Murder at Ebbets Field

by Troy Soos

  There certainly were some things about Margie Turner that I didn’t understand. Fortunately, I didn’t have to understand her to like her.

  We turned south on Third Avenue and were soon in her apartment. Inside, we quickly passed her adopted relatives in the parlor and almost sprinted past the kitchen with no thought of having coffee. That could wait until morning.

  I found the Century Theatre on West Forty-seventh Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. It was a burlesque house now, the kind that gives burlesque a bad name. In the harsh light of Thursday morning, it looked seedy and rundown.

  The marquee headliners were La Petite Aimee “from Gay Paree” and comic Izzy Pickle. Also advertised were Madame Fong’s Oriental Dancers and “a Bevy of Beautiful Chorines.”

  I was here on a long shot, a hunch. If it went nowhere, nothing was lost. But I had two reasons for hoping it would work out: one was to see if I could put Esther Kelly’s mind at ease, to make up for the worry we’d caused her; the other was a test to see how my luck was running. I knew I’d need a lot of it, since I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get much hard evidence against Florence Hampton’s murderer.

  No one was in the theater’s ticket booth and no amount of hammering on the front door could arouse a response.

  I went to the alley door and pounded away at it. From inside came a muffled yell, “I’m comin’, I’m comin’, dammit!”

  The door popped open with a squeak and a scrape. The man in the doorway was old and gaunt, with drooping skin that hung loose from his throat. “What you want?” he asked in a hoarse voice. “We don’t open till two.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “My name’s Mickey Rawlings. I play for the Giants . . . baseball . . .”

  “So?”

  Okay, he’s not a baseball fan. “I’m a friend of Esther Kelly.”

  “Who?”

  “Esther Kelly, the actress. She used to be Esther Nielson.”

  His face warmed up. “Esther,” he repeated with a smile. “You a friend of hers?”

  I just said I was. Wasn’t he listening? “Yes, I am. She told me she used to act here. A long time ago. I was wondering if I could take a look around.”

  “Yeah, sure, what the hell. Come on in.”

  He let me in, and I followed him through the back stage. I noticed he had a pronounced limp—an encouraging sign.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

  “Frank Roche.” He offered his hand. “There ain’t much to see. It ain’t like when Miss Esther performed here. No more real acting at all. Goddamn hootchie-kootchie dancers and shimmy-shakers is all we got now. Almost as bad as the houses in Union Square.”

  “You the owner?”

  “Hell no. I’d show plays if I owned this dump. Nah, I’m just the stage manager. Now I’ll show you what this place used to be like.”

  He led me to a small office, its walls covered with more photographs than hung in Margie’s parlor. Taking a scrapbook from a desk drawer, he laid it open and said, “This is what it was like when Miss Esther was performing. Here’s the first show.” He pointed at a cast photo. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was lettered in white paint at the top of the photo. “There she is,” he said. “Little Eva.” Esther Kelly was easily recognizable, looking not much different from the way she did now.

  In the bottom right corner of the picture, the white paint said 1876. That’s . . . thirty-eight years ago. If Esther Kelly was six when she appeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she must be in her mid-40’s now, at least ten years older than I would have guessed.

  “Is this date right?” I asked.

  “Sure is. That’s what gave the theater its name. The U. S. of A. was a century old that year.”

  “Do you ever see her anymore?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer for a minute. “She comes around sometimes.”

  “Like she did a month ago?”

  “Yeah. She gets a little . . . well, lost sometimes. And she comes by. This is no kind of place for a lady like her. So I take her home.”

  I thanked him for his time and left.

  My hunch had paid off. I hoped I still had enough luck left to snare Florence Hampton’s killer. If luck was a bat, I’d just used up a hit.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I didn’t want to go west. Not now.

  Even though it would be a relief to get out of the line of fire, away from attempts to poison me or bash in my skull, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in the city until the murder of Florence Hampton was resolved. I was so close to wrapping it up. All I needed was proof.

