by Mike Reuther
“His department store you mean?”
He nodded and stared off into the newsroom.
“What did you say your name was?” he said.
“I didn’t. But it’s Crager.”
“What’s your business Crager?”
“I’m a private detective. Just checking out some leads on the Lance Miller murder.”
“Yeah. Lance Miller. A real tragedy. I did a few pieces on him through the years. Hometown boy makes good. That sort of thing. Hey. He could have been a star. If he hadn’t waited till he was long in the tooth to take the game seriously.”
“Did you know him very well?”
Diggen made a face.
“Hey. I can’t get to know any of these ballplayers these days. They all wanna be treated like prima donnas. Hey. Give me the old time ballplayers any ol’ day. These kids today have agents before they even play in their first game. And God help you when you write something negative about any of them.”
“Even Babe Ruth had an agent.” I said.
“Hey. I haven’t seen one kid in more than fifty years of sports writing who could hold Babe Ruth’s jock. That’s another thing. The scouting is horrendous. They think just because a kid can run a fast forty-yard dash they can make a ballplayer out of him. Then they wonder why he ends up hitting a buck seventy against Class A pitching. These kids don’t even know the fundamentals of the game. Hey. But they got agents. You can bet on that.”
Diggen ran his bony hand through his hair and gazed across the newsroom. “Hey. Don’t get me started. Okay.”
“Hey. I wouldn’t think of it,” I said.
Chapter 12
With the team back in town for the Labor Day Weekend - the final weekend of the season - I figured it was time to get out to the ball park and do some more probing. I hadn’t talked to many of the players and figured now was as good a chance as any.
I was starting to feel pretty good about things. Maybe it had something to do with the weather. Sunny days with the kind of blue skies that would bring joy to a heart-broken drunk arrived Saturday. It was like the Southwest all over again. But it was more than the weather that had me feeling good. Except for just a few beers, I’d stayed off the booze for a number of days now. Sobriety, for once, had felt nice for a change. Real nice. But it was lunatic thinking to believe I was off the booze for good. I had to face the fact that money had as much to do with my sudden sobriety as did a sudden conviction to just stop drinking. With the rent due and the other bills breathing down my neck, there was simply little left over for drinking money. The final installment of my severance pay had arrived the last week of August, and I was doing my damnedest to stretch my funds. Still, my sobriety, along with the decent weather and a gut feeling that things were about to break in the case, had given me a case of the jollies.
Before heading out to the ball park, I gave Pat a ring. It was only eight o’clock, and I figured to catch her before she headed off to her hair dresser job over at the Ocyl Mall, but there was no answer. Apparently, she’d gotten her three brats off to her sister’s early and taken the first bus to the mall. I left the apartment and made my usual morning coffee stop. It was beginning to be a habit with me. My coffee, The Progress and the riff raff of the coffee shop as company, although until recently, I was liable to grab some java at any one of the more than half-dozen joints that passed as coffee shops in the downtown.
Myrna was her usual miserable self, a stub of a cigarette hanging from her mouth as she silently filled the cups of her sorry lot of counter customers. I took a seat at a booth in the corner and looked out at the window at what passed for street action. I was barely into my first cup of the morning when Erma of all people walked in.
I’d been into Red’s on a few recent nights, nursing beers as a way of convincing myself that my taste for alcohol could be tapered off, and on each occasion I’d noted the absence of Erma. And now here she was. She was muttering to herself as she shuffled past the tables. She bumped into a chair or two along the way before wedging herself into a chair at a table no more than a few feet from my booth. She wore the same baggy dress that she always had on when she was at Red’s.
“How ya’ doin’ Erma?” Myrna said, appearing at her table with some coffee.
Without looking up, Erma grunted, her face set in her patented scowl. Nobody scowled like Erma. Myrna shuffled off.
“Erma,” I said.
She didn’t answer which didn’t surprise me. Erma seldom acknowledged anyone.
Finally, she slowly turned.
“I know you?” she said.
“Sure. You know me. I’m Crager. From Red’s.”
“From Red’s?”
She scratched her head and looked at the floor. “Don’t go in there no more. Too many shady characters.”
That nearly floored me.
“This place ain’t exactly a refuge for the croquet and cricket crowd,” I said.
Erma shook her head.
“Too many shady characters in Red’s. And that’s a fact.”
It was usually useless to converse at any length with Erma. Thoughts stuck in her crazy head like wet crap to wool, and once she got something in her brain, the best thing was to leave the woman to her little world.
“Too many shady characters there. Too many,” she parroted.
For the next several minutes, this went on: Erma, her eyes staring at the floor and every so often blurting out another sentence about the shady characters at Red’s. Everyone in the place ignored her, of course. Disheveled old ladies mumbling inanities were par for the course at Myrna’s. But I was sitting too close to her, and it was getting to me.
“Give it a rest Erma,” I said.
“Too many shady characters,” she shot back. “Too many shady characters.”
She rocked back and forth in the chair now. Apparently, her crazy brain had fallen into some type of rhythm.
That was enough for me. I tossed a buck on the table and started for the door.
“Too many shady characters,” she said. “Mick Slaughter’s a shady character.”
