Murder at Ebbets Field

by Troy Soos

  I found the lamp and grabbed one of its legs but couldn’t pull it up. Then I felt something, a piece of string tied around it, with a couple of inches dangling loose. I tugged off the string, then left the spotlight at the bottom of the pool and bobbed to the surface. I heard Elmer Garvin order the dark sheets taken down, and the area was again brightly illuminated by the lights of the park.

  “Gimme your hand, Mickey.” It was Tom Kelly again. He pulled me out of the water, and with a soft slap on my back pushed me next to Margie. He then walked away, leaving us alone.

  Margie was shivering. Her wet thin clothes clung to her like a second skin, revealing every goose bump on the real skin underneath. No one brought her a blanket, no one came to ask her if she was hurt or needed help. Florence Hampton would have; I almost looked for her, though I knew she would never come.

  I moved next to Margie and she fell into my arms.

  “Are you cold?” I asked, stroking her gently.

  “No,” she answered through chattering teeth. Her shivering was from fear, not cold. I left her for a moment anyway to pick up my jacket from the ground. My boater was floating in the pool, and I decided to leave it there.

  As I put my jacket around Margie’s shoulders, Elmer Garvin was talking with a member of the crew about what happened. The workman was explaining that when the light fell over it pulled the cord out of the socket before hitting the water. Garvin was complaining about the baboons who must have tipped it over.

  “The light didn’t hit you?” I quietly asked Margie.

  “I dove under . . . when I saw it falling . . . it hit me on the shoulder but not hard. I’m okay.”

  Elmer Garvin finally came over to check on his star. “You hurt?” he asked.

  “No.” Even if she had been, I don’t expect Margie would have admitted it. Just like a ballplayer, I thought.

  “You want to try another shot?” Garvin asked.

  I felt her flinch. Before Margie could answer him, I spoke up. “No more tonight. I’m taking her home.”

  Garvin exhaled an exaggerated sigh. Then he said, “Yeah, okay, might as well. This ain’t working nohow.” He grudgingly offered to have somebody drive us.

  I turned him down and said we’d take a cab.

  Just before we left, Garvin observed, “You two sure don’t have much luck around here, do you?”

  Luck had nothing to do with it. Those monkeys didn’t tie the string to the light stand.

  The cab ride was wordless as we sat next to each other, the summer night slowly drying some of the water from our clothing.

  And it was wordless when we got to her apartment, and Margie took my hand and led me through her parlor and into her dark bedroom.

  Our moist clothes were peeled off, slowly, as I fumbled with hers and she with mine. We dropped them on the floor where we stood, then embraced and fell together into bed.

  Our bodies were still damp from the pool, and at first we stuck together wherever we touched.

  Our combined body heat quickly dried us.

  Then we were wet again, with sweat.

  Afterward, we lay closely together, so close we were almost occupying the exact same space. Margie’s head was cradled in my right arm and our legs were intertwined. I mapped out her body with mine, memorizing the feel of every feature that pressed against me. I wondered exactly how this had happened and was very glad that it had.

  My arm started to tingle, falling asleep under the pressure of her head, but I didn’t want to move it. This felt so warm, so close, so good. I didn’t ever want to move from this position.

  The warm breaths that wafted on my neck became louder and more evenly spaced. She was asleep. And my arm was getting numb. I tried to flex my fingers but could barely feel them. If I moved my arm out from under her, I’d wake her. So I decided to remain still, even if it cost me my right arm. I’d just have to learn to throw lefty.

  Then a new feeling took hold of my body: hunger. My stomach felt hungrier than it ever had before. I started to picture food. My mouth started to water and my stomach rumble. I began to hope it would growl loud enough to wake Margie. Then I could pull my arm out, and go see what was in her ice box.

  I tried to fall asleep, but my stomach was raging inside. I had to get to the kitchen.

