Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  “Hey, Cool!” Kevin said excitedly from behind the closed door. “You were awesome tonight. I watched it on the tube.”

  “One second, Kevin.” Cooley’s fingers flashed over the alarm system’s keypad.

  Harvey holstered his gun and opened the door, letting in the muggy night. Kevin was a gangly teen, cradling a worn basketball, with a teenage boy’s standard-issue acne-mottled face. He wore a FUBU jersey and baggy cutoffs. He stood on the stoop, sweating heavily.

  “Hi. I’m Kevin Lovick.”

  “I’m Harvey, one of Moss’s friends.”

  “Hey, Kev, whassup?” Cooley said, knocking fists with him across the threshold.

  “Three-for-four! You’re crankin’.” Harvey knew the kid would be talking about having been Moss Cooley’s neighbor for the rest of his life.

  “Thanks, man.”

  Harvey said, “You haven’t seen any strangers or strange cars in the neighborhood, have you?” The teenager shook his head. “Listen, Kevin, would you do Moss a big favor?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Moss is going to be away from the house for a few days, so I was wondering if you could keep an eye on the house for him. You know, especially at night. Let us know if you see anybody casing the house. Take down a license plate number, that sort of thing.”

  Kevin looked at Moss quizzically. “But you guys are just beginning a home stand.”

  “There could be a field pass in it for you,” Cooley said. “Hang out with me at batting practice.”

  “Awesome.” Kevin was glowing. “Sure.”

  “How’s the jumper coming? You keeping that right elbow in?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Well, listen, Harvey and I have a little business to attend to, so I’ll dig you later, okay?”

  Harvey found a scrap of paper in his pocket and wrote down his cell phone number on it. “This is what you call if you have any news.”

  “Awesome,” Kevin said. “Thanks!” He bounced the ball once excitedly on the front stoop before dribbling off into the darkness.

  In the Subaru, on the way to Exeter, a light steamy drizzle began to fall. Harvey set the wipers at a slow interval.

  “I don’t know if this streak’s worth it,” Cooley mumbled.

  “Well, Moss, having set no records of my own in my brief career, I’m really not in a position to give you any advice on that. All I can say is, on the one hand, I understand it’s no fun feeling like your life’s in danger. On the other, you just don’t want to give up too quickly on a chance to be known as the man who did the impossible.”

  “What’s this?” Cooley said, picking up a videocassette off the dashboard.

  “Oh, that’s a documentary I thought we could watch in our new home. Seeing as how we’re going to have all that time on our hands.”

  “When It Was a Game,” Moss read off the label.

  “Might appeal to a man with your sense of history. Speaking of which, Moss—before, remember when you were telling me that the lynchers knew where their victim lived because he’d done some yard work for them?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  Moss Cooley let the wipers complete their arc before answering. “Because he was my granddaddy.”

  12

  IT WAS TWO IN the morning. Upstairs slept a man whose grandfather had been murdered and strung up, and who was now one of the most recognizable and revered figures in the country. Only in America, Harvey thought bitterly, sipping some pilfered cognac on the downy sofa the last occupant had left behind.

  The rain had kept up, troubling Harvey with the cover it provided for other sounds. Despite the newly installed motion detectors and pressure mats, the loaded .38 lay on his stomach. It had been a while since he had ventured into the land of physical peril, and it was hard to relax. He felt like talking to Mickey, but a call at this hour would probably wake her out of some much-needed sleep. He dug a pack of Export A cigarettes out of his knapsack—the pack was a week old and still half full—and lit one. He sat and smoked, thinking of nothing. That was a cigarette’s charm—it offered a brief dopamine-charged release from rumination.

