Murder at Ebbets Field

by Troy Soos

“You were on the tour?”

  “Of course! The missus wouldn’t go without me. I take care of her.”

  I said confidentially, “Well, I’m glad to hear that. Just between you and me, I don’t think Tom Kelly takes care of her quite the way he should.” I tried to be subtle in my criticism of him.

  “Hah! He treats her awful, he does.”

  I guess there was no need for subtlety. “You know,” I said, “I suppose you’re right. In fact, the first time I saw him was at a Vitagraph party on Coney Island. The whole time he was trying to dance with Florence Hampton. Left poor Esther in tears. I heard she was so upset, she spent the night in the hotel.”

  Bridget furrowed her brow. “That was the night Miss Hampton died?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, she didn’t stay in any hotel. It was Mister Kelly who didn’t come home. The missus came in. I remember because—” Then her face flushed and she clamped her mouth shut.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She kept her lips sealed tight and shook her head.

  “It’s just between us,” I promised gently. “What do you remember?”

  Bridget gave in. “The old fellah brought her home that night . . . almost morning, it was.”

  “What old fellow?”

  “Oh, I don’t know his name. He’s an old gentleman, with a bit of a limp.” Bridget then warned me, “Now don’t you go to thinking anything improper about the missus. That fellah left her at the door. I expect the way her husband treats her, she just needs somebody nice to talk to sometimes. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “Have you seen her gentleman friend before?”

  “Well.... There’s been a few other times he’s brought her home.”

  “Huh. And you say Tom Kelly didn’t come home at all that night?”

  “No, not until morning.” Bridget didn’t sound like she wanted to say any more.

  “I like Esther,” I said. “I’m glad it’s you who takes care of her. She’s in good hands.”

  Bridget smiled.

  “You said Tuesday’s your day off?”

  She nodded.

  “The next time the Giants are at the Polo Grounds on a Tuesday, you give me a call, and I’ll make sure there’s a couple of passes for you.”

  With effusive thanks, she promised to take me up on the offer, and we went back downstairs.

  From Margie’s dazed expression, I could tell she wasn’t getting very far with Esther. So after an excuse about having to get ready for the ballgame, we said goodbye and left.

  We walked west on Myrtle Avenue. In the distance ahead of us were the church spires and treetops of Brooklyn Heights.

  Soon I’d have to hop a trolley for Manhattan. “How about coming to the game?” I suggested.

  “No, I should go back to my apartment. Mr. Garvin will phone to see if I’m really sick—not that he’s worried about my health but to check that I’m not at a ballgame. I’d better be home when he calls.”

  “Oh, okay. Uh ... about me leaving you alone with Esther. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. So I figured it might be better to let you talk to her by yourself and see if you could get anywhere.”

  “I don’t think I did,” she said. “I tried, but . . . well, Esther seems so forgetful.”

  “She had a good memory about that play she was in.”

  “True, but she’s vague on anything that’s happened recently.”

  “Did you ask Esther where she went after the party?”

  “She said she came right home.”

  “Huh.”

  Then Margie said, “I made a few phone calls last night. After you left.” Her tone tacked on the word “early,” though she left it unspoken.

  “About what?”

  “About Esther. The standard story in the fan magazines is that she abandoned her career to help her husband get into acting. But what I was told by some theater people was that she couldn’t get a part anymore. She couldn’t remember lines, wasn’t reliable. They said she drank too much.”

  “She doesn’t seem like a boozer.”

  “No, no she doesn’t. So, are you going to tell me what you found out from Bridget?”

  I thought I was being teased. So I was happy to report that I’d had more success than she had. “Bridget told me that Esther did not come right home after the party. She didn’t get in until almost morning. And Tom didn’t come home at all.”

  “Ooh. You did good.”

  “Not only that, but a man brought her home that night. Bridget didn’t know who he was though.”

  “You did very good.”

  Hell, I’d learned it from her. I just did the same as she had when she talked to the waitress at Kitty’s casino. I was starting to figure out what “together” meant—not necessarily being in the same place at the same time but cooperating.

