The Cincinnati Red Stalkings

by Troy Soos

“I’m not reading. I’m looking.”

  “For what?”

  “Not sure ...” I’d been trying to imagine what the man who killed Ollie Perriman could possibly have been after. “It seems to me like the thief was looking for something specific, not just something he could fence for a few bucks. And from what I saw, it didn’t appear that much, if anything, had been taken. So ... I got to wondering: what if he was after something Perriman had given me? What if it’s here?”

  “Oh!” Margie sat up a little straighter and her eyes opened a notch wider. “But that’s just a pile of ... What could be valuable in there?”

  “I can’t imagine.” These things were interesting to me, and they were rich with memories and history, but were they valuable in the sense of being worth stealing—worth killing somebody over? “But I want to see.”

  “And if you find something?”

  “I’ll turn it over to the police. Maybe they can figure out who would have wanted it badly enough to kill for.”

  “Good. Let the police handle it.” Margie relaxed a bit.

  “You know ... it could be that the robber did find what he was looking for in the office. Maybe it just wasn’t one of the things you thought were valuable. Never know what’s important to someone else.”

  “You could be right.”

  “Good. Coming to bed then?”

  “No, I’m going to go through the rest of this stuff.”

  Margie began to point out how stubborn I was, then she emitted a yawn that could have sounded the way for a barge on the Ohio River. “Well, I have to go to the zoo tomorrow to talk to Mr. Stephan about that job. I’m going back to sleep.” She pulled herself up from the sofa and stretched. When she finished, her kimono was partly open.

  I had a brief notion to put off going through the rest of the items until morning. No, it would nag at me all night. As Margie started for the staircase, I reached for the Baseball Magazine.

  She paused on the second step. “You’re not going to get involved in this, right?”

  “No, I promise.”

  Detective Forsch stubbed out his cigarette, adding the butt to an already full ashtray. “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Rawlings.”

  “Glad to,” I said, although I really wasn’t. I’d finally gone to bed shortly before dawn, having found nothing of value in the materials Ollie Perriman had given me. A few hours later, I was awakened by Forsch’s phone call. He asked me to meet with him at police headquarters, and since I could think of no way to refuse, I was soon on a streetcar headed downtown.

  City hall, a towering stone block structure that took up the entire block of Plum Street from Eighth to Ninth, looked more like a cathedral than a municipal building. There were even stained-glass windows depicting scenes of early Cincinnati. Inside, stunning murals covered the lobby walls, and the flooring was of decorative tiles. The opulence didn’t extend to the offices of the Crime Bureau, however. Detective Forsch and I sat in a windowless interview room on the building’s east side, with a plain pine table between us.

  On the table were a green ledger book that I recognized as Ollie Perriman’s, a pack of Murads, and the ashtray, which was made from a brass artillery-shell casing. Forsch pulled a fresh cigarette from the pack, and methodically lit up. The detective was either wearing the same clothes he’d had on in Perriman’s office or an identical suit in the identical shade of drab, perhaps a plainclothes version of a uniform. Standing inside the doorway of the room was a beefy young man in the more recognizable uniform of navy blue flannel and brass buttons.

  Forsch said nothing while enjoying the first few drags on the cigarette. I thought he might be trying to unnerve me by taking so long. He probably didn’t know that this wasn’t my first time in a police interview. “Got to be at the park for batting practice in an hour,” I said.

  The detective’s gray eyes glittered momentarily, as if getting me to speak first was some kind of victory for him. “Wouldn’t want the team to be without your talents,” he said.

  I tried to remember what I might have done to get on this man’s bad side; if I had done anything, it eluded me.

  He opened the ledger. “Mr. Tinsley has completed an inventory of the collection, comparing everything in the office to Perriman’s entries in this book—and it turns out a number of items are missing.”

  Huh. So it was a robbery. I found myself disappointed that Forsch had been right.

  The detective turned the book to me and pointed to one of the lines. “And every item that’s missing has your name written next to it.”

