Murder at Ebbets Field

by Troy Soos

  “They’re always fighting,” Margie said, staring toward the source of the noise. Then she turned to me and started to talk dispassionately, as if reciting a tale of people who were strangers to her. “Libby met William Daley two years ago, and she fell in love. Hard. And he loved her. Last year they married, a June wedding. I was a bridesmaid.

  “Libby hadn’t turned thirty yet and she couldn’t have been happier. Everything in her life was wonderfu)—the movies, her new husband. She still talked to me then, mostly about having children. She had a future. Then her husband goes off on that fool trip, thinks he’s going to teach the Chinese to play baseball . . .”

  I knew the trip she was talking about. Last winter, Daley had organized a baseball tour of Asia and Europe that featured some of baseball’s biggest names.

  I also knew how the tour had ended. “And Daley died on the trip,” I said.

  She nodded. “Bad oysters. He ate some bad oysters ... and that’s it. He’s dead, and Libby’s life is ruined.” I remembered the zeal with which Margie consumed oysters at the Sea Dip Hotel. Maybe she imagined she was avenging William Daley’s death. “She was married to him for eight months, didn’t see him for the last four, and then . . . she’s a widow.”

  “Didn’t see him? She wasn’t with him on the trip?” Why wouldn’t a new bride join her husband for a world cruise?

  “No . . . maybe that’s what bothered her so much. Maybe she thought if she’d been with him she could have helped him. But she couldn’t go on a ship. She was terrified of water.”

  “Afraid of water?”

  “Uh-huh. Ever since she was a little girl. She told me.”

  “But she went swimming Saturday night. That’s how she drowned.”

  “She couldn’t swim. She must have fallen in.”

  “But she had no clothes on. You don’t take your clothes off to fall in. You take your clothes off to go swimming.”

  “I told you! She couldn’t swim!” Margie sounded angry that I couldn’t comprehend this simple fact. It wasn’t all I couldn’t comprehend.

  “How do you know she had no clothes on?” she suddenly asked in a calmer voice.

  Oops, I guess I let that slip. Did I want to tell Marguerite that I was the one who found Miss Hampton’s body? No, for some reason I didn’t. “I have a friend,” I said. “He’s a reporter. And he told me.”

  “Why?” Her eyes probed me sharply.

  “He thought I might know something about what happened. Or ... that I might be able to find out for him.”

  “Is he writing something about her? I don’t want that. There’ve been too many horrid things written about her already.”

  “No. He promised me it’s not for print.”

  “Her death wasn’t an accident, was it.” Her question sounded like a statement of fact.

  “I don’t know. I thought it was. I figured she met Virgil Ewing after the party and they went for a midnight swim. You remember when he said . . .”

  Margie nodded.

  “She was naked and she was found drowned,” I said. “If she wasn’t swimming, why would—” I halted as I realized there was another reason to take your clothes off. But from what I’d heard of that activity, it didn’t generally result in drowning.

  I changed tack. “After I left the party, what happened? Did it seem she was more with one fellow than another? Did it look like she’d be leaving with one of them?”

  “Nooo.... Things were the same. All the men fighting over her. Then—Oh! She left alone. I saw her, I remember she wasn’t looking well. It was just a little while before I left.”

  “Wait a minute. I just thought of something: why would Virgil Ewing even ask her to go swimming if she’s afraid of water?”

  Margie chuckled. “He wouldn’t know about it. Libby wasn’t one to admit she was afraid of anything. I’m probably the only person who knew. She let it slip during one of our late-night chats.”

  “Hmm.... Well, maybe I should talk to some people and see what I can find out about all this.” I was thinking in particular of speaking with Virgil Ewing, Sloppy Sutherland, and Tom Kelly.

  “Why you?”

  “I want to find out what happened.”

  “So do I. And she was my friend.”

  Was this a competition? “I don’t know ... I just thought . . . ”

  “Why don’t we both try to find out what happened?”

  “Together?”

  “Together,” she said.

  Together sounded good.

