Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  “I don’t have to go to Teasers anymore to see Cherry Ann in the altogether.”

  “I know. I’m just saying. You know, Moss, I never came up with a pet name for you.”

  “I already got one. Cool. And you never use it.”

  “Everyone calls you that. People who’ve never met you call you that. The goddamn signs in the stands call you that. I’m talking about a name that’s just between us. Like Snake Head.”

  “Snake Head?” Cooley laughed. “What kind of dumb-ass name is that? What you going to call me when I get a new do? C’mon, you can do better than that.”

  “The Starrett Stallion.”

  “That shows no intelligence whatsoever.”

  “Yo’ Mama Head,” Harvey said, suddenly laughing uncontrollably.

  “You don’t calm down, I’m gonna drive.”

  Harvey got off 95 again at exit 14 and headed toward Cooley’s house in Cranston, winding past ranch houses, salt-boxes, tag sales, and fruit stands. “Moss,” he said, “I’m sorry I never got the chance to show you the documentary about the old days of baseball. You would’ve liked it. Joltin’ Joe’s in it—film of him as a kid at Wrigley Field playing in the ’thirty-eight Series. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the fielders used to leave their gloves on the field.”

  “I think I heard that, but why the hell did they do it? Did the other team use ’em?”

  “Nope. Everybody just left their gloves there. I don’t know why they did it. Convenience. Tradition. The league didn’t outlaw it until after the ’fifty-three season.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be tripping over somebody’s raggedy-ass glove.”

  “I don’t think anybody ever did. Least not in an important game. Otherwise it would’ve been outlawed sooner, don’t you think? They say someone once put a dead rat in Phil Rizzuto’s glove. He had a phobia about rats.”

  “I got one of those too.”

  “I’ve never met anybody who actually had a thing for rats,” Harvey said, pulling into Cooley’s circular driveway. “What’s that?” he asked Moss, his stomach tightening.

  “What?”

  “Hanging from your porch light.”

  “Goddamn motherfuckin’ motherfuckers.”

  They got out of the car and walked up to the front stoop. It was a black Ken doll without any clothes on, hanging from the porch light cover latch by a length of twine that had been fashioned into a tiny noose around its plastic neck. Its neck had been wrenched back at an awkward angle. Safety-pinned to the twine was a piece of paper folded into quarters.

  Harvey quickly circled the house, .38 in his hand, but saw no other signs of vandalism or forced entry. When he got back to the porch, Moss was still standing on the stoop, looking at the Ken doll.

  “Goddamn motherfuckers.”

  “Someone didn’t hear the streak’s over,” Harvey said.

  But the note, once he’d unpinned and gingerly unfolded it, removed any doubt that its author had heard about Cooley’s hitless game last night. Like the note that accompanied the lawn jockey, it consisted of letters cut from magazines and glued to the page.

  ShAmE AboUT the STReAk.

  NoW waTcH YOUr aSs OR it wILL bE an unSoLVeD rACe Crime.

  Harvey cut the Ken doll down with his pocket knife, and they went inside, Harvey holding the doll by the very end of the rope. He put it on the living room coffee table, where it lay on its back as though awaiting a miniature autopsy.

  “Somebody’s fucking with me,” Moss said, slumping on the sofa while Harvey paced.

  “This is the same guy who sent you the lawn jockey.” He held the note by the edges and studied it as he walked the floor.

  “I can see that.”

  “Why does he say ‘unsolved race crime’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s the only thing in the note where there’s any traction.”

  “Damn,” Moss said. “He’s got to be talking about GURCC.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Georgia Unsolved Race Crimes Clearinghouse. GURCC. Bunch of lawyers and investigators in Atlanta who try to reopen and prosecute old race crime cases.”

  “Yeah, I know about them,” Harvey said. “Murder and rape cases. No statute of limitations. What’s it got to do with you?”

  “One of my childhood friends from Alabama—Charlie Fathon—he became a lawyer for them last year just out of law school, and he asked me to get involved over the winter.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Oh, the usual shit. Lending my name to their fund-raising campaigns. I dropped some cash on them. They’ve been talking to me about being their spokesman. Doing some speaking for them. You know, ’cause of my granddaddy and all, I’ve got some credibility. I hate to put it that way, but there it is.”