  When he stubbed it out, he began thinking again—about how his first career, baseball, had chosen him. He had chosen his second, private investigation, without at first understanding why. Later, knowing that some of life’s biggest decisions echoed the obscure mandates of childhood, he wondered if he hadn’t laid the groundwork as a boy, when he turned out to have a gift for finding errant baseballs hit into the woods that lay beyond the outfield of his school playground. As he and his friends grew older, and stronger at bat, no game was complete without several balls disappearing into the dense foliage that acted as a short center-field fence. His skill was in greater and greater demand. He had a sixth sense for what had been lost. His gift, though, was complemented by a sense of responsibility to find the ball, whether or not he had been the one to hit it. He took a profound pleasure in it. It wasn’t simply that baseball was always more important to him than the others and so he was willing to assume responsibility for keeping the game going; it seemed, in some deeper sense, to be his job to do what was necessary.

  “Oh, let Blissberg find it,” one of the Orlowsky twins would say, happy to have a breather, perfectly content to move on to the day’s next activity. They’d sit on the scruffy grass and watch their skinny friend, whose father would often treat them to submarine sandwiches at his Italian restaurant after their games, as he jogged single-mindedly toward the trees. With his preternatural talent for gauging the trajectory, direction, and speed of a baseball, Harvey would fix his eyes on a point in the forest where he figured the ball had settled. And it would be there. Or nearby, underneath some trillium leaves, behind a fallen branch.

  One time he came out of the woods after an unusually difficult five-minute search, only to find that everyone had gone home, leaving him alone with a smudged Rawlings ball and his own strange intensity.

  He heard Moss walking above him now, padding to the bathroom in the strange house, unaware that they had something in common. They had both lost family to hate. Harvey’s own great-grandmother on his father’s side, and her daughter, who was his grandmother’s sister, and her diabetic husband and two children had been taken to Auschwitz by the Nazis. But there was no photo of their death to keep the horror fresh. In post-World War II America, among Jews who had come long before the war, the Holocaust was not a daily touchstone of racial agony; by the time Harvey began to understand what had happened, the unthinkable events had disappeared behind a scrim of history. Once in a while—even at Fenway, during that brief eternity between pitches—the upstage lights came on, revealing the carnage, and he was shocked, but the shock would end abruptly, like awaking from a bad dream of falling to one’s death. Harvey felt stranded at one end of an impossible contradiction.

  Two generations after his relatives had vanished, Harvey was just another white man in America. You had to be standing awfully close to see the Jew in Harvey. But Moss Cooley carried his holocaust on him. In him. He continued to wear the badge of difference and humiliation, because it was his skin.

  Cherry Ann Smoler lived in a converted loft in the Jewelry District, an area of nineteenth-century brick factories that once provided, through the magic of electroplating, the bulk of America’s costume jewelry. The few remaining survivors, like Marshall Levy’s Pro-Gem, had long since fled to suburban industrial parks along 95. Now the district housed architectural firms, Internet start-ups, consulting and design groups, software programmers, and an assortment of other young professionals, including Cherry Ann Smoler, who held down what had to be one of the more colorful night jobs.

  Just before noon, she opened the door of her loft to Moss and Harvey, wearing baggy sweat clothes in which she had apparently been sleeping only recently. Her copious blond hair was held loosely in place with a plastic butterfly clip. There was a touch of misgiving in her smile at the sight of a second man in
her doorway.

  “Hi, honey,” she said drowsily to Moss, laying a palm on one of his cheeks and rising on her tiptoes to kiss him lightly on the other. She was a Slavic beauty, with wide-set brown eyes, broad cheekbones, and a generous mouth. Behind her, he saw a well-appointed kitchen in a corner of the loft, glistening with stainless steel and copper, and then a cat, a muscular lilac-point Siamese, licking itself ardently on a throw rug. Harvey glanced at Cherry Ann’s manicured bare feet. He turned his head away at the thought of them in the towering platform shoes favored by strippers. Harvey didn’t fit the standard profile for horny men in many respects, one of them being his distaste for platform shoes, the calf-enhancing sine qua non of exotic dancing. He thought they made women look like R. Crumb drawings. But even without the benefit of platforms, makeup, or a chrome pole, Cherry Ann Smoler was the stuff of men’s rawest fantasies and knew it, and her success at denying or ignoring that fact—for there was nothing affected or flirtatious in her behavior now—only endeared her more to Harvey.