  It was Saturday morning, eight-thirty, and I had an hour to get to Grand Central Station for the start of the road trip to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. We would be away from New York for two weeks . . . two weeks away from Margie.

  I tried to call her at the studio, to hear her voice again before I left. She was tied up and couldn’t be bothered. The kind of scenes she did, “tied up” could be literal.

  Then I called Karl Landfors at the Press. He was starting to be a good second choice when Margie wasn’t available. Landfors wasn’t tied up, and I got through.

  “You see the Public Examiner today?” he asked.

  A rock blossomed in my stomach. “No.” In fact, I’d made a point of not looking at that paper anymore.

  “Interesting headline,” Landfors said wryly. “What Does He Have Against the Dodgers? it says.”

  “Is the ‘he’ me?”

  “Yes, indeed. Another article by William Murray. Appears he found out that you were with the Dodger batboy in a pool hall ‘where you went to stir up trouble just before he was killed.’ ”

  “That was a week before he was killed!”

  “That’s not the way the story reads. Anyway, he makes an interesting connection. He ‘reminds’ people that you’re a suspect in Florence Hampton’s death and that she owned part of the Dodgers. Then he suggests you killed the batboy. And finally he predicts you’re going to kill a player if you’re not stopped. Says it’s because you can’t beat them on the field.”

  “I’m going to kill Murray if he isn’t stopped!”

  “Calm down. Nobody takes him seriously. None of the mainstream papers have picked up on this. By the way, he says Casey Stengel is your next target.”

  Jeez. What a load—

  “Actually,” Landfors said, “you won’t have to worry about him much longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “When my sister’s murderer is caught, he can’t continue to call you a suspect.”

  How did Landfors know I was on to the killer? “Uh ... what do you mean?”

  “Let’s just say that you don’t need to do any more investigating.”

  “You mean you know—”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Who was it?” I wanted to know if we’d come to the same conclusion.

  “I’d prefer not to say yet. Not until I have proof.”

  “Tell me. We can put the information we have together.”

  He paused. “No,” he decided. “I’m planning to take care of it myself.”

  Fine. You don’t tell me your murderer, I won’t tell you mine.

  We were at an impasse, so after a little more fruitless back and forth we hung up.

  Then I wondered what he meant about planning to take care of it himself. If he tried something stupid . . .

  Now it wasn’t just Margie that I wanted to stay in town for. I wanted to get Florence Hampton’s killer behind bars before Landfors got himself in trouble.

  Those quiet, harmless-looking guys. They’re the ones you have to watch out for. When they get riled, they can really go berserk.

  That night, as we rattled west through Pennsylvania, I struggled my way into the upper berth of a Pullman sleeper. I fidgeted in the bunk, simmering in the heat and absorbing the aromas of its previous occupants. Pullman beds were notorious, apparently designed for maximum discomfort. Now it seemed worse than usual, as I thoug
ht about having Margie next to me. I never felt so alone as I did lying sleepless in the sleeper car.

  Eventually, I began to imagine the curtain-shrouded berth as a cocoon, where I was shielded from the outside world. I used the isolation to gather my thoughts on the Hampton investigation, organizing them where they fit together and mentally cataloging the missing pieces I had yet to fill in.

  I already was two for four: I knew who killed Florence Hampton and who poisoned the champagne I drank.

  Then there were two murders I wasn’t so sure about: William Daley’s and Larry Harron’s. I wasn’t sure in my head, anyway, although my gut was certain. I had to work backward with those deaths; instead of establishing means, motive, and opportunity to identify the killer, I had to start by knowing who the killer was and then trying to figure out how and why.

  And there were those “accidents”—the spotlight that almost killed Margie in the pool and the bottle that smashed over my head. The spotlight had had a string tied to its leg. I knew that was no accident. And I wasn’t sure about the switched bottles being a mistake. What bothered me about these incidents was the change in method. Although Karl Landfors said a murderer might change tactics if he was desperate. Maybe the killer knew I was getting close.