  “Moss, why haven’t you mentioned it to me before?”

  “It never occurred to me the threats had anything to do with it.”

  “C’mon, Moss, you’re the object of racial threats, and you’re involved in a race organization—”

  “Now don’t get in my face about it,” he snapped. “I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. I thought it was the damn streak, just like you.”

  “What I don’t get is that this is the first I’ve heard of you and GURCC. The press doesn’t mention it.”

  “I keep it low. I don’t like these rich motherfuckers who go around saying, ‘Look at me, I’m giving to this, giving to that.’ ”

  “But this asshole knows about you and GURCC.”

  “It’s public information. I just don’t blow my horn about it. But my name’s there on the mailings and the ads.” He rubbed his face with both palms, then dropped them. “Let me ask you something: If this is the same guy who wrote the note about the streak, why’s he on a different page now?”

  “What if it’s the page he’s always been on? What if the first note was just a smoke screen?”

  “What if it’s just some crazed motherfucker toying with me? What if next time I get a note telling me to lay off the goddamn stuffies at Hemenway’s?”

  “Right now, we got this.” Harvey finally sat opposite Moss. “Why would he want you to cut your ties with GURCC?”

  “I have no goddamn idea!”

  “You got any literature from GURCC I can look at?”

  “He’s not interested in GURCC! He’s just some goddamn motherfuckin’ stalker!”

  “I’d like to look at it anyway,” Harvey said softly.

  “All right. Hold on. Maybe I got some upstairs.” Cooley stalked off toward the stairs. At the foot of them he turned and said, “I want those pieces back.”

  “We’ll get them back,” Harvey replied.

  While Cooley was upstairs, Harvey took out his pen and notebook and wrote down on a fresh leaf: “DiMaggio evades apprehension. Do nothing in greatest game. Escape retribution.” What was going on? It had to be the same person, but the language was different. The first note was stilted, telegraphic, the second conversational. Where the first was an all-purpose warning to lay off DiMaggio’s record, the second pointed to a specific association of Moss’s. Harvey felt the man meant business with this new note. Now, in retrospect, the first time around he just seemed to be playing a game. A game, Harvey thought, studying the first note again, breaking it down. …

  He reached for his cell phone and called Marshall Levy.

  “Where are you?” Harvey said.

  “I’m at home. Where are you?”

  “I’m at Moss’s house, and we’ve got a problem.”

  “I thought our problem was over.”

  “I’m afraid it might just be starting.”

  “I’m not happy hearing this, Harvey.”

  “I didn’t write the script, Marshall.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Harvey told him about the Ken doll lynching and the note.

  “I didn’t know about this GURCC,” Marshall said.

  “Neither did I. We need to meet. You, Fel
ix, Moss, and me.”

  “When?”

  “Before the game.”

  “All right. Come to the skybox at eleven-thirty. Cool okay?”

  “Pissed. You’d be pissed too.”

  Harvey went to Cooley’s kitchen and found a Ziploc bag. He dropped the Ken doll into it, and when he came back to the living room, Moss was there looking at the doll in Harvey’s hand with an expression suggesting that what Moss saw in the bag was not just the most recent token of some stranger’s hate, but a relic of generations of hate leading back to his granddaddy and before.

  “All I could find was this,” Moss said in a flat voice, holding some papers folded into thirds. “Here.” He thrust it at Harvey.

  It was a slickly produced four-page direct-mail fund-raising solicitation from GURCC. He skimmed it: “So we need your help if we are to continue our efforts to reopen these cases, arrest and convict these criminals, still at large… . Even in a democracy, justice has a price tag. … We accept no public funds, no fees from monetary jury awards. … some of the most experienced investigators and lawyers in America. … Last year saw us bring two men to justice thirty-two years after they bombed a black-owned motel in Jackson, Mississippi, killing a housekeeper.”