  Margie moaned in her sleep and suddenly shifted her body. I tried to take advantage of the shift by disentangling myself from her. She moaned again, and this time it wasn’t a sleepy sound. She nibbled my neck, then smoothly swung a leg over my waist. I think she misinterpreted my movements.

  That’s okay. My stomach could wait until breakfast. And it was going to have to be a really big breakfast.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Icranked the handle of the new Victrola that now graced my parlor. As the heavy record disk began to spin, I lowered the bamboo needle until it caught a groove. The rippling piano of Eubie Blake’s “Fizz Water” started to sound, traveling from the vibrating needle through some hollow brass tubing and out the sound hole in the front of the walnut cabinet.

  On the way home from the Polo Grounds, I’d stopped at a music store and bought the best talking machine they had, as well as half a dozen records and several packages of needles. The bamboo needles were something of an extravagance since they lasted for only one play, but they gave a softer sound than steel and didn’t chew up the records. And I was in an extravagant mood.

  It was Saturday afternoon after the Giants game and a couple of hours before I was to meet Margie at Vitagraph’s weekly party. The festivities were to be on Coney Island again, this time at Stauch’s Dance Hall next to Steeplechase Park. Margie and I had decided that we should be there, if only to show that the “accidents” we’d had weren’t going to scare us away.

  I’d told Margie about the string that was tied to the spotlight. There was no doubt now that she was a target, too. I wanted her to be careful, so I also told her that I suspected the champagne that had made me sick had been poisoned. She took it all pretty well, and we agreed not to let on that we knew someone was trying to kill us. So tonight we would dance, a show of defiance at whoever was trying to harm us.

  I started to sway to the rhythm of Blake’s syncopated music. Then I began moving my feet and brought my hands up as if holding an invisible girl. I danced in front of the Victrola, imagining Margie and me as the next Vernon and Irene Castle.

  In the middle of the next record, the phone rang. I closed the cabinet doors to lower the volume of the music and picked up the receiver.

  “Mickey Rawlings?” The Southern drawl was vaguely familiar.

  “Yes?”

  “This here’s Billy Claypool.”

  “Who?”

  “Billy. Virg Ewing’s friend. You told me to call you if I seen Virg with Sloppy Sutherland.”

  “Yes, of course.” Actually, I’d almost forgotten about him. “What’s up?”

  “The two of ’em just went into a bar together. You think Virg might be in trouble?”

  “They look like they’re fighting or arguing?”

  “Nah, they look like they’re best buddies. I don’t know what’s going on. I never seen the two of ’em like that.”

  This I had to see. “Where are they?”

  “Nappy’s. It’s a little place near the Navy Yard.” He quickly gave me directions.

  “Wait for me. I’ll meet you outside.”

  We hung up and I rang the Vitagraph studio. Margie wasn’t available, so I asked Joe Gannon the guard to tell her that I’d probably be late to the party.

  The ornate spires of Wallabout Market’s administration building dominated the evening sky near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The structure looked more like a cathedral than an office building, and one that would have been more appropriately situated in Paris than on the Brooklyn waterfront.

  Nappy’s, on the other hand, would have been a blight on any neighborhood. The tavern, just off Washington Avenue, was a dilapidated one-story shack that looked like a Western saloon in a Bronc
o Billy Anderson movie. Its clapboards were bare of paint, the only color on them provided by streaks of rust from a corrugated tin roof.

  Billy was standing outside the door, his brawny arms folded across his chest. He gave a nod when I approached him.

  “They still inside?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  I rubbed the grime from a window pane near the front door and looked through. Virgil Ewing and Sloppy Sutherland were hunched over a small table. With them was Peter Kurtz, agent for the Federal League.

  So that’s what they were up to.

  “What you want to do?” Billy asked.

  “Let’s go in and say hello.”

  Billy opened the front door and let me enter first. My foot struck an overflowing spittoon, and its fermenting contents splashed onto my shoe. The smoke that hovered in the air wasn’t nearly strong enough to mask the room’s more nauseating stenches. Foul as it was, this was a perfect place to meet somebody without being noticed. It was the sort of joint where no one looked at anyone else—looking at someone the wrong way here would probably end up in a knife fight. The sailors and longshoremen who made up most of the clientele stared down at their whiskeys with total absorption. There was no music and not much conversation.

