Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City

by Mike Reuther

  “Yeah, I heard,” I said. “What with the murder and all.”

  “Just a terrible, terrible thing,” said the ballplayer. He gave me one of those somber looks better reserved for a funeral.

  “Anything we can do for ya?” said the turnip.

  I told him my business and handed him one of my cards through a hole of the chain link gate. He studied it for a long time as he worked the cigar around in his mouth. The kid looked over his shoulder at the card.

  The turnip handed me back the card and cleared his throat. “Yeah. Well. He was one hell of a ballplayer. It’s really too bad.”

  “A terrible, terrible tragedy,” the kid said.

  And now they were both staring at the ground. Finally, the turnip looked up. “You wanna ask us some questions. Is that right?”

  I nodded.

  With a key he unlocked the big padlock on the gate. The door swung open.

  He stuck out a pudgy hand. “I’m Dickie Emerson, head groundskeeper here. This here’s Randy Vaughn, the team’s second baseman and a future major league all-star.”

  “Vaughn broke into a Gomer Pyle grin. “Cut it out Mr. Emerson.”

  “Shit boy. You got what it takes.”

  Vaughn looked up at me and shook his head. His face had turned a shade of red.

  “Let me tell ya somethin’ about Lance Miller,” Emerson said. “He coulda had one helluva career. One helluva career. But he just pissed it away.

  “Take Randy here. He don’t have the talent of a Lance Miller. But he comes out here to the ball park hours and hours before games, even on his days off and works his butt off. That’s how you get to the major leagues.”

  “I heard Lance had gotten the call to join the Major League team right after the game yesterday,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Emerson said. “Lance had been hot as hell the past few weeks, and the Mets were short on outfielders. I thought it was a mistake.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “Look. I know the Mets were desperate for an outfielder, and Lance was carrying a hot stick and all that. But for chrissakes, the guy was thirty-three years old with a lot of heavy baggage to boot.”

  “Heavy baggage?” I said.

  “There was that drug thing from his past for one thing. And he had been pretty much of a bust as a Major Leaguer before.”

  “But the Mets did need an experienced outfielder, and they’re in a pennant race,” I said.

  Emerson looked at the ground and shook his head. “I just think they would be better off calling up one of the young kids. Not some has-been with a lousy track record.”

  Emerson worked the cigar around in his mouth and looked up at me. “Look,” he said. “I been around a lot of ballplayers. Shit. I been maintainin’ the grounds of this ball park for the better part of twenty-five years. Most of ‘em that come through here will never play a damn inning of Major League ball. But just about all of ‘em got one thing in common.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “None of ‘em wanna be ridin’ buses through the minor leagues the rest of their ballplayin’ careers.”

  “But not Lance huh?” I said.

  “No. I didn’t say that,” he said. “And that’s what shocked the shit out of me. He got here back in June with a reputation for being lazy and showin’ up at the park late and not wantin’ to do anything more than he had to. Hell. He was a good twenty pounds overweight when he got here. Looked like a wet sack of shit. But let me tell ya, he sure made some heads turn around here. Every day, he’d be out here a good two hours before the other players, doing his running and stretching and hitting off that batting machine. Most days he even beat Randy here to the park. Ain’t that right kid?”

  Vaughn nodded.

  Emerson used a pudgy hand to heft up the tool belt. The thing was filled with all sorts of tools and sagged well below his big belly. I spotted a hammer, some screwdrivers and a couple of wrenches sticking out of the pockets. And for the first time, I saw strapped to the tool belt, a sheath for a long-bladed knife.

  “I heard he was into weight-lifting too,” I said, averting my eyes from the sheath.

  “He wanted to increase his home run power,” Emerson said. “I thought it was a lot of crap. These ballplayers today think if they throw around some weights they’ll become the next Babe Ruth. I always thought it made ‘em muscle-bound, but it seemed to work for Lance.”

  “He really went at it too, Mr. Crager,” Vaughn added.

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “He was always at the gym sir.”

  The sir and the mister bit was getting a bit annoying.