  There, on the third page, was a photo of Moss Cooley’s face with an adjacent bold-face quote from him: “ ‘My own family has known what it is to lose someone to racial hatred and never even learn the murderers’ names. The Georgia Unsolved Race Crimes Clearinghouse is the best shot we have at ensuring that those who kill out of racial hatred will not go scot-free.’ —Moss Cooley of the Providence Jewels.”

  Harvey glanced at a block of text highlighting some of the race crimes the group was in the process of gathering evidence to reopen: “the rape and murder of sixteen-year-old Joella Barnes… the execution-style shooting death of Ephraim Woodson… the lynching of Edward Gomez and Allen James Spellman…” The atrocities raced by on the page. He folded the letter and put it in his jacket pocket.

  “Let’s go. We’re meeting with Marshall and Felix at eleven-thirty.”

  “I don’t know about any meeting.”

  “I just set it up, Moss. We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing.”

  “I know what I’m doing. I’m out of this drama. I just want to play baseball.”

  15

  A SMATTERING OF CLEVELAND INDIANS and Providence Jewels dotted the field below Marshall’s skybox office, running wind sprints and stretching beneath a hard blue sky. The office contained the same cast of characters as three nights ago, but instead of a headless lawn jockey on the desk between them, now it was Ken in the plastic bag, the note that came with it, and the fund-raising letter open to the page with Moss Cooley’s picture on it. Robert, Marshall’s skybox steward, had already brought the four of them fresh orange juice, coffee, croissants, Danish, and a selection of gourmet half sandwiches arranged in perfect concentric circles on a plastic tray.

  “GURCC,” Marshall was saying, smacking as he chewed a bite of roast beef on onion roll. “As a card-carrying liberal, I’m sure I’m on their mailing list. Probably even gave them some money. I had no idea you had a friend there, Cool. You know, I get so much goddamn stuff in the mail. Sometimes I think I’d like my epitaph to read: ‘I’d rather be here than have to go through any more mail.’ What do you think, Harvey?”

  “I believe it’s the lawn jockey guy, and we need to look a little deeper into it.”

  “What if the guy’s just going to come up with one thing after another?” Felix asked.

  “That’s what Moss thinks,” Harvey said.

  “I think he’s just going to keep going,” Moss said. “One thing after another.”

  Harvey popped a pitted black olive in his mouth. “We can sit and wait for the next thing, but my guess is this asshole wants Moss to quit his association with the organization, and he wants him to do it for a reason.”

  “Which is?” Marshall said.

  “Moss says he doesn’t know,” Harvey said.

  Moss stood and slammed his fist on Marshall’s desk. “For chrissakes, I don’t know.” Moss, his face clenched, appealed to Felix and Marshall. “Harvey over here seems to think I’m holding out on him.”

  “Look, Moss,” Harvey said, “I believe you.”

  “Then why do you think it matters so much to someone out there if I’m involved with GURCC? That’s why I think this guy’s just yanking my chain. Why would it matter if I don’t know anything?”

  “I can’t figure that part out.”

  Felix raised both palms abruptly, like a third-base coach holding a runner at third. “Professor,” he said, “I’m a man of modest intellectual means. If Moss can’t think of a reason why anyone would write him telling him to quit GURCC, except as part of a scattershot racist campaign against him, why should we pay special attention to it?”

  “Look, here’s what I’m saying,” Harvey said. “The most significant threat that came Moss’s way during the streak—the lawn jockey—comes from the same man who sent this.” He gestured at the Ken doll. “The man is serious, and the issue’s not a black man overtaking Joe DiMaggio. The streak’s over, but he’s still at it. I don’t think the lawn jockey was about the streak at all.”

  Owner Marshall Levy stirred. “What about the note that came with it?”

  Harvey opened his notebook to the leaf on which he’d written “DiMaggio evades apprehension. Do nothing in greatest game. Escape retribution.” He held up the notebook for the other three men to see. “This is what the note said, right?”

  “What’s your point?” Marshall said. “The note basically says for Cool to stop his own hitting streak or else.”