  We weren’t noticed until I pulled a chair up and sat down between Kurtz and Ewing at their table.

  “What the hell you doing here?” Ewing demanded.

  “I asked him to come,” Billy answered from a standing position behind me.

  Ewing looked up at Billy, clearly puzzled, but he said nothing.

  Nor did Sloppy Sutherland, who eyed the door as if he urgently wanted to dash out of it.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mickey Rawlings,” Kurtz said. “Still think you’re gonna be playing in the World Series?”

  “This must be some catch for you,” I said, ignoring his question. “Sloppy Sutherland and Virgil Ewing jumping to the Feds together.”

  “Don’t say nothing,” Ewing warned.

  Kurtz spread his hands. “I don’t see there’s any reason to talk to you about this. If there was a negotiation in progress, you could do us some serious harm.” He added with a humorless smile, “Come to think of it, maybe we should make sure you don’t get a chance to talk at all ... ever.”

  “Don’t talk crazy,” Sutherland hissed. He didn’t care about his diction now.

  “Crazy?” Ewing said. “You’re not the one the owners tried to kill.”

  “What owners?” I asked.

  “The owners. ” Ewing’s speech slowed down to the pace of a change-up. “Charlie Ebbets maybe, I dunno. I figure somebody give them the idea I was talking to the Feds about jumping, so they tried to poison me.”

  “The tobacco in your locker,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That is crazy,” I said. “If they kill you, you can’t play for anybody.”

  “Yeah,” said Ewing. “But it’s a warning to anybody else who might be thinking of jumping.”

  “Don’t talk to this guy,” Kurtz said.

  Ignoring Kurtz, I asked Ewing, “What’s really going on with you and Sloppy, anyway?” I turned to Sutherland. “Or is it ‘Walter’ in here?”

  Sutherland dropped his eyes. He’d probably rather have Charlie Ebbets know he was talking to the Feds than have his high-society friends know he was in a dive like Nappy’s.

  “My guess,” I went on, “is that feud you guys have going is to keep people from thinking you might be making a deal together. Is that it?”

  Ewing downed the rest of the whiskey in his glass. Sutherland coughed. Kurtz cracked his knuckles.

  “Look,” I said. “I already know enough to get you in trouble if I wanted to.”

  Kurtz growled, “Yeah, like I said, we should take care of that. Take you out back and do some damage to your memory.”

  “No you won’t,” Billy said firmly.

  Kurtz looked up at him, then shrugged and called to the bartender, “Gimme another Brooklyn!”

  “Tell you what,” I said to Ewing and Sutherland. “Maybe we can make a deal and protect each other. If I can guarantee that I won’t tell anybody about you jumping to the Feds, you tell me everything that’s been going on.”

  Nobody said yes, but nobody said no.

  “You got a piece of paper?” I asked Kurtz.

  He ignored me.

  “You got a contract?” I said. “I’ll sign a contract to play with the Feds. That should solve it.”

  “You for real?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You’re finally getting smart.” Kurtz pulled a folded paper from his jacket pocket. I wondered how many scorecards and contracts he kept in there.

  He laid the blank contract on the table and pulled out a pen. He then filled in $3,000 on the salary line.

  “You offered four thousand before,” I said.

  “That was before,” he explained. “This is now.”

  I took the contract and pen anyway, and signed my name at the bottom. Smirking, Kurtz reached over to take the paper back. I handed it to Billy instead.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. “Billy holds onto this. If I tell on you guys, he gives the contract to Kurtz and I play for the Feds. If I don’t tell, he tears it up. I trust him to do that. Anybody doesn’t trust him?”

  Ewing gave in first. “Okay. You’re right. The feud is just to keep people from finding out that we’re partners in this deal with the Feds.”