  I read one of the entries: Ellard’s BB in Cin., acquired from Anon. who’d donated it. Written in the margin was Rawlings. There were similar entries for the guides and other materials now in my parlor. “Perriman gave me these things,” I explained. “He kept a record of everything in the collection, and I guess he wanted to keep track of where they went.”

  “Gave them to you?”

  “Yes. They weren’t worth anything. Mostly duplicates of things he already had, and he was going to throw them out otherwise. I can show you the stuff if you want.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Mr. Tinsley has already confirmed that the missing items weren’t of any value.”

  I was thinking to myself that this meant all the mementos in Perriman’s collection were accounted for—they were either still at the ballpark or at my house. So the killer didn’t find what he was looking for.

  Forsch exhaled a stream of smoke. “You didn’t by any chance tell anybody about what was in the office, did you?”

  “I probably did. There wasn’t any secret about it. Hell, Lloyd Tinsley was already starting to publicize what was going to be in the exhibit.”

  “Yes, I know. Might have led somebody to think there was something valuable in there.”

  I recalled the announcement that had appeared in the paper the day before Perriman was killed. “Long-lost treasures” was one of the phrases that had been used to describe the collection. “I suppose it might have.”

  “Somebody who knew his way around the ballpark,” Forsch said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “No sign of a break-in. How’d the killer get in? And how’d he know where the things were kept?”

  “Well ...”

  “Unless it was somebody who’d been there before. Or somebody who’d been told where to go.”

  That’s what Forsch was getting at: that I was in cahoots with somebody to steal the collection. “As far as getting into a ballpark,” I answered, “just about any ten-year-old kid can find a way to sneak in. And it happened the night after a game; anybody in the park that day could have hidden inside and waited until nighttime. As far as the robber knowing to go to the office, where else would things like that be stored but somewhere in the administrative area? And both times I went to Perriman’s office, the door was open—maybe he kept it unlocked when he was working there.”

  “So you knew the door was kept open.” Implying that I could have relayed that piece of information to an accomplice, too.

  “Yeah, I did. But you know, if I told somebody what was in the room to help them steal it, they’d have taken it.”

  Forsch stubbed out his cigarette. From the look on his face, whatever half-baked theory he might have been entertaining about me being involved was also extinguished.

  Judging by his questioning of me, his investigation wasn’t amounting to much, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that it ever would. But in case it could turn out to be of some help, I said, “There’s something I noticed when I went to the office to talk to you yesterday.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “One of the uniforms was partly burned. Maybe whoever killed Perriman tried to set the place on fire to cover it up.”

  Forsch grunted. “You been reading the papers too much.”

  The front pages of the last few days had been filled with stories and photographs of a massacre in Mayfield, Kentucky—a family of eleven had been murdered an
d their house burned down to try to cover up the killings. “Yeah, I read the papers. But I also know what I saw. The day before he was killed, Perriman showed me a uniform jersey he’d just gotten. It was from Cal McVey, who wore it when he was with the ’69 Red Stockings. I know there weren’t any burn marks when Perriman showed it to me. But when I saw it yesterday, it was burned.”

  Forsch reached for the Murads. “Maybe it was an accident. You should hear how the wife yells at me about holes in my clothes.” He then stuck another cigarette in his mouth and lit up.

  “It wasn’t a cigarette hole,” I said. “Anyway, just thought you might want to consider it.”

  “Consider it?” Forsch’s eyes narrowed. “I got to answer to Lloyd Tinsley, I’m getting pressure from Garry Herrmann’s pals upstairs, and now I got a goddamn ballplayer—and a lousy one at that—telling me how to do an investigation?”

  At least now I knew why Forsch had been so hostile to me: my bosses were giving him a hard time, so he was going to give some of it back to one of their employees. I said calmly, “It was just something I noticed, and I thought I should report it to you.”

