Prairie Hardball

by Alison Gordon

  “Truth hurts, I know,” he said, kissing the top of my head, gently, in the condescending way that both infuriates and comforts me.

  We lay in silence for a while.

  “So, who else did you interview today?” I asked.

  “Enough with the meddling,” he murmured.

  “I’m not meddling, I’m just taking an interest in the man’s interests, like the teen magazines used to tell me.”

  “I’ve got other interests, too, you know,” he said, sliding down next to me and reaching up under my T-shirt.

  After a few delicious minutes, I slipped out of bed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I stumbled through the darkness to the dresser and fumbled around in the top drawer until I found the surprise I’d bought in the washroom in Davidson. Virna’s home town. I unwrapped it and got back into bed, leaving my T-shirt on the floor.

  “It’s a Nite-Glow,” I whispered in his ear. “I want to watch the glow grow and grow.”

  So we did. We watched it glow, grow, crow, sing, dance, and practically whistle Dixie. Afterwards, we lay tangled together in the sheets.

  “You still say I’m just like my mum?”

  “You never know, Kate. She and your dad may have been wild in their time. They still might be.”

  “Are you kidding? They only did it twice. Once for Sheila and once for me.”

  “Then how do you explain your insatiable lust? Who did you inherit that from?”

  “Maybe she had a passionate interlude with some passing stranger.”

  “Probably,” Andy said. “With the bible salesman.”

  “Mr. Cyril Honeycutt. He was a pretty horny guy.”

  We both laughed in the darkness, feeling warm and close.

  “So, you had drinks with Jack again tonight,” Andy said, too casually.

  “Edna and I, both. He’s in pretty rough shape right now. We figured he could use some company.”

  “What have you been talking about?”

  “His mother, mainly. Growing up with her and Wilma Elshaw. He’s pretty devastated by their deaths.”

  “I guess he didn’t happen to mention that he and his mother offed dear Auntie Wilma?”

  I didn’t answer for a moment.

  “I guess your new best friend didn’t happen to mention that,” Andy said.

  “Stop calling him that,” I said. “Edna told me there had been some rumours. Did you talk to him about it?”

  “He didn’t deny it. He talked about the pain she was in at the end. How she died holding his mother’s and his hands, with a smile on her face.”

  “And you call that murder?”

  “What do you call it?”

  “Mercy. Love. The kindest and most difficult thing anyone can do. What I would hope you’d do for me if I asked. What I hope I’d have the courage to do for you.”

  The next silence was his. He held me very close.

  “Who do your horsemen like as a suspect?” I asked, after a few minutes.

  “At the moment, my horsemen are going off in all directions,” he said. “Like the musical ride on acid. I think maybe the succession of old dears through the interview room was a bit too much for them. We’re all going to sleep on it and start fresh in the morning.”

  He yawned.

  “Well, I hope it goes better tomorrow, then,” I said. “There are a lot of frightened people around here. Me included.”

  Our next silence lasted a long time. Almost into sleep. Then I remembered.

  “Who do you like?” I asked him.

  “For the murder?” he asked, sleepily.

  “Uh huh.”

  “You know what they say. Who gains? I’m not quite ready to write off the next of kin.”

  Chapter 22

  I called my editor, Jake Watson, first thing the next day and told him my plans for a feature on the girls’ league. He told me to go ahead, as long as I hooked it on the murder. Then I called Dave Shury, the Hall of Fame guy, and arranged to have a look at the archives. After checking with the police, he told me to find the key, on a hook under the eaves at the back of the church. I promised to lock up when I was done. By ten-thirty, I was dug in with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League files in the Hall of Fame library. Andy had dropped me off on the way to the RCMP, promising to pick me up in time for lunch.

  There were signs of the investigation everywhere. I had to wipe grimy fingerprint powder off the desk and chair before I could use them. But I enjoy research, and quickly got so engrossed in the files that I almost forgot that I was sitting just a few feet away from where Virna Wilton had been found.

  I skimmed a couple of turgid scholarly papers on the league, including one by the banquet speaker, and set aside a book that had been published a few years before, which Shury had said I could borrow. What interested me most that day was the primary material, the files and scrapbooks the women had brought with them to the reunion. They hadn’t been catalogued or organized in any way yet. They just sat in cardboard boxes which had been brought over from the banquet hall.

  I started with the old Life magazine piece from the first spring training in 1943. It was wonderfully politically incorrect, with photographs of Virna ironing in the locker room and Millie Epp of the Kenosha Comets having her hair done.

  There was a lot of emphasis in the text on the wholesome aspects of the sport, on the charm school the girls attended, on the beauty makeovers by Helena Rubinstein, and on the credentials of the team chaperones. The other main thread of the piece was true-blue All-American patriotism, bringing entertainment to the home front while the boys were off fighting the war. One full-page photo showed the Racine Belles and Rockford Peaches, later arch-rivals, lined up along the basepaths in a “V for victory” formation, hats held over their hearts. My mother was way out at the far tip of one of the arms of the V.