  “That’s what it says.” Harvey took out his pen and, reaching over the top of the notebook page like a first-grade teacher showing her class a picture book, circled the first letter of each word. “Here’s the message, though.”

  “ ‘Dead nigger,’ ” Moss said. “When did you figure that out?”

  “At your place. I don’t know, but I figured the same guy, different-style notes. Made me wonder why the first one was so strange. So I started playing with it, and I got ‘dead nigger.’ First the words ‘dead nigger,’ then the dead nigger Ken doll.”

  “What’s next, full-size inflatable dead nigger?” Moss said, not laughing.

  Harvey looked at Marshall and Felix. “Look, we’re dealing with a smart crazy person. He likes to play games. We just don’t know how serious the game is.”

  “Question,” Felix said. “If the real issue is GURCC, why didn’t the man just come out and say it the first time? Why waste any time at all with a lawn jockey and pretend it’s only the streak?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to obscure his real objective. Not draw too much attention to it.”

  “Don’t overthink it, Professor,” Marshall Levy said.

  “Why don’t we wait to see what else we get from the guy?” Felix Shalhoub said.

  Marshall nodded. “I agree. Let’s wait. But, Harvey, I’d like you to look after Cool until further notice. You might as well keep your safe house for a little while. I’m paying for it, anyway. Meanwhile, can we keep Cool’s house under surveillance for a few days?”

  Harvey sighed. “I know a guy I can put in Moss’s house with a gun and a camera with a telephoto lens.” He was thinking of Linderman senior. “But I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough.”

  “What do you propose?” Marshall asked, polishing his glasses on his tie. “Bring in the cops?”

  Harvey looked at Cooley. “Moss?”

  Moss, who hadn’t touched any food, took a tiny sip of orange juice. “Would it be all right with y’all if I went back to playing baseball?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Felix added.

  Cooley nodded. “I’ve had it with this motherfuckin’ nonsense. I’ll cut my goddamn ties with GURCC and get back to playin’ some ball.”

  “Give in?” Harvey said. He had thought that history�
��the larger playing field—mattered to Moss.

  “This crazy-ass wants me to break my ties? Fine.” Moss turned to Felix. “Let’s put out a press release saying I’ve ended my relationship with GURCC, that I’m not their spokesman, whatever. We’ll get it in the papers where this asshole can see it,” Moss went on, “and that’ll be that. If the guy’s agenda is GURCC, as you say it is, Harvey, then we won’t hear from him again. If it’s not his agenda, we’ll hear from him on some other motherfuckin’ subject.”

  “What reason are we going to give for your severing your relationship with GURCC?” Marshall asked.

  “Why not tell them the truth?” Felix suggested. “Then they’ll print it. Hell, it’ll be all over ESPN. Because of an anonymous death threat to Moss Cooley urging him to sever his relationship with GURCC, Mr. Cooley has decided to end his association with the civil rights organization. He was slated to become GURCC’s national spokesman. Etcetera, etcetera.”

  “Wait a minute,” Harvey said. “You want to advertise that you’re the subject of a death threat, go ahead. Then we got the cops and the feds all over us for more information. You want that, Moss?”

  “No.”

  “How else do we let this guy know Moss is not in bed with GURCC anymore?” Marshall asked, helping himself to a tuna salad on whole wheat.

  “Give it to Bob Lassiter of the Providence Journal,” Harvey suggested. “Give him an exclusive, but don’t mention the death threat. Just say you’re quitting GURCC ‘for personal reasons.’ If you mention the jockey or the doll, you run the risk of either encouraging or antagonizing the guy. This way, it’s really just a private communication between Moss and this asshole.”

  “I like it,” Felix said. “Give the old scribbler an exclusive.”

  “What if the guy doesn’t see it?” Marshall asked.

  “He’ll see it,” Harvey said. “He lives here. Or near here. I don’t think the guy drove long-distance to deliver sixty pounds of lawn jockey. In any case, if you give the story to Lassiter, it’ll be picked up. It’ll still end up on ESPN. If Moss picks his nose, it’ll end up on ESPN. What do you think, Moss?”