  “Fine, fine. Never mind.” As a peace offering he asked, “Cigarette?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, I appreciate you coming in, and I assure you: we are doing everything we can. Today we’re rounding up anybody with a record for burglary or armed robbery, and they’re all gonna get a thorough questioning. It ain’t like this is a case of a couple roustabouts on the docks killing each other over a bad batch of hooch. There’s important people interested in it getting solved. And if I wasn’t doing a good job, Garry Herrmann would have me walking a beat with Jimmy there.”

  Like a dog, the uniformed cop perked up at the sound of his name.

  “Herrmann could do that?” I asked.

  The cigarette in Forsch’s lips jiggled as he let out a laugh. He tilted back in his chair and took a long drag. “You’re new to the city, aren’t you?”

  “Only been here a few months.”

  “Ever hear of Boss Cox?”

  “Of course.” Cox had been one of the most notorious political bosses in the country. “He pretty much ran Cincinnati. Died a few years ago, though, didn’t he?”

  “Ran all of Hamilton County. For thirty years. And yes, he’s dead—but not his organization.” Forsch’s chair clacked on the floor as he let the front legs down. “You know how Garry Herrmann became president of the Reds?”

  “Bought the team?” I ventured.

  Forsch shook his head. “Herrmann was one of Cox’s lieutenants.” He took another drag and let the smoke out slowly. “In 1902, John Brush was the owner of the Reds. He opened a new ballpark—the Palace of the Fans—and it was a big hit with the folks around here. Boss Cox took such a liking to it that he decided to buy the team. When Brush refused to sell, Cox threatened to run a street right through the middle of his nice new park—and he would have, too. Brush changed his mind and Cox, Herrmann, and Max and Julius Fleischmann—of the yeast and gin family—took over the club. And they appointed Garry Herrmann president.”

  “Jeez.” I knew that most owners were of the robber-baron mold, but I’d never heard of tactics as outrageous as this.

  “So I can assure you Mr. Herrmann will be very pleased with our efforts to solve this case.”

  With that assurance, I left for the ballpark.

  Before I got to Redland Field, though, I wasn’t so certain that Forsch’s primary interest was in solving the case. His efforts seemed intended more for show than for results— there’d been all those cops standing around the office yesterday, and he was planning mass roundups for today. I had the feeling it was a higher priority for Forsch to impress Garry Herrmann and his political cronies than to get justice for Oliver Perriman.

  Chapter Six

  Beautiful day for a funeral, I thought.

  The sky was high and clear, the air drier and cooler than it had been in weeks, and the scent of fresh-mown grass wafted about Redland Field making it smell like a garden. Red-white-and-blue bunting dripped from the front-row railings of the grandstand and streamers of the same colors ran along the top of the outfield fence. In left-center, the American flag billowed freely, no longer in the grip of the oppressive humidity that had been smothering the city.

  This was Saturday, July 2, the start of the Independence Day weekend. The Reds players were lined up along the third-base foul line, and on the first-base side were Wilbert Robinson and his Brooklyn Dodgers, reigning National League champions.

  The ballpark was packed to overflowing. Some fans took standing-room spots in the right-field bleachers; others were on the field itself, seated on the left-field terrace behind a rope barricade. Across the street, the Western Avenue Irregulars had gathered on the roof of the Jantz & Leist Electric Company for a free view of the activities.

  There was more than a ball game to entertain them today. A brass band in the right-field bleachers was playing John Sousa marches, and a fireworks display was scheduled for after the game. And preceding it all, was a memorial service for Oliver Perriman.

  His actual funeral had been yesterday, but the team was holding a special “tribute” to him today. It was now under way, with Lloyd Tinsley speaking into a large megaphone set up on the pitcher’s mound. Behind him were Garry Herrmann and a group of dignitaries—the sort of men who like to be seen at such events and get their names in the next day’s newspapers. Tinsley began by introducing the others. Among those present were Louis Kahn of Kahn’s Meats; Maynard Kimber, the sausage king; and the heads of the Moerlein, Hudepohl, and Wiedemann breweries. The guests had no connection to baseball that I knew of, and appeared to have been invited solely because of Herrmann’s fondness for their products. At least none of them were called upon to say anything; they simply puffed up and waved when their names were announced. Garry Herrmann himself was quietly beaming—things weren’t so terrible anymore.

