Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City

by Mike Reuther

  “Smart huh?”

  “Really quite clever would be a more appropriate description.”

  “Yeah?”

  Hampton turned to stare out the window at a farm silo. We still had about five miles to go. Between the airport and Centre Town there was little to see but the rolling farmland caught in moonlight. As we moved along up the road, the shadowy images of trees, hills, and road signs would loom before us before vanishing.

  “You must understand Mr. Crager. Our relationship was hardly a conventional one. There existed a vast disparity in our backgrounds and educations. I should have been aware of her intentions.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “She used me.” he said, staring hard at me.

  “How’s that?”

  Hampton leaned back in his seat. He closed his eyes for a few moments.

  “In a sense I did, as you put it Mr. Crager, take Jeannette in. She was working nights at that dreadful pickup bar. The poor woman could barely pay her rent. Lance was hardly coming through with alimony. But that mattered little to Jeannette. She was determined to get back with him. In hindsight that has become quite clear to me. At the time I blinded myself to that cold fact. Jeannette played me for a fool. I removed her from her dreary, pitiful existence and introduced her to my own world. I not only showered her with affection, but I surrounded her with books and squired her to academic functions. I opened up entire new possibilities to this girl.”

  “And she only wanted Lance?”

  Hampton again turned to the window. We were just nearing the airport now. The control tower, like some immoveable dark sentry, stood in the distance. A small commuter plane was coming in for a landing.

  Hampton allowed himself a sigh. “Alas, it’s quite true.”

  “So, Jeannette was somehow hoping to get back with Lance and reunite their little family?”

  “I am afraid that was the happy picture Jeannette had in mind.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Ha. Jeannette’s charming plans for a Norman Rockwell existence were indeed laughable. She’s no stay-at-home wife. And Lance … why he’s nothing more than a rake. Carrying on simultaneously with Jeannette and Reba Miller …”

  “So it’s true?” I said. Hampton glared at me. “I mean about Lance and Reba?”

  “The biggest tramp in Centre Town,” he said. “Their little affair was no secret to me. Reba wanted Lance for purely selfish reasons, and Jeannette wanted Lance for a happy past he represented to her.”

  “Tell me about Reba and Lance.”

  “Reba Miller. Aspiring grande dame of Centre Town society and harlot to every ballplayer.”

  Reba Miller a tramp? Somehow it didn’t wash.

  “You’re full of crap,” I said.

  “Hardly Mr. Crager. Reba Miller had a weakness for ballplayers. She was especially fond of the young ones, I’m told. The eighteen, the nineteen-year-olds, their hormones amuck. The vulnerable ones freshly sprung from the bosom of homes. The ones she could control.”

  “But that’s crazy. Why would a woman of her means carry on with ballplayers? She’d have everything to lose.”

  “She had nothing to lose Mr. Crager. For all her beauty, her seemingly cool and confident manner, her numerous connections, friends and rich life, Reba Miller is an empty person.”

  “How in the hell do you know all this?”

  “Her poor cuckold of a husband happens to be a dear friend of mine.”

  “Ronald Miller?”

  “A nice, decent chap and an astute businessman, despite some recent setbacks, but no match for Reba.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Ronald adores Reba, but for all that adoration she spits on him, which, I am sorry to say, only causes Ronald to come back for more. Theirs is hardly a marriage made in heaven, if you’ll excuse the cliché.”

  “So where does Lance fit into all this?” I asked

  “I’m sorry?” Hampton peered over his glasses at me.

  “You said Lance and Reba were having an affair.”

  “An affair? I suppose you could call it that. Affairs often suggest flings, sexual complications, often without the emotional commitments.”

  “You’re losing me,” I said.

  “Reba, by all accounts, was more than a bit smitten with our dead ballplayer,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  Hampton shook his head. “It was I who acted as nursemaid to Ronald Miller. Why the poor man was crushed that his wife insisted on carrying on with Lance.”