  “Look kid. Just call me Cozz. Okay?”

  “I was always taught to respect my elders, sir.”

  The kid apparently was too far gone on the respect thing.

  “Okay,” I said. “So he hit the weights pretty good. This was over at Mick’s Gym. Right?”

  I looked at Emerson. He shrugged.

  “Yes sir,” Vaughn continued. “He went over there as much as he could. He really added some muscle to his body too.”

  “All to the betterment of his career huh,” I said.

  “Lance was at the end of the line,” Emerson said. “Not too many Major League teams are gonna take a chance on a thirty-three-year-old minor leaguer unless the guy can really show ‘em somethin’. Lance probably figured he had one last shot and put everything into it.”

  I turned to Vaughn. “You hang around Lance much?”

  He looked at me for the longest time with a somber expression. “I wish I could have spent more time with him, Mr. Crager.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He didn’t have the Lord in his life, Mr. Crager.”

  Emerson rolled his eyes. “Okay Randy. That’s enough.”

  “No. I think it needs to be said, Mr. Emerson.” Vaughn looked me squarely in the eye. “I have reason to believe Lance was a fornicator, Mr. Crager.”

  “Okay Randy. Let it go,” Emerson said.

  But trying to stop this straight arrow now would be like trying to muzzle Pat Robertson from asking for donations. I decided to play it cool anyway.

  “I don’t suppose you know of any women he was fornicating with,” I said.

  He did all right. But it really wasn’t “Christian-like” for him to divulge names.

  “That’s really between Lance and the Lord, Mr. Crager.”

  But I wasn’t going to give up that easy.

  “Look kid. I’m trying to solve a murder. I don’t think the man upstairs would be happy if you were helping a murderer go free.”

  Well, I had him there. He shuffled his feet. His eyes moved past me through the gate toward the dike. Finally, he looked up at me with those choir boy eyes and said that Lance and Reba Miller had engaged in sinful acts on a number of occasions.

  I didn’t bother asking the kid how he came about this little nugget of information.

  Emerson slowly removed his cigar as he looked at me.

  “Just remember,” he said. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

  Chapter 4

  It was a good hike back into town from the ball park. I probably could have called a cab, but it was a Sunday and in a town this size I figured to get stuck riding with the same SOB from before. And I sure as hell didn’t need to spend any more money on cab fare. Besides, the sun was out and with the recent rain the city actually looked washed and clean. It was still warm, but the humidity had done a temporary retreat. The sun appeared as this great big ball sitting above the dike. It was one of those fleeting, rare moments in life when it felt wonderful to be alive.

  By the time I made it to Red’s it was about 8:30. Red himself was sitting on the other side of the bar with his face stuck up against the TV screen. The bloopers show was on the tube, and Red was having a good chuckle over some fat woman being waylaid by a storming brood of pooches. It seems the woman, who looked to go about 300 pounds, had no sooner reached the back stoop with
a dish of dog food when the neighborhood’s entire contingent of hounds stormed her.

  “Catching up on your heavy reading there barkeep?”

  Red turned around with this kind of goofy grin. If you didn’t know better, you’d of thought the guy was an imbecile. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how he’d come about his nickname. Although well past forty, Red had a full head of curly flaming crimson hair. As usual, he was dressed more like the steel worker he’d once been than your friendly neighborhood saloon owner. Even on this hot summer evening he wore a heavy flannel shirt and old beat-up blue jeans. He rarely had a ready retort for my sarcasm. Instead, the corners of his mouth would form a devilish grin, and he’d slink off to the beer tap. And that’s just what he did this time too.

  “You’re late. All the good-looking women have been taken.” Red set down the draft beer in front of me on the bar.