  So I continued to think.

  By the time the train arrived in Pittsburgh, the only conclusion I’d come to was that lying alone in a Pullman berth was torture compared to being in a bed in Brooklyn with Margie curled up next to me.

  Monday was Labor Day. For many, it signaled the end of summer, and men would soon be discarding their straw hats. The tradition was to buy a new boater every Memorial Day and destroy it after Labor Day. I measured summer differently and had my own tradition: I put on a new hat when the opening game of the baseball season was played and continued to wear it until the last out of the World Series. Except for the ones I left floating in the Luna Park swimming pool and covering the pale dead face of Florence Hampton.

  On this day, however, I wasn’t thinking of death. My thoughts were solely on baseball as I sat in the visitors’ dugout of Forbes Field, the only ballpark in America named after a British general. We were playing a holiday doubleheader against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

  My teammates were anyway. Determined to keep pace with the Braves, John McGraw decided he would play only the regulars, no utility players, and was limiting the pitching rotation to three men: Mathewson, Tesreau, and Marquard. I was a spectator. And, though I would never admit it to McGraw, that was okay.

  I got to sit back and watch Honus Wagner, the old Flying Dutchman, play baseball. For two games, eighteen innings, the forty-year-old Wagner put on an exhibition of how the game should be played—slashing line drive hits, stealing bases, snaring everything hit to him at shortstop. I never could understand how a man so awkward looking, so bowlegged and ham-fisted, could play the game’s most elegant position so superbly. But those bowlegs carried the Dutchman around the bases with the same dash and brilliance as Ty Cobb. And those huge hands of his would shovel up any grounder hit to the left side of the infield; he’d scoop up about a bucketful of dirt with the ball and throw most of it along toward first, but he’d nail the runner. And through it all, he had as much fun as a kid playing a sandlot game. His rough homely face—much like Casey Stengel’s, only more so—was lit up with the sheer joy of playing.

  With Honus Wagner leading the Pirates’ attack, Pittsburgh swept both games. We took no consolation from the fact that the man who beat us was the player McGraw himself rated as the best in baseball history. The Boston Braves had won both ends of a doubleheader at home. Their first-place lead was now three games.

  At the hotel, I tried telephoning Margie again. Again she was busy at the studio. We didn’t connect until later that night when I reached her at home. “How are things at the studio?” I asked her, though I didn’t care about the studio.

  “Crazy. I think Mr. Garvin has lost his mind.”

  “Why? What’s he doing?”

  “It’s what he’s not doing. You remember he couldn’t do anything with the scenes we shot at Coney Island?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “It’s the same with the pie-throwing movie. He just doesn’t know how to do longer pictures. So you know what he’s going to do now?”

  “Uh-uh. What?”

  “He’s actually going to let Mr. Carlyle film his Hamlet movie. Shows how desperate Mr. Garvin is. Well, it’s sweet in a way, I suppose. Mr. Carlyle’s a ham, but he’s like a little kid having his dream come true. So, that’s a long answer, but the studio’s been crazy. How are you?”

  “Oh, okay. I’m not playing, we’re losing, and . . . and I miss you.” What was in my head just slipped right out of my mouth.

  After a second, she said softly, “I miss you, too.”

  Then we were quiet. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want to get mushier and I couldn’t go back to small talk. So I promised to call again soon.

  The road trip went on. One more game in Pittsburgh, which we won, then to Cincinnati, where the last place team swept us. The Braves had a five and a half game lead over us, and we knew it was almost over.

  I continued to miss Margie, despite calling her every other day. And I fretted over what Karl Landfors might be up to.

  There was one advantage to being away from New York: with no chance to question people or get evidence, I made the most out of reviewing every bit of information I already had. The picture slowly became clearer to me, and my mind continued to work over the crimes, trying to answer the questions that remained.