  I was feeling good about Margie Turner again. Good enough to ask her to dinner on Friday night. A candlelight dinner for two was what I was thinking. Her thinking was that it sounded like a great idea.

  The game against the Cubs was one of those tormenting matches which neither team seems to want to win. The problem was, we needed a win to keep pace with the Boston Braves. We squandered half a dozen scoring chances, until the Cubs booted a couple of ground balls in the ninth to give us the victory 2—1.

  While changing after the game, McGraw stuck his head in the locker room. “Dodgers just beat the Braves four nothing,” he announced. “Stengel hit two homers.”

  Strangely enough, there were cheers for the Dodgers in the Giants’ locker room. We now had a one game lead on the Braves.

  McGraw’s announcement also reminded me that I still hadn’t gotten through to Stengel about the Dodgers’ batboy.

  From a wall phone next to the locker room door, I called Ebbets Field. After some explaining and convincing, I was put through to the Dodgers’ clubhouse, and Stengel got on the line.

  I almost had my lips touching the mouthpiece as I spoke so my teammates wouldn’t hear me calling Ebbets Field. The Dodgers were still The Enemy no matter that they did us a favor today. “Casey,” I said. “Mickey Rawlings. Hear you had a good game.”

  “Yeah, I was seeing the ball real good today. Rudolph threw me change-ups that looked fat as grapefruits. Kind of like this knuckleball pitch that—”

  “Casey, what I want to talk to you about is Larry Harron.”

  There was an abrupt silence at the other end.

  “The batboy,” I prodded. “He got poisoned last week.”

  “Yeah, I know. He was a good kid. It’s a damn shame about him. We’re all taking it kind of hard.”

  “I read it was an accident. I don’t suppose there was anybody who had something against him?”

  “Nah, everybody liked Larry. Damn good kid.”

  “He was at the pool hall when we went to see Virgil Ewing.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “He was an honest kid?”

  “I think so ... why?”

  “He wouldn’t lie about anything?”

  “Nah, not Larry.”

  “What if it was for Virgil Ewing? If Ewing said he did something and asked Harron to swear to it, would he lie to protect Ewing?”

  “For Ewing, huh. Maybe. The kid worshipped Ewing. Wanted to be just like him. Why?”

  “Oh, no reason. Just wondering.”

  “You ask some strange questions.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks, Casey.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Thanks to Elmer Garvin, we had to make a slight change of plans Friday night. Instead of a quiet candlelight dinner for two, we were in noisy Luna Park on Coney Island with a million light bulbs blazing all around us.

  Luna, on the inland side of Surf Avenue, didn’t specialize in wild mechanical rides the way Steeplechase Park did. Instead, Luna Park had more of a circus atmosphere, complete with clowns, acrobats, and animal attractions. Animal
s of the oddest species were engaged in all kinds of occupations. Men and women took rides on African elephants; children were pulled around the park by billy goats hitched to little carts. There were pools of water with lethargic sea lions basking on their edges and skittish donkeys plunging into the pools from diving boards.

  Vitagraph crews had again spent the entire day shooting reels of film, taking advantage of Luna Park’s attractions. Only one scene remained to be shot: a night scene for the latest episode of Margie’s Dangers of the Dark Continent serial.

  The entire company was gathered around a large pool that wasn’t currently in use by diving donkeys. Garvin was trying to have it made into a jungle pond, complete with a menagerie borrowed from the park.

  Margie, dressed in her khaki shirt and brown jodhpurs, stood patiently next to the camera. The other actors were less patient, fidgeting on the side as they waited for the filming to be over so they could all go home.

  Garvin shouted instructions to the workmen setting up the set. They tried to arrange bushes and sand to make it look a little less like a swimming pool in Brooklyn and more like a lagoon in Africa. They moved spotlights and herded uncooperative monkeys who darted among the actors and spectators. One animal handler had a python coiled around his arm. The snake started to whip its tail against a parrot tethered to a perch. The parrot screeched, and other birds joined him in a shrill chorus. It was a chaotic scene that looked hopeless.