  “But you said she was lying down with half the ball club.”

  “Yes. After Lance tossed her aside. Why. It was more than the woman could stand.”

  It was unbelievable. It wasn’t enough that this fool had gotten himself mixed up with some waitress young enough to be his daughter, a woman who apparently had been more taken with a washed up ballplayer than with a washed up academic. There was also the professor’s friend, a respected businessman, sitting by as his wife got it on with half the members of the local bush league team - that is, when she wasn’t doing time with the team’s slugger who just happened to be her husband’s brother. Hell. Hampton and Miller must have spent more than one night together crying crocodile tears over those women. But those two hadn’t been the only ones to get their hearts broken. If Hampton wasn’t feeding me a lot of crap, Jeannette and Reba had also been duped by love. And now there was a murdered ballplayer, and it was anybody’s guess as to who might have committed the grisly act.

  “As you can see Mr. Crager, Centre Town has untold stories within its confines. Why this town is a veritable Peyton Place of secret lives. Lies and betrayals. Betrayals and lies. Well … to hell with it all.”

  He began to sob silently into his handkerchief. And there his head remained buried for the next few minutes. Let’s just say the prospect of a grown man crying makes me uneasy. For what seemed like the longest time I just sat there in the cab allowing the roaring sound of the plane now on the ground and coming to a stop on the runway drown out the guy’s blubbering.

  “You know what the worse part of it is?” he asked, looking up from his andkerchief.

  I shook my head.

  “I never achieved tenure at Ocyl College. Those bastards stole everything from me.”

  “No,” I said. “The worse for you was losing Jeannette.”

  Hampton stared into his handkerchief.

  “That bitch. I’m bloody well better off without her. Why, she’s nothing more than a hash house waitress. And that sir is all she will ever be.”

  “But you loved her just the same.”

  The car had stopped in the parking lot outside the airport terminal. Hampton’s teary eyes were watching the plane.

  “Yes. I suppose that’s true,” he said softly

  “Enough to kill for her?”

  I tossed the note on his lap.

  Hampton didn’t flinch. He looked down at the note then up at me.

  “And how long have you had this in your possession Mr. Crager?”

  “That’s not important.”

  For a moment he considered the note. Slowly, his face formed into a smile.

  “Ha! If you think this somehow implicates me in the death of Lance Miller you’re sadly mistaken Mr. Crager.”

  “Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t.”

  “I’m hardly a murderer.”

  “I didn’t say you stuck the knife in him Hampton.”

  “Oh I see. You perhaps see me as an accomplice in this miserable business. Sorry Mr. Crager. But if you’re looking for a guilty plea you need look elsewhere.”

  He picked up the note and held it before his face with both hands. He appeared ready to rip it in a million pieces. But if that was the case he thought better of it. “I think I’ll just hold onto this.” He put the note in his pocket and got out of the cab.

  The cabbie gave me a funny look before exiting as well and followed Hampton to the rear of the cab to get his things from the t
runk.

  I just sat there staring at the runway lights. In a few moments Hampton stuck his head through the window of the cab.

  “For your information Mr. Crager, I have already spoken with the police, and they’ve found no reason to hold me in any way responsible.”

  “Yeah. Funny how it’s you skipping town all of a sudden.”

  “I’m getting on with my life. You would do well to get on with your own Mr. Crager.”

  With cane now in hand, he abruptly turned and followed the cabbie struggling with his bags toward the terminal.

  As it turned out, Hampton wouldn’t be the only one to skip town.

  Mick Slaughter, still high on my list as a suspect in this case, was nowhere to be found over the next few days. Word at his gym had it that he had headed somewhere out of state for a body-building competition. Funny thing was, nobody seemed to know the location of the thing. I had more than a sneaking suspicion his absence had to do with something else.

  Max Headroom and the Tattoo Man, his principal henchmen, were gone as well.