  “What about the rivalry over Florence Hampton? Which one of you was really seeing her?”

  Sutherland and Ewing stared at each other. Sutherland finally said glumly, “It wasn’t me.”

  “It wasn’t me neither,” Ewing admitted.

  Sutherland elaborated, “I thought he was seeing her, and he thought I was. We didn’t find out until after she was dead that she was just leading us both on.” He began running a fingertip around the rim of his empty shot glass. “The whole thing started after we got back from the world tour. At first, I thought she was really interested me. But all she wanted to talk about was her dead husband. She asked a million questions about what he did on the tour—who he saw, where he went. Daley died on the ship coming back, you know.”

  I nodded.

  Ewing piped up, “It was the same with me. She kept asking me questions about the tour, too. It bugged the hell out of me. The papers were printing all these stories about her fooling around with the players, and I thought I was the only one not getting anywhere with her.”

  Sutherland said, “Anyway, it just developed that people thought Virg and I were competing with each other for her. It was Kurtz here who said it would be useful to let people think that.”

  Peter Kurtz nodded and explained, “Nobody would suspect they’re in a deal together if they’re fighting over some dame.”

  “After the party at the Sea Dip, the night Florence Hampton died, where did you guys go?” I asked.

  Sutherland sighed. “Right here, at this very table.”

  Ewing nodded. “Yeah.”

  The bartender came to the table and filled Kurtz’s glass with dark rum, omitting the lime and grenadine that usually went into a Brooklyn. He asked me, “You drinking or just talking?”

  “Leaving,” I answered. I’d heard everything I needed to know.

  “Well I’m drinking,” Ewing said. “Get me another bourbon and a beer to chase it.”

  Sutherland said in a soft voice, “The thing is, I got to really liking Florence Hampton. She was a classy lady. I wish there had been something between us.” Then he said to the bartender, “Get me a bourbon, too. A double.”

  I rose and gave my seat to Billy. He promised me he’d keep the contract safe, and I believed him.

  On the way home, I hashed over what must have happened, trying to think from Florence Hampton’s point of view.

  She was talking to players who had been on the world baseball tour, investigating her husband’s death. Then rumors about her having affairs with ballpl
ayers start to circulate. She lets them go unanswered, maybe even fosters them, so that nobody will catch on to what she’s really doing. Finding out what happened to her husband was more important to her than her reputation.

  Sutherland and Ewing also let the rumors propagate and their supposed rivalry be publicized so that nobody suspects they’re really in joint negotiation with the Federal League.

  As far as I could tell, there was no reason for either of them to have killed Florence Hampton. And now they did have an alibi for the night she died.

  This case was a strange one—false names, nonexistent politicians, affairs that never happened. If only Florence Hampton’s death hadn’t really happened either. But I’d seen her body, cold and bloated and blue.

  Not until I was back in Manhattan did I realize I’d forgotten about the Vitagraph party.

  I went to bed, certain that Margie was not going to be happy with me.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I was right. She wasn’t happy. Maybe I was getting better at predicting what a woman would think.

  I phoned Margie at six-thirty the next morning, thinking the sooner I called, the less angry she would be. Launching into my apology, I said, “I’m sorry about missing the party. I called the studio. Did you get the message?”

  “I got a message that you’d be late, not that you wouldn’t be coming.” She sounded sleepy and grumpy.

  “Things happened, and I couldn’t come. I’m really sorry.”

  “Well . . . okay,” she murmured. I was amazed at the way she could tack on the warning “don’t let it happen again” without uttering the words.

  To show her that I hadn’t missed the party for a trivial reason, I told her the full story of my encounter with Virgil Ewing and Sloppy Sutherland. “They both denied meeting with Florence Hampton after the party,” I concluded. “She wasn’t having an affair with either of them.”

  “And you believed them?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But the way they fought over her . . . it seemed so real. If they were just acting, they’re better actors than anybody at Vitagraph.”