I turned. Erma was rocking furiously in her seat now. She continued staring at the floor.
I slid into the seat across from her. “Did you say Mick Slaughter?”
Her head went up and down. “He’s a bad one. Had ballplayer knocked off. That’s what he said.”
I moved closer to Erma. She continued rocking in that damn seat like she was trying to pump a Harley. It was driving me nuts. Finally, I grabbed her arm. “Erma. What else did he say? And now her eyes met mine for the first time.
“Who?” she said without looking at me.
“Mick Slaughter. You said he had the ballplayer knocked off. You mean killed? He had the ballplayer, Lance Miller, killed?”
“That’s it. Lance Miller. His brother got him killed.”
“Ron Miller?”
“That’s it Ron Miller. He and Mick Slaughter they was in cahoots. In cahoots, he and Mick Slaughter.”
Erma rocked even more furiously in her seat. “In cahoots, he and Mick Slaughter. In cahoots, he and Mick Slaughter. In cahoots…”
“Erma. What else?” I was shaking her arm now. But it was no use. She kept repeating that same line over and over and rocking away in her seat like she was willing it to take her away from there and to some strange faraway world of her making. Finally, I got up and left her there.
I had another stop before the game that afternoon. The public library hadn’t been much help for me in scanning old copies of the Progress. But I knew it had to have recent issues on hand. I had a hunch there was something I had completely missed from before.
The mousy woman was at the circular reference desk. She spotted me the minute I came through the door but pretended she didn’t.
“Hey gorgeous,” I said.
Ohhh … Mister Crager,” she cooed, acting surprised. “And what brings you back here.”
I gave her one of those oh-so-subtle seductive glances. “What do you
think doll? I didn’t come in here to check out what’s on the shelves.”
Her eyes batted. “Now stop that,” she said.
She gave a pat to her beehive hairdo, adjusted her glasses and blushed. I leaned on the counter separating us. It caused the poor woman to take a step back and pull tightly against her chest the three or four books she’d been holding.
“Put down the books girlie. Unless you wanna take them with us.”
“Take them with us?” she said.
“Sure. On our little trip. Just you and me, the sun and the sand. How about it babe?”
“Now you’re making fun of me Mister Crager.”
“Who me? Not a chance. It’s that perfume. It makes me …”
“Uninhibited.”
“I couldn’t have said it better.”
She lowered the volumes and gave me one of those looks to let me know that she was in on the joke now.
“Oh Mister Crager. No girl should have to endure such teasing.”
I gave her my best hurt puppy look. “You’re the one teasing doll.”
August issues of the Progress were piled on a shelf in the reference room. I was looking for the Aug. 3 edition, it being the day following Lance Miller’s murder. I wasn’t interested in gleaning from the news account any information about the homicide. What I wanted to find was anything written about the banquet at the Spinelli the night of the murder. I wanted to get a clear idea of who might have attended the affair. I was still playing with little bits of information, but it’s often the small pieces of the puzzle which go a long way toward fitting it all together.
Sure enough, I found what I was looking for in the local section on a page largely given over to entertainment. The article, just as I had hoped, listed some of the people who had attended the affair. Ron Miller and his wife Reba were mentioned as was the name of Giles Hampton. Interestingly enough, there was no mention of Jeannette. Then I remembered. That night at the ball park, when I’d spotted the four of them, Jeannette had been dressed casually while the others clearly had been in attire more suited for such a gala event. Had she even attended? Most of the names I didn’t recognize. But two other names were familiar - Jack Walters and Billy Hanson, the two ballplayers who’d been at Mick’s gym. Apparently, they were the only two ballplayers from the team in attendance.
There was also a picture to go with the story. This I gave some scrutiny. A great sea of faces were in the picture - people in formal attire sitting at tables. The photograph had obviously been taken from some podium in the room without the benefit of a zoom lens. Only the people sitting nearest the camera were in any sort of clear focus. Still, I could make out some familiar faces, and if I wasn’t mistaken the dumpy guy next to the wall holding a drink was Emerson. With his white shock of hair and wide girth, he stuck out in the photo like a loud drunk at a Baptist picnic. Among all the suits he was the lone male in the picture not wearing one.
I called a cab from outside the library. No more than a minute went by before one pulled up to the curb with my old buddy behind the wheel.
“You don’t look drunk or beaten up this time,” he said. “What gives?”
“My therapist tells me that’s self-destructive behavior,” I said.
“In therapy now huh? So that’s where all your money goes.”
“That and toward cab fare,” I said.
“Where to?”
“The ball park.”
He shook his head and smiled.
“You’re in luck this time. Today there actually is a game.”
We headed through town, the sunshine lending a happier tone to the empty storefronts, crumby bars and the lousy street life that reeled past. At the corner I noticed Mick’s place was dark inside. Apparently, he was still out of town, and no one had been left in charge to open the place. The question was: Why? Hadn’t he left someone to run it on other Saturdays? At least, that’s what he told me before.
I noticed the cabbie glancing at me in his rearview mirror.
“I’ll bet I make a good 50 percent of my income on fares back and forth from this ball park in the summer.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure as shit.”