  I stayed on the fringes, careful not to knock anything over or get in the way.

  Tom Kelly stood not far from me with his shoulders drawn up and his hands clasped behind his back. The electric lights of Luna showed his strong handsome profile to great advantage, but no one was noticing. All eyes were on Margie and the activities at the pool.

  I sidled my way through the onlookers until I was standing next to him. “Hi, Tom,” I said. “How you doing?”

  He shrugged. Kelly didn’t look to be in a mood for conversation, so we watched the animals for a few minutes while I tried to think of the best approach to get him to talk.

  I decided to go for his ego. “I was wondering if you could give me some advice,” I said.

  He looked puzzled but interested. “About what?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m getting tired of sitting on a bench for John McGraw. I thought maybe I’d try doing moving pictures for a living. Like you did. Not that I could be a leading man like you, but I could probably do comedy.”

  Kelly laughed. “From what I saw in that movie with Florence Hampton, you’d be good at it.”

  “Hey, thanks.” I was sure he hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but I wanted to be agreeable.

  “The movies are pretty good,” said Kelly, nodding thoughtfully. “There’s nothing like seeing your name in lights. And the fans . . . they’re better than baseball fans. With baseball, it’s kids and men bothering you for autographs. When you’re in the movies, it’s the ladies that go after you.” He nudged me with his elbow and chuckled. “That’s real nice.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, with a guilty glance at Margie.

  “And another thing about the pictures,” he continued, “is you don’t have to worry about your arm going dead or losing your hitting eye. You can last for years as an actor. Hell, look at old Carlyle there. He’s been acting since the Civil War.”

  “You gave the game another go this winter, though, didn’t you?”

  “On the world tour, yeah. Daley didn’t take me along to play ball, but I got into a few of the games.”

  “Why did he want you?”

  “For publicity. See, he thought nobody would know baseball players in Asia and Europe and them places. But they’d know a famous movie actor like me.” Kelly drew himself up a little taller. “The pictures are big all over the world.”

  “So how’d you end up playing?”

  “Because McGraw kept losing his players. Mathewson and Doyle decided not to go at all. Fred Merkle stayed with the team until we got to San Francisco, then he left. You know, a cruise sounds like fun, but not many people really want to spend four months traipsing around the world. When The Empress of China set sail from Seattle, there weren’t enough players left to field two teams. So McGraw had to play me. Sonofabitch almost choked asking me to play for him again.”

  “How’d you like it?”

  Kelly smiled. “It felt good.” He paused as a far-off look glazed his eyes. “It felt really good.” After another moment he said, “You know how it feels when you hit the ball with the sweet spot of the bat?”

  I nodded.

  “Nothing like it, is there?”

  “Sure isn’t,” I agreed. “Except maybe snagging a line drive. A low line drive that you have to dive for. And it almost pops out of your glove when you hit the ground, but you hang on to it.”

  “Yeah, or stealing home! You ever steal home?”

  “Yup. My first year, I stole home on Christy Mathewson.”

  Kelly slapped my shoulder. “On Mathewson! That’s great! I love to see them college boys get shown up.” He chuckled, then said almost wistfully, “Yeah, it was good to play again.”

  We watched as Garvin had some black sheets stretched out to block some of the electric lights of Luna Park. Then he had a spotlight moved closer to the pool.

  “You think you might go back to baseball?” I asked Kelly. I was starting to think I might like him for a teammate.

  “Nah. Sometimes I think about it.... As much as I try, and as much fun as it is sometimes, I can’t really get the hang of being a movie star. It just ain’t a natural thing for a fellow to do. I might like to play again, but McGraw would never take me back.”

  “Maybe somebody else will.”

  “McGraw would ruin it for me. He’d bad mouth me.”

  “You know anybody he doesn’t bad mouth?”