  Not until after the game, while riding home on the Third Avenue El, did I realize that I’d forgotten to ask Margie about going with me to the movie premiere. Even if I had remembered, I wouldn’t have brought it up though. It wouldn’t have been appropriate under the circumstances.

  I had the feeling that before anything could develop between Margie and me, Florence Hampton’s death would have to be put behind us. And the best way to do that was to find out how and why she died.

  I tried to imagine what could have happened to her Saturday night.

  I started with the simplest explanation: after the party she meets with Virgil Ewing—or with somebody who heard Ewing’s suggestion and thought it a good idea. Anyway, she meets one of her suitors and they go skinny dipping. She has a cramp, or is too drunk to swim, and drowns.

  Two problems with that scenario. One, why didn’t her swimming date report her death? It could be because the publicity would hurt his career—and if it was Tom Kelly who was with her, it could also cost him his marriage. The second problem was tougher to explain: if she was so afraid of the water, she wouldn’t have gone swimming in the first place. Maybe Margie was wrong about that, but why would Florence Hampton tell her she couldn’t swim if it wasn’t true?

  Okay, so how could somebody who’s afraid of the water end up naked in the Atlantic Ocean? Again, she meets someone on the beach. Not for swimming, but for a romantic rendezvous. It gets to the point where their clothes are off. Then what? She gets sick—the heat and the champagne overwhelm her—and maybe she passes out. Her partner brings her into the water to revive her. But then how would she drown? If she passed out, he wouldn’t just dump her in the water, he’d hold her up.

  Maybe she didn’t get sick. Maybe there was an argument and she was beaten or choked—but not too badly, or the police wouldn’t have called her death an accident. And I hadn’t seen any marks on her body. Anyway, then she gets thrown into the water. Did the man who threw her in know she couldn’t swim? Was it murder? Or was it unintentional, just a way to punctuate an argument that got out of hand?

  Whatever did happen, I was convinced that someone was with her when she died. And I was starting to believe that her death was no accident.

  Things no longer looked as bright as they had when I was dancing with Margie Turner on Saturday night.

  Even the baseball diamond, the one place where hope always survives no matter how lopsided the score, seemed dimmer. Not only did the Dodgers beat us again Monday afternoon, but the mood of the ballpark was funereal. Florence Hampton’s death left the Brooklyn fans too glum to cheer their team’s victory.

  Before the game, Charlie Ebbets addressed the crowd through a megaphone set up behind the pitcher’s mound. He said polite, insipid things about her. I thought he should have treated her better when she was alive—it was just two days ago that he threw her friends out of the ballpark. Come to think of it, I never did find out what that was all about. Why wouldn’t he want his ballpark used in a movie?

  Chapter Six

  The flags around the outfield fence were still at half-mast, the same as they had been yesterday afternoon. But it was the Pittsburgh banner that was nearest the right field foul pole today. By beating us in the first two games of the series, the Dodgers had pulled themselves out of the National League cellar and into seventh place.

  There was some relief from the heat today, provided by scattered clouds and gusting breezes. Winds can swirl strangely in a ballpark, and they ble
w today with home team bias. The Dodgers’ flag flew straight out, as if the breeze was giving them a good omen. The Giants’ hung limp next to the left field foul pole.

  I stood on the top step of the Giants’ dugout, absentmindedly tightening the leather lacing on my glove. It was two-thirty on Tuesday afternoon, half an hour before game time for the series finale, and the park was already standing room only. Crackling chatter and guttural shouts from the crowd filled the park with a frenzied din. The Dodger fans were in a blood lust, eager to see Brooklyn sweep a series from the Giants.

  Last evening’s crowd had been restrained, almost somber, in mourning for Florence Hampton. Now the lowered flags seemed to be the only things grieving.

  Across the diamond, the Dodgers’ hunchbacked batboy emerged from the dugout. A hunchback was considered the most powerful good luck charm a baseball club could have, and many teams had them as mascots. Virgil Ewing then stepped out in his catcher’s gear and gave the boy’s hump a rub for luck before going to warm up Sloppy Sutherland. The boy went about his business, lining up the team bats in front of the Brooklyn dugout. With their barrels pointing toward the infield and the Giants’ bats arrayed the same way on our side of the field, they looked like the cannons of two battleships about to fire broadsides at each other.