“Get many ballplayers?”
He grinned back at me.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yeah.”
He continued grinning at me.
“You got something to say cabbie say it.”
“It’ll cost ya.”
We were just pulling up to the ball park. A little kid wearing a Mets ball cap and waving a Mets pennant was being led by his father past the car toward the stadium. “How much?” I said.
“What’s it worth to ya?” he said.
“What is this? A game?”
He was turned around in the seat now looking real smug. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty.
“Okay,” he said. “Now that we’ve taken care of cab fare. Match that sucker.”
“Your ass,” I said.
I crumpled up the twenty and pushed it through the screen. Then I pulled a ten out of my pocket, held it up for him to see, and pushed that through the screen as well.
“There. That covers me for the other night too.”
He looked down at it and grinned. “I’ll guess that’ll do.”
“Okay. Sing your song.”
“That one ballplayer. The one the team sent home a few weeks ago … supposedly for personal reasons. What’s his name? Billy Vaughn? I picked him up after the game the night Lance Miller was killed.”
“Yeah. So.”
“So, I took him to the Spinelli Hotel.”
The team had just gotten done with batting practice and was now settling into its pre-game clubhouse routine. At the players gate entrance at the top of a ramp leading into the back door of the Mets’ clubhouse, I was met by Ray Wallace, the Mets’ one-man public relations office. I’d had several conversations with Wallace in recent weeks about the possibility of my speaking to Dutch Reuther, the Mets crusty veteran manager. Word had it that Lance and Dutch had carried on a feud of some kind during Lance’s time with the team, and I thought it would be worth checking out. It wasn’t my style to go through public relations flunkies in order to talk with people, but Dutch had proven to be a particularly hard person to contact in recent weeks, and with the team mostly on the road during that time, I had been forced to use the telephone in vain attempts to reach the manager. For weeks, Wallace had been putting me off like I had the worst case of leprosy. Finally, he had given in.
The clubhouse was a cramped, dark and dismal little hovel of a room that stank of rank feet and body odor. Rusted pipes running across the ceiling dripped of mildew. Rows of lockers ran the length of three walls with long wooden benches for the players to sit. There was virtually no room for twenty-five players to move around, let alone have any privacy. Making the whole atmosphere unbearable was the crashing sound of rap music. An insane asylum was a better environment. All around the room, players were milled about in groups or alone, joking, jiving, strutting. Four were playing cards at a metal table shoved into a corner. A hulking black kid was in his batting stance, taking practice swings before a mirror. Everyone gave the kid wide berth. I figured he had to be Tate, the kid from the streets of Chicago, the team’s single home run threat. Every few moments, he’d uncurl his big body and launch into an imaginary pitch. Three Hispanic players were jabbering away in Spanish near the clubhouse entrance. Another player in front of his locker in nothing but a jock strap demonstrated his Kung Fu moves for the benefit of two other players. Then I caught sight of Hanson, the kid from the gym. He sat by himself before his locker, a bat propped up between his legs. Sitting there in just his uniform pants, I could see now he had one hell of a muscular build. In fact, he looked damn near as impressive as some of the muscle heads down at Mick’s gym. But the happy kid I recalled from the gym appeared listless and withdrawn. He seemed upset about something, or maybe he didn’t feel well. I couldn’t decide w
hich. Another player was stretched facedown out on a table in another corner of the room. He was tall and lanky and wearing only his uniform pants as he rested very still on the table. I thought he might be sleeping until he began to stir. “Hey where in the fuck is Emerson anyway?” he said. It was Jack Walter, the other kid I’d met at Mick’s Gym. The one with the attitude.
Just then, Emerson came busting through a door from across the room toward the table. He was loaded down with towels, each of his pudgy hands gripping bottles. He set the towels in a pile on the edge of the table and the bottles next to the towels, then immediately got to work rubbing the shoulders of Walter.
“I don’t have all fuckin’ day you know,” Walter said. “I gotta warm up yet.”
I moved across the room, leaned down and got right into Walter’s face. “Didn’t know it was a big game.” I straightened up while maintaining this kind of wise-guy sneer.
He didn’t seem to recognize me at first. His eyebrows furrowed. Then it hit him.
“Oh. It’s the detective. Or should I say DICK-TEK-tive.”
Emerson shook his head at me. “This isn’t a good time.”
“Yeah,” sneered Walter. “Why don’t you take your business elsewhere.”
So help me God I could have smashed his face right there. I was aware of some of the other players looking our way. Tate had paused from taking his practice swings.
I looked at Emerson. “I wanted to speak with Reuther. Later, I’d like to have a talk with you.”
Emerson continued kneading the shoulders of Walter. “Sure, he said. “Have Ray Wallace bring you back down here after the game starts.”
I backed away. Walter gave me a smirk.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
Dutch Reuther was getting his picture snapped at home plate by a Progress photographer.
This was Dutch’s farewell, the final weekend of his baseball life after nearly fifty years in the game as a player, coach and manager, and the Progress was preparing a big feature story on Dutch. A photographer was snapping one last shot of the manager shaking hands with some local dignitaries whom I didn’t recognize. He appeared, if anything, weary of the entire affair.