  “We are here today,” Tinsley said, his voice echoing like thunder, “to honor Oliver Perriman. Mr. Perriman wasn’t a player or an owner or even an umpire. He was more important than any of those: he was a fan.” As I’m sure he expected, a solid round of applause greeted this declaration. After pausing to milk the ovation for all he could, Tinsley went on, “Oliver Perriman—‘Ollie’ to those of us fortunate enough to be his friend—worked hard to preserve our history, to document the achievements of our city’s ballplayers” —another pause for effect—“and to show the baseball world that Cincinnati is the city of champions.” The cheers were loud and long.

  I thought a championship every fifty years hardly justified a claim to being “the city of champions.” I also thought that a baseball diamond was for playing ball, not for self-serving speeches. I started scratching the earth with my cleats, mixing the lime of the foul line into the clay.

  As Tinsley continued to speak, I noticed that he never explicitly mentioned that Oliver Perriman was dead. Instead, the emphasis was on Perriman’s achievement in putting together “such a magnificent collection”—and on how Cincinnatians were sure to enjoy seeing the exhibit.

  It had been pretty much the same way in the newspapers: Perriman’s death had garnered little attention. Initially, there were a few brief reports on the inside pages that he had been killed during an attempted robbery “by person or persons unknown.” But the front pages had been taken up by coverage of other events: President Harding’s appointment of a former president, Cincinnati’s own William Howard Taft, to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; the controversy over a woman being seated on a jury in Cleveland; and the upcoming boxing match between heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and challenger Georges Carpentier. A few days later, a couple of follow-up pieces described the “exhaustive” investigation by the Cincinnati Police Department and reported their conclusion that the would-be robber and murderer had left town.

  “... and now, to make a very special presentation, I am happy to introduce Mr. Nathaniel Bonner, pr
esident of the Queen City Lumber Company.”

  Bonner, a lean man who must have been six and a half feet tall, took Tinsley’s place at the megaphone, bending over to bring his mouth down to its level. He coughed and cleared his throat a few times. “It is my understanding,” he finally began, “that there was one relic in particular that Oliver Perriman most wanted to retrieve from the dust of history—but could never find. That object was a bat, a twenty-seven-foot baseball bat inscribed with the names of the 1869 Red Stockings.” There were some murmurs from the crowd at the notion of such an enormous bat. “It was fifty-two years ago yesterday, that my father, Josiah Bonner, presented that grand bat to Red Stockings president Aaron Champion on behalf of the Queen City Lumber Company. Unfortunately, my father is a bit under the weather today, so I’m pinch-hitting for him, as it were ...” He’d started to stand upright and his voice began to fade. Leaning closer to the megaphone again, he continued, “As I said, that original bat has never been found. But”—he gestured toward a group of people standing behind home plate—“it gives me great pleasure to present a new bat, inscribed with the name of Oliver Perriman, to his wife Katie.”

  Team captain Jake Daubert led a short woman dressed in black toward the mound. She was wearing a veil, so I couldn’t tell much about her appearance other than that her figure was on the stout side, the kind that had been popular in the nineties.

  As the crowd gave her a respectful ovation, a small flatbed truck came out of the left-field corner, pulling something shaped like a telegraph pole covered by a red cloth. The truck stopped between home plate and the pitcher’s mound, and Nathaniel Bonner went over to it. He grabbed a corner of the cloth and tried to whisk it off with a magician-like flourish, but it snagged, maybe on a splinter. Bonner tugged and yanked at the covering until it tore away to reveal a magnificent bat supported on blocks. The varnished wood shimmered in the sunlight, and painted in red along one side was Oliver Perriman.

  Katie Perriman said a barely audible “Thank you” into the megaphone, then Lloyd Tinsley led her to the bat. She ran a hand over her husband’s name, almost caressing it. Then she reached under her veil and wiped her eyes, exposing a pale face framed by mousy brown hair.