  After I finished that piece, I began to dig into the individual files and scrapbooks. I put aside the ones from the women on other teams and started by concentrating on the ones from the Saskatchewan Belles: Virna Wilton, Edna Adams Summers, Shirley Rosen Goodman, Margaret Kostecki Deneka, Helen MacLaren Henry, and the late Wilma Elshaw.

  Virna’s was the fattest file, with articles from dozens of different papers. I could understand why she got the most ink: she was the lazy journalist’s dream—good-looking, well-spoken, and, almost incidentally, a terrific ballplayer. She also had what they then called great gams, which didn’t hurt.

  The other thing obvious from her carefully organized scrapbooks was that Virna never met a camera she didn’t like, and knew how to give a good quote, even in those less media-savvy times. More power to her. She used what she had to get everything she could. She had a great career, and parleyed it into another one after the league folded. The later scrapbooks, after 1954, were almost as interesting as the ones when she was a star.

  I looked closely at a picture of Virna and Wilma standing outside the All-American All-Star Flower Shoppe in 1956. Virna, who must have been in her middle thirties at the time, posed grinning, dressed in a dress that was the height of fifties fashion, with a bat on her shoulder. Wilma stood next to her, in slacks, her hair cropped short. She was smiling shyly, with her baseball and glove looking like props in her hands.

  It was a feature article from the Women’s Page of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, back when women’s pages hadn’t turned into the euphemistic Family or Lifestyle sections. Virna was portrayed as a plucky widow, raising her twelve-year-old son with the help of her old teammate Wilma. There was a picture of Jack with his dog, Morley. He was cute even then, a pre-adolescent hunk.

  The post-career book apparently included every mention ever made of Virna, even references to the flowers for a ladies’ tea or social being supplied by the shop. There were also speeches she�
��d made, community awards she had received, golf tournaments she had played in, and little-league teams she had coached.

  By the time I’d put the last book aside, I knew more about Virna than I had before. I think I liked her less.

  I skimmed my mother’s scrapbook next. She wasn’t a star, in talent or temperament, so there was less to read. Most of it I half-remembered from my childhood, anyway. Mum was a team player, there’s that to be said about her. Any time she was quoted, it was to praise another player. And when other players talked about her, they applauded her unselfish nature. Having met my share of modern superstars and bench-warmers, I could read between the lines and understand how appreciated she was.

  Generally, the young women I read about in the yellowed clippings were very like the older women I had come to know over the past few days. Rosie Rosen, as she then was, was garrulous and self-centred, slightly whiny and always ready with an excuse when she lost. She was also extremely glamorous in her playing days. She retired after the 1950 season. The last clipping in her scrapbook was the announcement of her marriage to “successful businessman Bert Goodman” and their subsequent round-the-world honeymoon cruise.

  Edna Adams was then, as now, cute and likable, funny, energetic, and lacking in guile. She was obviously the team cheerleader and a fan favourite. Almost every story about her mentioned the championship home run.

  When she retired, also in 1950, the community held an “Edna Adams Day” and gave her a set of matching luggage and a fur stole.

  I was particularly intrigued by Margaret Deneka’s file, because she was the one I could least imagine in her prime. As “Meg-the-Peg” Kostecki, she was one of the original Belles, a four-time all-star and, as Edna had implied, a real character. The term “live-wire” was used to describe her in several articles. She even made the gossip columns for pranks she pulled. I assumed they were her pranks. Why else would she have included in her scrapbook an item about ducks found swimming in the chaperone’s hotel bathtub?

  In her pictures, Meg was lovely, in an ethereal sort of way, almost angelic, with soft blonde hair framing a heart-shaped face, but mischief lurked in her eyes. In pictures of the Belles’ keystone combination, she and Virna made a wonderful contrast: the one striking and dramatic, the other soft and feminine.

  I turned to Wilma’s material last. It was less orderly than Virna’s, little more than a collection of clippings in annual file folders, covering only the years she played. I started with 1944, the year she and Edna joined the Belles. She made an immediate impression, hitting .319 in her rookie season. Sorting the clippings by date, I read a series of increasingly enthusiastic game stories, and a full personality profile towards the end of the season, angled towards women, and written by a woman who was clearly not in the sports department.

  “Some say that baseball is a man’s game,” it began, “but Wilma Elshaw shows that a ballplayer can be a lady, too.”

  The saccharine story played up Wilma’s domestic side, the needlework she did in her spare time and the warm mufflers she knit for the brave young men, including her fiancé, who were off at war, defending democracy.

  “For Wilma Elshaw,” the piece concluded, “all the cheers from all the fans in the baseball park are nice, but she dreams of accomplishments in another field. This Canadian All-American Girl looks forward to the day that a certain Royal Canadian Navy battleship comes in and she can embark on her next career as Mrs. Lieutenant Morley Timms.”

  That was an interesting development.

  Chapter 23

  When Andy went to the RCMP detachment that morning, the receptionist buzzed him through the inner door before he could state his business.

  “Good morning, Inspector Munro. I hear that you’re one of us,” she said. “From the big city. The big, big city. Here to show us how?”

  “I’m sure no one here needs any showing.”

