by Troy Soos
Nathaniel Bonner came into the office, ducking his tall frame as he passed through the doorway. Today his resemblance to the sixteenth president was closer to the Lincoln of the war years, with worry creasing his features.
Bonner and I exchanged curt nods. Adela said to him, “Please have a seat.” Once he’d done so, she went on, “As I mentioned on the telephone, I’ve decided to take you up on your offer. Mr. Rawlings here confirms that there is merit to your claim regarding my father’s past indiscretion.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Miss Whitaker,” Bonner said.
She frowned. “I’m referring to—”
“Nice place,” he interrupted, looking around. “I’ve thought of getting some of the modern amenities for my own office.” He then looked from me to Adela. “Don’t think I’ll get a Dictaphone, though. Too noisy. You mind turning that thing off?”
Adela looked disappointed. Then she turned a switch on the machine behind her desk, and the whirring of the recording apparatus came to a stop.
Visibly more relaxed, Bonner asked me, “Do you have information, or was this just a ruse hoping I’d say something incriminating for the machine?”
“I know you don’t have what you were looking for,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have paid Rufus Yates’s fine, or hired him to break into my house.” I wasn’t willing to say much more; there wasn’t much that I knew for certain, and so I had to make it last, giving him one crumb at a time to make him think I knew more than I did.
“What Mr. Rawlings is proposing,” Adela said, “is that, since he has the evidence that can verify your claim, you pay him a finder’s fee, as it were. I think his proposition sounds reasonable.”
He turned to me. “What size ‘finder’s fee’ did you have in mind?”
“Whatever you were going to pay Ollie Perriman for the entire collection. What I have is the only part of it you really wanted anyway.”
Bonner slumped back and thought it over. He finally said quietly, “It would have been so much easier if he would have sold. Everything that followed is on his head—Perriman brought it all on himself by being too stubborn to sell.”
Adela put in, “If he’d sold you his collection, you would have recouped the cost with the money you expected to get from me.”
“Exactly,” Bonner said. “What happened is partly your fault, too, you know. You threatened to charge me with attempted extortion. So I had to find the ledger”—he smiled—“so it could be genuine extortion.”
Ledger? What ledger? I didn’t know what he was referring to, but I tried not to look surprised. “You couldn’t let Perriman know exactly what you wanted,” I said, “so you had to try buying the whole lot. The day Perriman was killed, there was an announcement in the newspaper saying the exhibit would be opening soon. I take it that’s when you decided you couldn’t wait any longer.”
He nodded. “Once it was on display, there wasn’t much chance of ever getting it back. So I paid him a visit that night. Tried to get him to tell me where the ledger was.”
“And he wouldn’t.” My mind was racing, trying to determine what ledger Bonner could be talking about. The one in which Perriman recorded his collection had still been in the office, so that couldn’t be it.
Bonner shook his head. “Claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. And I did try to get it from him. Tied him up, punched him around a little . . .”
“Tried burning the old uniform, too?” I asked.
“Figured if he didn’t care about himself, I’d see if he cared about his precious relics. Set a match to the shirt, but he still wouldn’t talk. So I put the fire out—that ledger was somewhere in the room, and it wasn’t going to do me any good as a pile of ashes.”
“And then you killed him.”
“Wasn’t planning it that way,” Bonner said. “I brought the gun with me as a precaution—I don’t make a habit of breaking into places at night. Then when Perriman wouldn’t talk, I realized he’d tell what I’d done. And by that time I was furious that he didn’t give me what I wanted. So ... I shot him.”
“And later you found out that he’d given part of the collection to me. Why bring Rufus Yates into it? Why not do it yourself again?”
A distasteful expression curled his lips. “I didn’t care for the experience. I decided it would be better in the hands of a professional.”
Adela said, “You are not only a blackmailer and a murderer, Mr. Bonner. You are a coward.”
His eyes narrowed. “My price just went up, Miss Whitaker.” Then he leaned back farther in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Now let’s decide exactly how much it’s going to cost you to keep the world from finding out your father built this business on money he embezzled from the old Red Stockings.”
