotional state, Mr. Thompson must have been extremely nervous as he crouched, well out of sight in the shadows of the ball park’s upper deck,” Wolfe continued. “When the time finally came to shoot, he was surely horrified when he hit the wrong person. He undoubtedly fled from the stadium quickly, not bothering to relock the gate he had opened.”

  “He should have been horrified that he was even in that position to begin with,” Davies said.

  Wolfe nodded. “True, but bear in mind that this was a man who, with little regard for his own safety, had put his life on the line for his country during one of the most violent and deadly campaigns of the last war, Oki
nawa, and that he was so badly scarred by the experience he could no longer be considered rational by any reasonable standard.”

  “Of course, you are right,” Davies said. “A lot of men who have come back from the war without physical wounds have been permanently damaged nonetheless. I saw it myself both during combat and back at home.”

  “After the killing, Charles Fentress was angry at Richard Thompson but was relieved in the sense that everyone would think the senator had been the target,” Wolfe continued. “In fact, Mr. Fentress probably felt that if his wife had indeed been the victim as intended, the police and the public would assume the shot had been intended for the Mr. Milbank and went awry. He felt he could not lose either way.”

  Fentress sat, arms folded and face down. Sergeant Stebbins had not moved from his side.

  “So Richard Thompson was so distraught at what had happened that he killed himself?” Ray Corcoran asked.

  “He was driven to it by that man!” Marguerite Hackman said, glaring at Fentress. “He called the evening Dick shot himself, the same day as the shooting at the baseball game, June 14. I answered the phone and when I told Dick it was for him, he made me leave the room. I remember that he seemed hysterical even before he picked up the receiver. How I wish I had just hung up on you,” she spat at Fentress.

  Wolfe continued. “Inspector, I believe Mrs. Hackman to be correct in her assertion that Richard Thompson was encouraged to end his life. After all, he now was a murderer, with virtually no hope of avoiding either permanent imprisonment or death. Let us assume Mr. Fentress presented him with that grim prospect during that telephone conversation, as was probably the case. Faced with that kind of future, it is not at all difficult to imagine the young man using his service pistol to ensure he would never go to trial.”

  “Say what you want to, this was not truly a suicide, it was murder!” the dead marine’s sister insisted.

  “How did you know about the Thompson suicide?” Cramer asked.