  She got up from the desk and came around it with her hand extended in greeting. She was what is generously described as a “big-boned gal” in the prairies, with her red hair buzzed short. She wore open-toed sandals with her tailored slacks and shirt, and her toenails were painted an incongruous hot-pink.

  “Anything I can do to help, let me know,” she said, as they shook hands. “The name’s Brenda Rasminsky, but everybody calls me Bambi.”

  Andy thanked her while trying to recall if he had ever encountered anyone less fawnlike in his life.

  “The boys are waiting on you in the GIS office,” she continued. “How do you take your coffee?”

  “Three sugars, I’m afraid.”

  “Hey, you’re a cop. It’s not like sugar’s the biggest risk you’re ever going to take in your life. I’ll bring the coffee on in. I’m just brewing a fresh pot.”

  “Thanks. Thanks, uh, Bambi. I appreciate it.”

  “After this, you fetch your own,” she said.

  “Always do.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said.

  He went to the General Investigation Section, checking his watch on the way. They weren’t due to start the meeting until ten, and he made it five minutes to.

  Deutsch looked up when he rapped on the doorjamb.

  “Morning,” he said, abruptly. “You can take the desk in the corner there for now. Then we can get this thing going.”

  Andy did as he was told, trying not to get annoyed by the chip on his colleague’s shoulder. He sat at the desk and looked around the room at the rest of the assembled team, which consisted of Corporal Hugh Grenfell and Constables Louis Tremblay and Dewey Resnick. A large work table had been cleared off for the investigation, with file folders and racks set up and ready to fill. A stack of index cards sat next to an empty metal box. Two laminated whiteboards leaned against the wall, their markers attached by strings.

  A few minutes after Andy arrived, Inspector Digby and Staff Sergeant Morris came in and sat down.

  “All right, gentleman,” Digby said. “What have you got for us? I’ve already got the press on my ass, local, national, and the U.S. I’d really like to get this one solved fast.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Deutsch said.

  The meeting was pretty much like the ones Andy was used to in Toronto, except that there he was the one in charge. Deutsch started by going over the physical evidence at the scene and the pathologist’s report.

  “Death took place at the Hall, not elsewhere. It was, as we thought, caused by ligature strangulation, since there were no fingerprints or cuts on her throat. The killer used a piece of cloth of some sort, something soft, not a rope, not a wire. They picked up fibres from her neck. There were also contusions and bruising behind the ear, so we think she was knocked unconscious first. We’ve taken all the bats from the hall for fingerprinting, but I don’t have much hope there. Too many people have touched them over the years.”

  “What about elsewhere in the Hall?”

  “We got all sorts of prints from around the organ, but we have the same problem with those. It’s a public place.”

  He flipped a few pages in the report.

  “We’ve taken the seal off the Hall, by the way. Dave Shury called this morning to ask if that woman from Toronto could go in and do some research. Munro’s friend.”

  “She’s there now,” Andy said. “Working on an article about the league.”

  “I hope that’s all she’s working on. You said yesterday that she has a habit of interfering with investigations.”

  “She has promised that if she comes up with anything that might have a bearing on the case she’ll pass it along,” Andy said, a bit defensively. “She’s looking into the history of the league and some of the women who were here. If this murder has its roots in the past, she might find them in those old files. If not, at least she’s out of our hair.”

  Deutsch grunted and continued his report.

  “There were no real surprises in t
he autopsy. Blood alcohol was high, .14, almost twice the legal limit, but we already knew that she’d had a few. Stomach contents confirm that her last meal was the one served at the banquet that night.”

  “Did it give him any reading on time of death?” Andy asked.

  “I don’t know what pathologists are like in your neck of the woods, but ours is super-cautious. Based on gastric testing and degree of rigor, he’s given us a wide enough time margin to actually include the last time she was seen alive and when she was found.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Morris said.

  “What about the other physical evidence?” Digby asked. “Any blood? Anything we can get DNA from?”

  “The only blood was probably her own, from the head injury,” Deutsch said. “Same blood type. No signs of struggle, no skin under the fingernails. We have some hairs, of different types. But they could be from any time.”

  “The public place problem again,” Morris said.

  “And a public place that isn’t exactly a laboratory at the best of times,” Grenfell added. “Old Morley Timms is the caretaker, and he just gives it a sweep or a mop when the mood takes him.”

  “Check when he cleaned it last,” Deutsch said. Grenfell made a note.

  “We did find one thing that might be significant. A button. Like from a suit jacket. With any luck, we can match it if we find a suspect.”

  “If, if, if,” Digby said. “Any indication of the kind of strength required to strangle someone like this? Could it have been a woman? An old woman? Is that possible?”

  “Pathologist thinks so. Especially since she was unconscious at the time. All someone would have to do is give her that bop on the head. After that she’s not going to be resisting.”

  “But the murderer would have to lift her body onto the piano stool, there. That takes some strength.”

  “We can probably rule out the one with the walker,” Deutsch said. “And that one who’s all crippled up.”

  “That would be Edna Summers and Shirley Goodman,” Andy said. “Then there’s Mrs. Deneka, who is a few marbles short of a bag.”