Embezzlement? This was supposed to be about the murder of Sarah Devlin.
He stretched out his long legs under her desk, then jumped at the clattering sound when his foot struck something. He was quickly on his knees, pulling out the base of a candlestick telephone. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a line to my secretary’s office, Mr. Bonner. She has a Dictaphone also.”
Bonner dashed to the door and pulled it open. Aaron Whitaker was standing outside, blocking his path. He had a shotgun in his hands and the muzzle was aimed at Bonner’s chest. Aaron stepped forward, forcing Bonner back into Adela’s office.
Adela calmly said, “We didn’t know if you would be armed, Mr. Bonner. Now, my brother will keep you here until the police arrive.” She looked at me. “Detective Forsch was the name, correct?”
I nodded, and she told her secretary to put in a call to the detective.
With a few exceptions, the meeting with Bonner had gone the way we’d planned. Adela and I expected him to notice the first Dictaphone; the idea was that once he discovered it and the recorder was turned off, he might feel secure that he’d thwarted our scheme and open up about what he’d done to Ollie Perriman. I didn’t count on his long legs knocking over the phone under the desk, though. I’d hoped to get a lot more information.
I tried a few more questions while we waited for the police to arrive, but Bonner had clammed up completely.
Forsch arrived with several patrolmen. We gave him our statements and the disk from the secretary’s recording machine, and he took Nathaniel Bonner into custody. Bonner refused to make any comment to the police, telling them to contact his attorney.
I was still trying to figure out the strange turn this had taken. Especially Bonner’s charge about embezzlement from the Red Stockings. And what ledger had he been looking for?
Then I looked up at the portrait of Ambrose Whitaker and realized he wasn’t the one who had killed Sarah Devlin.
At home that night, I finally told Margie and Karl all that had happened. I was uncertain whether confronting Nathaniel Bonner had been an overall plus or a minus. On the plus side, I had learned some more, and I had another idea on the role Sarah Devlin’s murder played in things. But Bonner had thrown that curve about embezzlement, and failed to tell me anything that would get me out of trouble with respect to Rufus Yates. And, perhaps the biggest negative, I’d sure antagonized the man who might have given me more answers. If he continued to keep silent, some questions might never be resolved.
That’s what the three of us discussed: the pressing need to find out more about Yates. And a question that was bothering me: how did he and Bonner happen to know each other—what was the connection between them?
Margie volunteered to contact the manager at the Palace Theater again and ask if he knew any other bookies she could contact about Yates. Karl was going to get in touch with Spider Jenkins to see if he had been able to dig up any additional information.
As for me, I was going to look for the ledger that had been the true target of Bonner’s search.
Chapter Thirty-One
There was nothing in the Wednesday morning newspapers about the Bonners or the Whitakers. Either
the police department was being cautious in releasing information to the press, or the families had enough influence to keep the stories squelched for a while.
Lloyd Tinsley did make the front page. According to the paper, a date for the opening of the exhibit had finally been set: August 30. That date, three weeks away, had been chosen because it was Cal McVey’s birthday, and the former Red Stocking had confirmed that he would attend the opening. Also scheduled to appear were Edd Roush, Eppa Rixey, Heinie Groh, and “Dick Hurley,” who’d been released from the hospital two days ago. George Wright was still a maybe. There was no mention of me.
For now, the disappointment over being scratched from the grand opening was minor. Because the article did give me an idea on how I might be able to check out the ledger Nathaniel Bonner had been looking for.
John Cogan, “Dick Hurley” to everyone else, readily agreed to serve as my accomplice. I picked him up at the Sinton Hotel, and the two of us traveled by taxi to Redland Field. It pained me to know that I wasn’t welcome at the park, but I put that aside.
The two of us found Lloyd Tinsley in his office, going over some paperwork. He looked up, obviously surprised to see either of us at the ballpark.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “But Mr. Hurley here was hoping for an advance look at the collection.”
“Yes,” Cogan chimed in. “If I might, I’d like to spend a little quiet time looking over the mementos from my old team before it’s opened to the public.”