  After dropping three out of four games to the Cubs, the team gathered at the Illinois Central station on Randolph Street. We waited on the platform for the train that would take us to St. Louis, our last stop. I sat on my suitcase, feeling grateful that it was a short enough trip that we didn’t need a Pullman train.

  And one more piece of the puzzle slipped neatly into place.

  When we arrived in St. Louis, I made two phone calls and had just about all of it figured out.

  It was three days before we’d be back in New York, and I was worried about Landfors. I tried calling him at the Press to see what he was up to. I decided that if he sounded close to doing something reckless, I’d tell him all I knew.

  He wasn’t there. A secretary at the paper told me he hadn’t been in for a week. What was that guy up to?

  Landfors was forcing me to act. I wasn’t going to get much more evidence. Could I get the killer to confess? Set a trap maybe? I’d have to try.

  I called Margie. This time she was second choice for a phone call. She gave me the daily news: Arthur Carlyle’s Hamlet was starting production, the Brooklyn Tip-Tops were on a six-game winning streak, and she wished I’d be back soon.

  What I told Margie was far less routine. I didn’t tell her everything but enough for now.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I danced off second base, taking a long lead as Sloppy Sutherland went into his stretch. He spun, threw to the shortstop who snuck in behind me, and I dove headfirst back to the bag, my hand barely reaching it before the swiping tag came down on my wrist.

  “Safe!” called the base ump.

  Twenty thousand Dodger fans hooted in disagreement.

  I called time, and stood up to brush myself off. The crowd continued booing and yelling. They packed Ebbets Field this Saturday morning to see the Dodgers eliminate us from the pennant race. There was no question that the Braves would win it. They had a nine game lead with only nine games left to play, and the Brooklyn fans wanted the death blow dealt to us in Flatbush.

  As I stood on the bag, I was suddenly sent back to another Saturday less than two months ago. August first. Just like today, the Giants’ Christy Mathewson facing Sloppy Sutherland before the screaming patrons of Ebbets Field. But then there had been Florence Hampton seated in a box seat, waving her handkerchief, cheering her Dodger team. Now she was dead. And the hunchbacked Brooklyn batboy was gone from the scene, too. A
lso dead.

  No! My mind was drifting off the game. This had never happened to me before; between the foul lines, I never thought of anything but the game in progress.

  “Time!” I called.

  “You already got time,” the umpire growled. “What’s your problem?”

  “Uh, twisted ankle. Let me walk it off.”

  “Go ’head,” he grudgingly agreed.

  To the loudening hoots of the crowd, I walked on the outfield grass, trying to clear my head. Okay, two outs, top of the ninth, tie game, and who the hell ransacked my apartment while we were out of town—no, worry about that later. Should I be pretending to limp? Did I tell the ump which ankle was twisted? Tomorrow, it will all be over. Florence Hampton’s killer will be in jail. Baseball, baseball, dammit! Get your mind on the game . . .

  “C’mon. Let’s get this show on the road!” Bill Klem bellowed from behind the plate. I went back to the base.

  The show. After the game, I’d be off to the Vitagraph studio, seeing Margie for the first time since the road trip.... You’re going to get picked off, if you don’t get your head straight.

  I took only a two-step lead off the bag, almost frozen, trapped between memories of the past and plans for the future, barely aware of what was happening now.

  On Sutherland’s next pitch, Fred Merkle hit a shallow loop single to right field. The sound of wood on horsehide exorcised all nonbaseball thoughts from my brain and sent me racing for third. I didn’t think it was hit long enough for me to score, but McGraw windmilled his arms sending me home. It was risky, but the strategy was right: play for a win on the road, a tie at home. I took a sharp turn at third, so hard that I almost skidded into the waving McGraw.

  The final sprint home, and I saw Casey Stengel’s throw coming into the plate. All the way on the fly, no cut-off. I was going to be out.

  The throw was just off the mark, on the first base side of the plate, and Virgil Ewing had to move up the line to field it. I went into a wide hook slide away from him, as he swept across with the tag. And he missed me!