  “Hi, baby,” Moss said, passing his hand up and down her back.

  “Did you make a hit last night?”

  “Three of them.”

  “Excellent. I can come watch you play tonight. I’m not working.”

  “You can sit with this guy,” Moss said, jerking his head at Harvey. “He has the run of the place.”

  Now, at last, she turned to Harvey, looked him up and down, and with hand outstretched said, “I’m Cherry Ann Smoler.”

  “Harvey Blissberg.” He shook it, her warm fingers like a small animal in his palm.

  Cherry Ann turned to Moss even before withdrawing her hand. “Is he a cop?”

  “Uh…” Moss began.

  “No. I used to be a baseball player,” Harvey said, impressed by her intuition, even as it annoyed him that he, or his responsibilities, would be so transparent. “I even spent a year with the Jewels.”

  She then did something Harvey found extraordinary. With her right hand she reached out and gently touched Harvey’s shirt where it hung over the belt. Her hand came to rest instinctively on the butt of his concealed .38. “But what is it you do now?”

  “You don’t miss much, do you?” Harvey said.

  “Not where men are concerned.” She looked at Moss. “You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?”

  “No,” Harvey said before Cooley could answer, “he’s doing something right. He’s now got the second-longest hitting streak in major-league history. And that’s made him a target.”

  She collected some fugitive strands of hair in the hook of her index fingers and pulled them off her face. “Which your job is to reduce the size of?”

  “Yes,” Harvey said, resenting that he should have known this woman initially from a photograph in a clubhouse.

  Harvey and Moss sat at her long butcher-block kitchen counter, drinking coffee, and brought her up to date on the headless lawn jockey, the letters, the safe house. Cherry Ann listened with a growing expression of alarm.

  “Is this streak worth his life?” she asked Harvey.

  “If we knew how serious the threat was, it would be easy to answer that question. But we don’t. Like so many, it may turn out to be empty, and a hitting streak like Moss’s is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “Men,” she said, topping off Moss’s coffee cup. Harvey held his hand over his. “Women don’t value streaks the same way.”

  “Except the ones in your hair,” Moss said.

  “Yuk yuk,” Cherry Ann said.

  “A man likes to leave something behind,” Harvey said and realized at once that this attempt at pithiness was not going to get by Cherry Ann Smoler.

  “And women don’t?”

  “What I meant was that men are more hung up on concrete accomplishments, like getting their names in record books.”

  “And on the obituary pages,” she said. “I don’t want him doing anything stupid.”

  “Speaking of doing something stupid, let me ask you something,” Harvey said. “Have you told anybody about your relationship with Moss? You understand I’m not implying anything here, but you’re dating a famous ballplayer, and most people in your position wouldn’t keep quiet about it.”

  “A couple of the girls at Teasers know about it. The two girls I’m closest to. Bobbi and Carol.”

  “Have you discussed your relationship with anybody else besides the two of them?”

  She thought. “My parents.”

  Cooley lifted his head “Your parents?”

  “Don’t get excited, honey. My dad’s a big baseball fan. Sorry if I broke the rules.”

  “What rules?” Harvey said.

  “We have an agreement,” Moss said.

  “We have an agreement to keep this as private as possible,” she said.

  “I’m under a microscope enough, as it is,” Moss added.

  “Me too,” she said, “and I’m not talking about guys staring at my monkey five nights a week. It’s more the way they look at you.”

  “How do they look at you?” Harvey asked, wondering what he looked like to strippers, holding his watery drink and pretending he had wandered in by mistake.

  “Like I already belong to them, like they’ve already had me or something. That’s the disgusting part, to see it happen on their faces. Men have two brains, and when I see that second one take over, it’s scary. But, hey, it’s how I’m putting myself through restaurant school. I don’t know if Moss told you, but I’m studying to be a chef.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Anyway, Moss and I really don’t believe in blabbing about us. Right, honey?”