  We both chuckled. Red’s wasn’t exactly a haven for nubile young women. It was your typical workingman’s drinking establishment. The bar ran the entire length of the one wall. There were a few tables and the decor was spare - some beer signs on the wall and a few pictures of local softball teams and one of Red and some of his hard-hatted buddies from the mill hoisting a few. If you weren’t into getting yourself blinding drunk or viewing the tube or arguing over sports, there was little reason to come into Red’s which was exactly why I liked coming there. It was usually quiet, the drinks were cheap, and the few patrons were a mostly orderly bunch drawn from the surrounding neighborhood. Red had given up a thirty-year pension from the mill to open up the place and claimed he had no regrets. He had confided to me that he was usually struggling to break even with the bar, but with his ex-wife remarried and his kids grown and scattered he wasn’t looking for a gold mine.

  “I got it dicked, Cozz,” he said with a sly wink. “More women than I can shake a stick at.”

  A standing joke between us was that a different girl was at the bar waiting for him to close up each night. I’d been around for many last calls, and the only woman usually around by that time was “Crazy” Erma. She was toothless, cranky and nutty as hell. Most evenings found her at the bar with a boilermaker in front of her as she railed about imagined conspiracies including her half-baked belief that Red was poisoning her drinks. Yeah. Crazy Erma fit in just fine at Red’s.

  “I take it Gallagher’s been here?” I asked Red, his concentration divided between picking his teeth with a swizzle stick and the television at the end of the bar which had suddenly gone on the blink. Red moved quickly away from me to rescue the barroom’s single most precious form of entertainment. The boob tube’s vertical hold was forever giving Red problems and more than once he’d vowed to pitch it out the door. He never did. Instead, he’d give the thing a few hard slaps which usually resulted in the picture going snowy. At that point, Red would declare the TV set a “menace to mankind”, take aim at the thing with a phantom high-caliber pistol and proceed to blow it to smithereens. This done, he’d slam his fist against the power button. The assassination now complete, Red would pause before the TV, assuming a pose of deep remorse. Without a word, he’d take from beneath the bar a towel and drape it over the television.

  “Remind me to nuke that thing,” he said, after yet another such performance.

  “Yeah. What the hell. It’s too much overhead.”

  Red grinned. “That lobotomy box goes and so does 90 percent of my devoted customers.”

  I looked about the empty barroom. “Looks like you had a mass exodus already. But fear not. You’ll always have us drunkards, crazies and Irish cops.”

  “Two of out of three ain’t bad on a Sunday night,” Red said.

  “The ol’ Irish cop Gallagher been here yet?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He was in here all right. Sloshed out of his mind.”

  “Did he have anything to say about a certain murder last night over at the Spinelli Hotel?”

  Since I’d been in town, I’d regularly used Red as a source for information. And more times than not my friendly neighborhood bartender, with his ear tuned closely to the ravings of Centre Town’s police chief, had proven valuable. This time, Red just smiled. I figured it could wait.

  “Like to hear about the messy and sordid divorce of Centre Town’s top cop?” Red asked.

  “Oh hell. Not again.”

  And then Red, always one to make great use of his dramatic skills, proceeded to give a brief Oscar-winning performance of the half-pickled and cuckolded Gallagher. Red’s sloppy drunk Joe Gallagher was damn near the real McCoy and, in a sad tragic kind of way, funny as hell. Red had to derive some humor out of Gallagher’s messy life since he was the one who had to bear the burden of the cop’s rages and tears. More than once, Red had been forced to call for him a cab. A few times he’d even dragged his drunken friend out of the barroom to his own upstairs apartment where he allowed the booze-addled cop to sleep it off on his couch. Gallagher’s drinking, at least according to Red, had become steadily worse over the years, and his flat-out refusal to admit he had a drinking problem was getting more and more pathetic. With me it struck a chord, you might say. I had spent too many nights in barrooms myself, my eyes foggy, my speech that of a babbling idiot, insisting to some weary bartender or anyone else handy that I too was no slave to the great god alcohol.

  I finally had to put a stop to Red’s rendition of “A Night on the Town with Joe Gallagher.” By this time, Red was pounding his fist on the bar top and using Gallagher’s best street-cop language to throw up curses at an ex-wife.

  “Sounds like the boy was a bit unseemly tonight,” I said.