“I suppose that would be all right.” Tinsley rose from his seat. “Why are you here, Rawlings?”
“At my request,” Cogan said. “He told me at the dinner you so generously gave me that he was familiar with some of the items. So I asked him to show me around, and he kindly consented. With your permission, of course.”
Tinsley’s big jaw chewed from side to side. “Fine by me,” he decided.
The business manager led us to Perriman’s office, unlocked the door, and accompanied us inside. Tinsley remained with us, watching, as I pointed out to Cogan some of the 1869 relics Ollie Perriman had shown me. Each object inspired a long-winded “recollection” by the Dick Hurley impostor; some of the things he said I knew to be wrong, but Tinsley didn’t. And for my purpose, it was the length of the yarns that counted, not their accuracy.
As I expected, Tinsley grew tired of listening; the same as at Cogan’s dinner, when he’d barely spoken to the old-timer, he just wasn’t interested. “I’ll be in my office,” he said. “Come let me know when you’re finished.”
When he was gone, Cogan winked at me, and whispered, “I’m afraid I’ve bored him.”
“Yes, nice job.” I immediately went to Perriman’s desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the 1870 score book. “Could you check to see that he doesn’t come back?”
Cogan walked to the door. As he did, I flipped to the back of the book, to the tallies of attendance and gate receipts that I’d seen before. I looked closer now, and saw that the pages were not originally part of the book but had been inserted and secured with tape. I carefully pulled out the two pages, folded them, and tucked them in an inside pocket of my jacket.
I replaced the score book in the drawer, then Cogan and I chatted for another fifteen minutes or so. We returned to Tinsley’s office, where Cogan thanked him and said he’d better be getting back to his hotel room for some rest.
As Cogan and I left the park, I had mixed feelings. The mission had been a success, but it still nagged at me that the Reds were playing a baseball game this afternoon, and I couldn’t be part of it.
I met Karl Landfors for lunch at Heuss House, a small German restaurant in Over-the-Rhine.
After ordering, I asked him, “Anything on Rufus Yates?” Ralph at the Palace Theater had given Margie the names of all the bookies he knew, and Karl was going to try to contact as many of them as he could about Yates.
“Not yet. But his former colleagues aren’t early risers. I have some leads, and I’ll keep checking them out this afternoon and tonight. You have any luck?”
The waitress brought a beer for me and a glass of white wine for Karl. There were some communities where the Eighteenth Amendment was probably never going to be acknowledged.
I pulled the ledger sheets from my pocket and passed them over to Karl. “What do you make of these?”
He pushed his spectacles up on his nose and gave the pages a once-over. “What do I look like, an accountant?”
On a good day, he did; most days he resembled an undertaker. “I tried to read them on the trolley,” I said. “Looks to me like they’re for the same days, only the numbers are different.”
Karl put the pages side by side and began to study them closely. The waitress returned with our meals, neither of which included sausage. After Margie’s revelation about the zoo, I had the feeling it would be a long time before I’d even try a hot dog again.
While picking at a plate of noodles and cabbage, Karl completed his examination of the accounting entries. “I’m no expert,” he said. “But I think what you have here is from a double set of books.” He shoveled a pile of red cabbage into his mouth, and juice dripped down his chin as he went on, “The pages each have the same dates and game locations, but different attendance figures and gate receipts. Somebody was skimming off the difference between the higher and lower amounts.”
“There’s something else I noticed,” I said. “All the dates are after July 2, 1869.”
He glanced again at the entries. “You’re right. But it could simply be that the earlier pages are missing.”
“Could be. But these were the only ones in the score books.”
I polished off the last of my potato pancakes. “Well, I’m off to the zoo.”
“Going to see Margie?”
“Her too. But first I’m going to talk to Ambrose Whitaker.”
The onetime Red Stockings bookkeeper was in a back-row seat outside the band shell, listening to an orchestra rehearse something that involved far too many trumpets. He was wearing a quaint three-piece suit, a homburg crowned his head, and his hands were clasped over the silver head of his cane.