  “Right.”

  Like hell, Harvey thought, thinking of the eight-by-ten glossy of Cherry Ann Smoler humping a pole that Moss kept in his cubicle. And God knows how much advertising of their affair Cherry Ann was not admitting to. Still, whatever they each did, Harvey saw that they meant it, this pact. Perhaps a shared knowledge of what too much visibility is like was the very thing that gave this relationship some glue. Harvey thought of the endless supply of celebrity relationships that kept the tabloid newspapers in business. It was easier to fall in love with someone in your own field, someone already on the movie set, someone in your own income bracket. But all public figures had something else in common: the experience of feeling owned by others. Celebrity was a kind of highly paid slavery. People objectified the famous; they were the serfs of other people’s fantasy lives. DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—if it hadn’t been for their respective fames—Joe had seen a publicity photo of her, and a business manager had arranged their first date—they would never in a million years have found each other.

  “Has anyone at the club asked you about him? Made any comments to you?”

  She shook her head.

  “And you two haven’t been sighted as a couple in the local papers?”

  “Not that we know of,” Cherry Ann said.

  “Think.”

  Cherry Ann flashed a glance at Moss. “Your friend doesn’t give up.”

  “You know these pushy Jews,” Moss said.

  “You know what I like about Moss?” Harvey said to her. “For a black man, he’s not lazy. The motherfucker actually holds down a job. What about you?”

  “I have a heart of gold,” Cherry Ann said.

  “I thought you might,” Harvey said.

  “To answer your question again,” she said, “no, I don’t think we’ve shown up in the paper. This isn’t New York, anyway.”

  “Cherry Ann, three nights ago somebody broke into Moss’s garage and left the lawn jockey’s head hanging by a rope.” She gasped—the tiniest audible intake of air—and reached out to take Moss’s hand. “So,” he continued, “there are people who know where he lives.”

  “He can stay here,” she said.

  “People know where you live.”

  “But people don’t know about us.”

  “That’s what you say. Until this blows over, I’ve put Moss in a safe place where nobody can f
ind him. I’m not even going to tell you where that is, because I want you to have deniability. He can always call you, and I’ll give you my cell phone number so you can reach Moss or me if you need to.” He ripped a page out of his little leather notebook and wrote down the number, nothing else. He handed it to her. “Don’t write my name, or Moss’s, next to this number, okay?”

  “But the ballpark,” she said.

  Harvey gave her his ballpark rap. “The odds of someone getting to Moss on the street, at night, are a lot better. That’s why Moss and I are going to be like Siamese twins for a little while. That’s why I’m carrying a piece. Beautiful cat, by the way.” The lilac-point male was on the counter, sniffing the contents of the creamer.

  “When can I, you know, see him?”

  “If you two can live without each other for a few more days, I’d feel more comfortable. After that, if the streak’s still going, we’ll figure something out.”

  Moss excused himself to use the bathroom, and Harvey used the opportunity to ask Cherry Ann if she was friendly with any other players on the team.

  “Absolutely not,” she said, insulted.

  “Listen, I have to ask these questions.”

  “I’d hate to have your job.”

  “And I yours,” Harvey said.

  She looked at the kitchen wall clock and stood. “Excuse me. I have to throw some clothes on and get over to Johnson and Wales. My associate degree in culinary arts awaits.”

  Moss came back, saying, “Why don’t you let Harvey take you to the game tonight? I think you might bring me good luck.”

  “Just what you need,” she replied. “But okay.” She looked at Harvey. “What time?”

  “I could leave a ticket for you at the Will Call window. Why don’t you show up at seven-thirty? Unless you want to come earlier to see batting practice.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got Baking and Pastry Arts until seven.”

  “You got a cell phone?” Harvey asked, and she nodded. “Call me when you arrive at the park, and I’ll come down and meet you at the gate.”