  Red shrugged. “I’m tired of fooling around with the guy. I called down at the station this time. They brought a patrol car by and saw to it that he got tucked in for the night.”

  I raised my beer toward Red. “Good work Mother Theresa. So what else did our fine upstanding policeman have to say?”

  He found a rag and then very casually used it to begin wiping down the bar, all the while whistling as he did so. I reached into my pocket for my roll and threw a ten on the bar. He eyed it but kept working the rag into the bar’s well-polished and already clean wood surface. I fingered another ten from the roll. “How’s your ex doin’?

  Red continued working the rag. The whistling got louder.

  “Why not give that cloth a rest?” I said, throwing the ten down on the bar right next to the other bill. Red ran the rag down the length of the bar. The whistling was really grating on me by this time. Red went over to the beer tap to pour himself a drink. When he came back he put down his beer and eyed the two bills before stuffing one of them in his pocket.

  “It seems our star ballplayer was getting a little action besides on the field.”

  “Heh. Heh. You’re doing fine Red.” I nodded to the ten still resting on the bar. “Go ahead. It’s yours.”

  He shook his head. “I ain’t greedy.”

  “What action we talkin’ about?”

  “An ex-wife. Her name’s Jeannette.”

  “Yeah … well. I know about that.”

  “There’s more. She’s shacked up with some college professor named Giles Hampton.”

  “Yeah. So.”

  “So the good word is that this Giles character paid Lance a bundle to stay away from his girlfriend.”

  “Heh. Heh. When Gallagher sings he really belts out.” I nodded to the ten. This time Red scooped it up like a vulture. When I reached into my pocket to pay for the drink he shook his head.

  “On the house,” he said.

  “Yeah limp dick. About twenty bucks worth.”

  Pat was just getting back from the kiddy park with the brats when I got to her place. She lived on the third floor of one of these mammoth Victorians the city’s historical commission was still trying to preserve in the part of town known as Millionaires Row, a slice of the city where the high rollers of one hundred years ago had sequestered themselves away from the community’s common element. All the movers and
shakers were long gone now, and the whole area had been taken over through the years by landlords preying on the same needy, downtrodden and derelict element the beautiful people of years past had managed to keep out. Some of the homes had long gone to seed, having surrendered to the mounting crime and drug dealing in the neighborhood just to the west. Pat and her brood had four rooms overlooking a park to the south. It was one of the nicer apartments along Fourth Street. Located as it was just a few blocks from my own place made it real convenient for us both.

  I gave her door five light raps. It had become a code of ours, you might say. Timmy, her five-year-old bundle of terror, got to the door first. He was just opening the door, the remains of what appeared to be a spaghetti supper smeared on his round little face, when her two other happy terrors arrived. They were twin boys, two hyperactive monsters with red hair and freckles. Nine years ago, while Pat had been waitressing in a downtown cafe, a smooth-talking salesman from Toledo had come into her life and stuck around just long enough to sire Timmy. Later, along came a handsome lug named Sam, a construction worker who loved the bottle almost as much as he liked blowing his money on the horses. His staying power was a bit stronger. He set up house while Timmy was still in diapers and didn’t leave Pat for the topless dancer until after he’d planted the seed for her two crimson-haired toeheads. Pat insisted their parting was amicable, but by the time I came along Pat’s trust in men had about hit rock bottom.

  Each twin had a leg of Pat’s while she held off Timmy with an outstretched arm. Behind her was a household in upheaval. The damn television was reverberating the blasts of some shoot ‘em up program. All across the floor were strewn toys, kitchen utensils and an upside down plate of spaghetti. Strands of noodles were scattered across the living room’s bare wooden floor. Two of the meatballs from the evening’s Italian feast were in a clump next to a toy dump truck. At least, I thought they were meatballs.

  “You wanna clean up the shit?” she asked.

  The kids were clinging to Pat like a bad case of the crabs. She shooed them away with some tough love: threatening to pull the plug on their boob tube rights if they didn’t get their little asses to bed.