  I was also having problems finding Miller. Miller had never been at the top of my list as a prime suspect and had proven to be an elusive animal since I’d been on the case. Numerous phone calls to his home over the next few days got me nowhere. Finally, I went over there myself. This came a few days after my meeting with Hampton. I didn’t find Miller there, but I did find his wife. She wasn’t a fountain of information. When I asked her about having an affair with Lance, she laughed it off like it was the most absurd thing imaginable.

  I caught her on a sunny afternoon outside the big house on Grand Boulevard. She made a lame attempt to get rid of me at first. Claimed she was in the middle of heavy gardening work. But that was a stretch. I followed her around the yard as she did little more than sprinkle water from a can onto the flowers and bushes of her lawn.

  Even to do gardening work she dressed the part of the wealthy society lady very much interested in keeping up appearances. She wore a tight-fitting purple and white pants suit. The blouse was low cut and revealed a nice glimpse of cleavage. Her red hair fell out beneath one of those floppy sun hats.

  “An affair. With that ballplayer?” she said. “Surely, you jest.”

  “Come off it,” I said. “Everyone claims you two had something going.”

  We stood now on the front lawn of her home. With a smile, she seemed to consider this for a moment.

  “I suppose you’ve been talking with the esteemed Giles Hampton. What an incredibly petty and vindictive man he is.”

  “Vindictive?”

  “Come now Mr. Crager. I’m sure you’ve checked around. I know what the ivory tower crowd over there at Ocyl College thinks of me. That I married my husband for money. God knows. Giles has been pumping my husband with that sort of information long enough. You know he lost his teaching position, of course.”

  I nodded. “He claims he was railroaded out.”

  “I doubt it. I’ve long suspected he had some sort of sexual identity problem. That he was playing footsy with some of his students - boys and girls - wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “He nearly went to work for Ronald,” she continued. “Ronald was ready to take him in too. It seems Mr. Giles Hampton had second thoughts about going off to teach at that cow college. He knew he’d need a job and worked all summer into duping my husband into allowing him to manage a trust fund that Ronald had once considered establishing.”

  “Back when he had money, you mean?”

  At this, she frowned.

  “Yes. At any rate, I put a stop to that nonsense.”

  “You?”

  “I’m afraid my poor husband occasionally falls prey to bad advice. He’s equipped with a good head but a bleeding heart.”

  “Where’s your husband anyway?”

  “Out of town on business, I’m afraid. Now if you’ll excuse me Mr. Crager, I have things to attend to.”

  She brushed past me and strode across the lawn toward a big screened in porch at the side of the house. I couldn’t help but steal glances at her figure moving across the lawn. At the door of the porch, she turned around.

  “Isn’t it funny how Giles Hampton left town so suddenly,” she said.

  Without another word, she disappeared into the house.

  The conversation with Reba Miller left me more puzzled than anything. I had dismissed Giles Hampton as a suspect but after hearing about the trust fund and his need for a job and money … well … who knew? The case was beginning to go in so many different directions and possibilities. But Reba wasn’t the only one to shed light on the situation. I found someone else who was able to offer some interesting information.

  By now it was nearly Labor Day. The heat and humidity of the late summer had finally shown signs of surrendering to autumn and the ball club, after a nearly three-week-long road trip, was finally returning to Centre Town to close out the season. Apparently, the team had just about reached bottom. In fact, when I picked up the sports page on that Thursday morning just prior to the holiday weekend I learned that the Mets were pretty much on life support. Losing seventeen of twenty games on a road trip north through New England had been like a shot to the gut to the team. Not only was a chance for postseason playoffs out of the question, but the club had nose-dived into last place.

  A three-column article about the club’s lousy season appeared in that day’s edition. I usually ignored what the local writers had to say about their teams in general. But this column, put together by a Progress staff writer named Jerry Diggen, had likened the team to that of a fallen Messiah. Apparently, the Mets were perceived as a kind of last-ditch effort to revive the damn city, and now the team was apparently leaving. Diggen, at least, was writing the team off.