  I walked out to second base, not so much to inspect the ground as to suggest to John McGraw that I was ready to play that position today. In the locker room, I’d seen that Larry Doyle, our regular second baseman, had a swollen right ankle splotched with angry red scabs where Brooklyn’s Zack Wheat spiked him yesterday. Since the amount of playing time I got depended largely on injuries to the starters, I paid as much attention to my teammates’ pulled hamstrings and split fingers as I did to batting averages and fielding percentages.

  McGraw came up to me as I was kicking the second base bag. “Doyle’s okay to play,” he said in answer to my thoughts. Then he looked to right field where Stengel was again bouncing balls off the flypaper sign. “What’s that crazy sonofabitch doing?” McGraw muttered. “He think the ball’s going to stick to it?”

  Since McGraw had just vetoed my starting hopes, I took some pleasure in correcting him—not something that was done often. “Uh-uh,” I said. “See, he’s throwing at the crease. So he can see how to play it off the wall.”

  McGraw watched a minute more, then conceded I was right, saying, “I’ll be damned.” He gave me a long look, nodded, and marched off to the Giants’ bullpen where Jeff Tesreau was warming up.

  I walked back to the dugout, my head down.

  “Rawlings!”

  I turned to the field to see who was calling me.

  “Rawlings! Mickey Rawlings!”

  The shout wasn’t from the field; it was from the stands in front of me. Somebody was calling me by name! I lifted my head, almost eager for the heckling to start. I didn’t feel at all persecuted. Actually, I felt rather honored.

  But no abuse came. Just my name repeated again, with no hostility in the voice. I looked into the stands, knowing full well that a visiting player shouldn’t acknowledge the crowd and wondering if I was being suckered in by an especially devious heckler.

  Then I saw a black derby near the rail and under it a face that looked like a skull with spectacles. I didn’t feel flattered anymore. This was no obnoxious Dodger fan about to shower me with vile abuse. It was only Karl Landfors.

  He waved to me and I walked up to the rail in front of him.

  “Hey, Karl,” I said. “What are you doing here?” Not the friendliest of greetings, but I’d sooner expect to see Henry Ford driving a Chevrolet than Karl Landfors at a baseball game.

  Landfors looked behind him with exaggerated caution. Then he leaned over the railing and cupped his hands around his mouth, not as a megaphone but to hide what he was saying. “I have the autopsy report,” he whispered.

  “The what?”

  “The autopsy report on Florence Hampton.” He pulled a folded paper from an inside pocket of his black undertaker’s coat.

  Karl Landfors sure was an odd one. He comes to a ballgame not with a glove to catch a foul ball or a picture to be signed, not even with bottles or vegetables to throw at the visiting players. No, he comes to a baseball game with an autopsy report.

  “She drowned,” he announced.

  “Everybody knows she drowned.”

  “They assume she drowned. There’s a difference. The autopsy proves it. Her lungs were full of water.”

  “Jeez, Karl, I can’t talk about that now. I got a ballgame to play.”

  “Oh. You’re playing in this one?”

  I wanted to grab his necktie and give it a hard twist. I also wished I could have answered yes.

  “Rawlings! Get your ass over here.” That yell came from behind me and it was the voice of John McGraw.

  I pulled the paper from Landfors, then handed it back, saying loudly, “How can I give you an autograph if you don’t have a pen?” I added quietly, “Meet me after the game.”

  “I’m not staying for the game. ” He sounded appalled by the notion that he’d watch a baseball game.

  “Suffer through it. I’ll meet you in the rotunda.”

  I trotted up to John McGraw. He showed me the lineup card. I was on it, playing second and batting eighth. I wished I could have shown it to Karl Landfors.

  The Dodgers started Sloppy Sutherland again on only two days’ rest. With no hope of getting to the World Series, they were going all out to sweep this series. Sutherland continued where he left off on Saturday, as if the two days off were just a break between innings. He dominated the game, slipping his talcum pitches past the fruitless swings of the Giants’ hitters. Big Jeff Tesreau, on a pace to win thirty games for us this year, had less luck with his less elegant spitballs. After five innings, we were down 6–0.

