by Troy Soos
“Ah. Well, that was nice of her,” Landfors said.
“Anyway, I thought you might want to see it. Carlyle’s death is probably the closest thing to justice that’s ever going to come out of all this.”
He stared down at the cans, expressionless.
“The way the police figure,” I went on, “is Carlyle took the strychnine to make the scene look more dramatic. They don’t know he also did it to avoid being arrested.”
Landfors abruptly asked, “Didn’t you wonder why Vitagraph suddenly decided to film Hamlet?”
“No, not really. They filmed all kinds of things.”
“They have two studios at Vitagraph: one for dramas and one for comedies. Didn’t it strike you as strange that Studio B, the comedy studio, was filming Hamlet?”
Until yesterday, I didn’t know that Hamlet wasn’t a comedy. “No.”
“I arranged it.”
“You did?”
With a grunt of exertion, Landfors lifted a massive red scrapbook from a shelf above his desk. “Like most show people, Libby kept a record of everything she did in her career. And it’s all here—playbills, photographs, newspaper clippings ...” He laid the leather-bound book open on the desk and slowly started turning the pages. “I couldn’t bring myself to look through it until a couple of weeks ago.” Stopping at a spot where two pages were sealed together, he slipped a forefinger between them. “In here I found a playbill and a news article. The interesting thing is that they weren’t about her. They were about Arthur Carlyle. The program was from the play he was in during the world baseball tour, and the clipping was about him leaving the show early. Libby must have had some suspicions about Carlyle—”
“And if Carlyle caught on that she suspected him, that was his motive to kill her,” I finished.
Landfors nodded. “Exactly.”
“But why would you arrange to have his Hamlet movie made? What would that accomplish . . . except giving him what he wanted all along?”
“It was going to be released as a comedy. I was to write comic title cards for the picture. Carlyle would have been humiliated.”
“All you wanted to do was embarrass him? What the hell kind of revenge is that?”
“Well, this isn’t proof of anything. See, I thought I could get Carlyle to break down. That movie was his dream, his shot at immortality; it’s what he lived for . . . and what he killed for. I thought that if he saw his dream shattered, that it was all over for him, perhaps he would give it up, tell us what happened to William Daley and how he did it.”
This was a plan? Landfors had better never again make fun of any of my ideas.
“I know how he did it,” I said. It was while waiting for the train in Chicago that I realized the world baseball tour wasn’t a continuous trip. They’d left on The Empress of China and returned on the Lusitania. A couple of phone calls to Boston gave me the schedules of the shipping lines. I explained to Landfors, “Carlyle left the play in Somerville just in time to catch a ship to Liverpool. When he got there, he turned right around and came back on the Lusitania as a crew member. And he served Daley a poisoned dinner.”
Landfors began tapping one of the cans of film. “So he thought this was going to make him immortal, huh?” He stood and twisted open the cannister. “No, I don’t think I need to see it.” With that, he dumped the roll of celluloid into the fire. As the film burned, shriveling and melting in the heat, he added the negative to the blaze.
“I found something else my sister saved,” Landfors said as the fire died down. “Letters from William Murray. He wrote them back when he was a theater critic. Appears he was quite infatuated with Libby, and he offered to give her favorable reviews if she returned his affection. She must have declined because his later reviews of her were vicious.” He handed me a bundle of letters tied together with a ribbon. “I thought I would pass these on to one of the Public Examiner’s rival scandal sheets. The only thing they enjoy more than smearing public figures is attacking their competition. It should get Murray off your back.”
I couldn’t see any reason to have Florence Hampton’s name appear in yet another scandal sheet. She’d gone through enough. I tossed the bundle in the fire and the flames burned brightly for a few more minutes.
Karl and I stood and watched until the embers no longer glowed.
A month later, the World Series was over; the Miracle Boston Braves swept the Philadelphia Athletics in four games. Another season gone, another Fall Classic that I could follow only from the newspaper accounts.
Karl Landfors was in France. Just after I’d left his apartment, a porter picked up his steamer trunk, and Landfors took off for Europe to cover the war. He told me he thought it would take longer than most people were saying, years maybe. And he predicted the United States would eventually get involved in the conflict.
Marguerite Turner was gone, too. Gone from Vitagraph and from New York, on a train to California to make pictures with D. W. Griffith. She left with the promise to come back when the moving picture craze was over. Deep down, I didn’t expect to see her again.
Before Margie left, she talked to Esther Kelly, to explain about the Century Theatre and reassure her about the memory lapses. I talked to her husband Tom and gave him Peter Kurtz’s business card in case he wanted to give baseball another try.
With Landfors in Europe, Margie in California, and no baseball to play, I was at a loss to find something to occupy me. I thought of asking Casey Stengel to tell me a story—I figured one of his yarns could go on for months—but he was on an exhibition trip to Cuba with the rest of the Dodgers team.
I was facing a long winter alone.
In November, the Federal League announced that Sloppy Sutherland and Virgil Ewing had signed with the Brooklyn Tip-Tops for 1915. Billy Claypool, true to his word, sent me the contract I’d signed for me to destroy. The next month, I read that Tom Kelly had signed with the Feds to manage and play for their Buffalo franchise.
As the weeks went on, I followed Karl Landfors’s battle reports in the New York Press and hoped he would come back soon and in one piece. I read in the movie magazines about Margie Turner’s upcoming films with D. W. Griffith and wished she would return in any condition at all.
It seemed all I was doing was reading about people I could no longer see in person. Reading wasn’t the thing for me. What I needed was the feel of the horsehide in my hand, not the smudge of news ink on my fingers.
My spirits didn’t pick up until I received a contract from John McGraw to play with the New York Giants for the 1915 season. I realized I did have things to look forward to. After winter would come spring—spring training.
Then opening day in April. New grass on the infield soft and green, bunting-draped bleachers filled with cheering fans, the crack of the bat, and the feel of a leather mitt on my hand . . .
There would be the rebirth that comes with spring. All teams would be even in the standings, each with an equal shot at the pennant. All players would start the season with the same batting average. Never mind .250, I could end up hitting .400!
And at the end of season, maybe I’d be in the World Series.
I would just have to wait till next year.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 1995 by Troy Soos
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-8740-3
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