  Kelly laughed. “Yeah, well. You know, on the way back from the world tour, I was thinking of maybe playing again. But then we come in to New York harbor and there’s Federal League agents scrambling to sign up the players that were on the tour—”

  “I remember that. The papers called it ‘The Battle of the Docks.’ ”

  “Just about was a battle. Some players had recruiters pulling on each arm—”

  I saw my opening. “Sounds like the way Sutherland and Ewing were fighting over Florence Hampton at the Sea Dip Hotel.”

  Kelly’s voice dropped. “Yeah, well, the point is that none of the Feds went after me. Hell, if the Feds don’t want me, nobody else will.”

  I pretended I didn’t hear. “Say, Tom, after that party, did you see which one of them ended up with her?”

  “The party,” Kelly repeated in a flat voice.

  “Yeah, I left early. I’m a beer man, myself—couldn’t stand that champagne they were serving. So I didn’t get to see how it ended up. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “They leave before you did or after?”

  Kelly gave me a cold stare and walked off. I had the feeling I still needed to work on my interrogation technique.

  Before I could determine if I’d learned anything useful from Tom Kelly, the action started for Margie’s scene.

  Garvin first had her fend off an attack by baboons. The gibbering animals didn’t appear particularly frightening. In fact, they were more interested in playing with each other than in attacking Margie. She used all of her acting ability to pretend that she was trying to escape from them.

  “Stop camera!” Garvin yelled. “Okay, that wasn’t bad. Now they chase you into the pool—the lagoon.” Even he wasn’t fooled by the makeshift set. “You dive in to get away from them. Start camera!”

  To the thorough disinterest of the baboons, Margie obediently dove into the pool with a loud splash.

  “We need more light to see her in the water,” the cameraman said.

  Garvin yelled, “Turn on the moonlight!” The big spotlight near the pool flashed on.

  “Still ain’t enough,” the cameraman complained.
“The other lights are interfering.”

  “Stop camera! Move the light closer.”

  “Can’t,” came the answer from a workman. “Cord ain’t long enough.”

  “Son of a bitch! Nothing works right around here.” To the cameraman, Garvin said, “Just do the best you can.” He began pacing along the side of the pool, his hands plunged in his pockets. “We gotta come up with something for her to do. She looks like she’s just swimming.” That’s exactly what Margie was doing, quietly treading water while Garvin tried to work out the next step of the action. He finally announced, “I got it! What we need is a crocodile. They got any crocodiles here?”

  A crocodile. Was he serious? I moved closer to the pool. I wanted to talk Margie out of taking such a risk.

  Then her face went suddenly dark, the “moonlight” gone. I turned my head to the spotlight. Its big bulb was swinging down toward the pool, right above Margie’s head.

  I blurted, “Watch out!” just before the lamp hit the water with a sizzle of steam and an explosion of glass.

  With one motion and zero thought, I slipped off my coat and went into a dive. Just before I hit the water, I remembered the spotlight was electric. “Go up like a Klieg light,” the workman at the Vitagraph studio had said.

  I hit the water, bracing myself for a jolt of electricity that didn’t come. I bobbed up for air, then dove under toward the spot where Margie had been. I groped around, grabbing hold of nothing but water. Then a piece of cloth, then a body inside the cloth. To my relief, the body fought back at me.

  We both came to the surface spitting water and gulping air. “You okay?” I gasped.

  “Think so,” Margie answered with a cough.

  “Grab hold,” a man’s voice said, and an arm came between us. Margie reached up and was lifted from the water. Looking up, I saw it was Tom Kelly pulling her out. He looked worried and asked if she was all right. I wasn’t sure if he was really concerned or if he was using the opportunity to soften her up for a future pass.

  “Somebody go down and get the goddamn light,” Garvin ordered.

  His first concern was for the spotlight instead of Margie? I was still in the water, so I dove under—not because I cared about the equipment but because I might have slugged Garvin if I’d gotten out of the pool at that minute.