  The Mets had many problems - both on and off the field. Fan interest was zilch, and the rumor of a sale of the club to an out-of-town business conglomerate was apparently a reality. Diggen revealed that unnamed sources had given him this last little piece of information. By next year, a bigger town, or at least some burg ravenous for minor league baseball, would be home to the Mets. According to Diggen, Centre Town was no place for the club. The ball park was in disrepair, and team owner Miller’s ploy back in the spring to use the stadium’s dilapidated condition as a means to get the city to ante up money for repairs to help keep the team in town had failed miserably.

  As for the club’s losing ways, that was attributed in part to injuries and unfortunate circumstances. Several players vital to the club’s good fortunes also had been lost in recent weeks. Two pitchers had landed on the disabled list due to arm injuries, and Vaughn, the second baseman with the Pat Robertson leanings, had been sent home for “undisclosed personal reasons.” That I found interesting. In fact, Diggen had squeezed a lot of provocative stuff into the piece.

  I figured a call to this Diggen guy was worth my time. Some funny things were coming down, and maybe Diggen was just the guy to clear up some of them. Or maybe he was just some local hack looking to stir up controversy.

  The Progress was housed in a wreck of a building over on Broadway, a three-block walk from my apartment, not far at all from the corner where drug pushers had set up shop. The only time I’d ever been inside the place was as a kid to fill out an application for a newspaper delivery job. I didn’t get the job. Like the rest of the city, it was a place that had only changed with respect to the mounting crime of recent years. It was a faded, crumbling brick building that took up a good half-block of the street. A half-dozen steps leading up to the double doors served as the main entrance. Chisled in stone above the main entrance was Atlas struggling with Earth, or what was supposed to be our planet. The stone was cracked and chipped beyond repair.

  I found Diggen hunched over a keyboard in a corner of the newsroom, an old skinny guy, probably about sixty-five or better. He was running a bony hand through the few strands of hair on his oily head while staring hard into a computer screen through a pair of the thickest glasses I’d
ever seen.

  “Help ya?” he said. He gave me a quick once over before turning back to the screen. He had quick bird-like movements.

  “Interesting column you had this morning,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He pecked hard at the keyboard with his index fingers. It reminded me of my cop days when I’d poke at typewriter keys to finish my damn police reports. He looked up, his frog-like eyes behind those coke bottle glasses jumping about. He was a nervous little kind of a guy. That was for damn sure. He couldn’t sit still in his swivel chair, and a huge blue vein in his chicken neck pulsated like it was about to burst.

  “You liked that?” he said.

  “It raised some questions.”

  He turned back to his computer. “Yeah…well…I don’t like to serve up a lot of negativity. That’s all you get anymore. But hey. You can’t hide from the truth either.”

  He talked fast.

  “That’s what newspapers are for,” I said.

  “Mmmm …” More mad pecking at the keyboard.

  “The damn team’s gone to hell,” he continued. “The sad part is, nobody cares. Especially those damn owners. Make a profit and get out of town. That’s their motive.”

  “Owners? I thought Miller controlled the team?”

  The froggy eyes considered me again. It struck me that possibly I was no more than a fuzzy figure to the old coot.

  “Don’t bet on that. Word has it that that fitness center owner. What’s his name … Mick Slaughter … is majority owner nowadays.”

  “That wasn’t in your column.”

  “He suddenly swiveled in this chair to face me. “I can’t write about stuff I can’t prove now can I?”

  My remark he’d taken as a challenge. He was a nervy little guy. I had to give him that. He just sat there staring up at me with those big ugly peepers, his scrawny arms folded.

  “Look. I just assumed …”

  “Yeah. I know. That Miller controlled the team. That’s what everyone thinks. Hey. The fact is, he’s been losing his shirt with the ball club since day one. The guy had no business being in baseball in the first place. He doesn’t know a thing about the sport, and every nickel he makes he pours into that other losing venture he’s got downtown.”