  In the top of the seventh, the tension between the teams suddenly boiled over. Sutherland must have thrown too close to Chief Meyers, because Meyers was charging the mound, bat in hand. We were going to have a donnybrook!

  I leapt off the bench ready to fight the first Dodger I could lay my hands on. Then I saw it wasn’t Meyers who was going after Sutherland, it was Virgil Ewing. Meyers was just trying to hold him back as Ewing screamed about being crossed up on signs. From the third base coach’s box, McGraw yelled at the Chief, “Let the bastards kill each other!” Wilbert Robinson bolted out of the Dodgers’ dugout and jiggled his way to the mound. The Dodger manager interposed his girth between Ewing and Sutherland and kept them from coming to blows. Umpire Bill Klem finally dragged Ewing back behind the plate.

  The Giant players sat back down, even more frustrated than before. We were already behind the Dodgers on the scoreboard; the least they could do was give us a chance to even things up with a brawl. But no, they wanted to fight among themselves. This Dodger team was not a civilized bunch. Maybe not a smart bunch either—how many signs do you need for a guy who only throws one kind of pitch?

  With two outs in the top of the ninth and the Dodgers still up 6–0, our first baseman Fred Merkle knocked a long triple to the center field wall. I was up next to either end the game or keep the rally alive.

  As I moved into the batter’s box, Virgil Ewing squirted a thin stream of tobacco juice at a pigeon bobbing along the ground near the backstop. He nailed the bird in the tail feathers, sending him into flight. I was impressed—Ewing hadn’t bothered to lift his mask; he’d spit clean through the bars. There aren’t many who can do that. I thought Virgil Ewing might have some unexpected talents in him.

  I looked back toward third base. Merkle was dancing off the bag eager to score. John McGraw, the only man in baseball who wore an infielder’s mitt in the coach’s box, pounded his fist into the glove twice. I wasn’t sure that I saw right, so I backed out of the box. McGraw repeated his move, hitting the glove twice with his right fist. It was the sign for a squeeze play.

  It didn’t make sense—we needed six runs, not one. I should be swinging away. Then I realize
d: McGraw figures the game is lost, so he wants to cost Sutherland his shutout and salvage some kind of victory. Well, it doesn’t matter what makes sense; all that counts is that McGraw wants me to lay down a bunt, so that’s what I have to do.

  And I did. On Sutherland’s first pitch, Merkle broke for the plate and I laid a perfect bunt up the first base line. I beat out the throw for a single and an RBI. And from the stands came a deafening roar of boos that could be heard in Hoboken. The Dodger fans had wanted Sutherland to get the shutout, and I became the most hated man in Flatbush.

  I took only a token lead off first base. No way was I going to try to steal a base now. I wouldn’t get out of the ballpark alive if I did.

  When Jeff Tesreau got up to the plate, Sutherland went into his stretch. Then he whirled and caught me by surprise with a pickoff throw—not to the base but at my head. I ducked and it grazed my shoulder as it flew into foul territory.

  I was too stunned to take off for second base right away. I recovered and started running but too late. Casey Stengel fielded the overthrow and threw me out at second base to end the game.

  Sloppy Sutherland didn’t trot off the field with the out. He stayed on the mound and followed me with his eyes as I ran to the Giants’ dugout. The look in his eyes told me that he hadn’t settled with me yet.

  The marble rotunda of Ebbets Field was known for two things: its ornate design and the bottleneck it created for fans entering or leaving the ballpark. To avoid encountering any of them, I kept Landfors waiting there for almost an hour before meeting him.

  He was standing in the center of the round floor, staring up at a huge chandelier that hung from the domed ceiling. The room was about 80 feet across, with a dozen ticket windows and turnstiles around it in a semicircle. The floor was tiled in white, with some red tiles laid in to look like the stitches of a baseball. The light fixture Landfors was admiring was ringed by oversized baseball bats, each supporting a baseball-shaped globe.

  “Sorry I took so long,” I said.