Whitaker recognized me when I approached, and invited me to sit next to him.
“I guess Adela and Aaron must have told you what’s been happening,” I said.
“No . . . They don’t tell me much anymore. Certainly nothing they think might upset me—they don’t think my health can stand it.” He smiled. “It’s rather nice, really, the way they’re protective of me.”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to trigger a heart attack or anything.
“But they underestimate my endurance,” Whitaker said. “So why don’t you go ahead and tell me?”
Okay, if he says he can handle it. “You wrote that note in the old baseball,” I began. “Didn’t you?”
His eyes remaining focused on the orchestra, Whitaker nodded.
“I thought maybe it was a confession,” I continued, “but the man who met Sarah Devlin that night passed himself off as Dick Hurley. You didn’t look anything like Hurley.” It wasn’t only that fact that Ambrose Whitaker had red hair, while Hurley’s was black. Charlotte Ashby told me that Sarah claimed the player she going to meet was “one of the handsomest” on the team. It was when I’d looked again at his portrait in Adela’s office that I realized there was no way, with his ungainly features, that Whitaker could have ever fit that description.
He murmured, “Her last name was Devlin, was it? I’d have contacted her family if I’d known.”
“Other than the players, there weren’t many young men at the banquet, were there?”
“No, mostly judges and business leaders. I was one of the youngest there.”
“You and Josiah Bonner, who presented the giant bat.” The pictures I’d seen of Bonner at the Queen City Lumber office showed him with dark hair and a mustache—he bore a fair resemblance to the Frank Leslie’s illustration of the real Dick Hurley. “Josiah Bonner was the one who killed her, wasn’t he?
And you knew about it.”
Whitaker’s granite face betrayed nothing; his expression was as fixed and steady as a statue’s. Then he gave a barely perceptible nod. “More than knew about it. I helped bury the poor girl.”
“Tell me what happened.” Since he’d at least taken the small step of leaving the note in the baseball, I thought Whitaker might be wanting to get it all off his chest.
His gaze dropped from the band shell to the ground at his feet. “In the summer of 1869, Josiah Bonner and I were a couple of up-and-comers in the Cincinnati business world. Both of us in our early twenties, and both getting a nice boost from our association with the Base Ball Club.
“Well, July 1 was the homecoming, and Josiah had his moment in the sun when he presented the team with that bat on behalf of the Queen City Lumber Company. That night, there was the banquet at the Gibson House. First time either Josiah or myself were among so many of the city’s leading politicians and businessmen, and we were both convinced that we’d soon be part of that elite circle. With the company, and the champagne, and the excitement of the day, it was a heady experience.
“After the banquet, Josiah and I went outside, and there was still a crowd around the hotel door, mostly young ladies.”
“George Wright tells me the ladies were ardent fans,” I said.
“They were indeed,” said Whitaker. “And that’s how the trouble started. Josiah and me were among the few men at the dinner who were about the same age as the players; some of the ladies assumed we were part of the team when we came out, and they tossed flowers and garters at us. One girl asked if we were Red Stockings. I answered that I wasn’t. Josiah was a faster thinker than I was, and he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity with a young lady. Claimed he was Dick Hurley, and I backed up his fib—it’s what you do for a friend, and I didn’t see any harm could come of it. Josiah and the girl went for a stroll, and I went on home.
“Next day, Josiah comes by and tells me things went well enough that he and the girl were going to see each other again that night. My family had a new phaeton, and he wanted to borrow the carriage to take her out for a midnight drive. Also wanted to borrow my best cuff links and a gold watch I’d been given for my birthday. I didn’t mind lending him my things, but I knew my parents wouldn’t agree to giving him the carriage, so I arranged for him to pick it up after they were asleep. I also told him that if he was planning to court the girl, he ought to fess up as to who he really was. He made it clear his intentions were of the short-term variety, however. Sorry to say, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that at the time—I was envious of him more than anything.” He sighed. “Of course the older I got, the more I knew it wasn’t right—he was dishonest, she was too young. I’ve wished a million times that I’d tried to stop him.”