Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  Linderman clapped his hands and disappeared with Felix into Shalhoub’s office off the locker room. Harvey sat in front of his cubicle and watched one of the mobile lab men clear everything out of Rudy’s locker, a few down from his. The man gingerly placed the garments, Rudy’s glove, a bottle of Selsun Blue, and a package of sugarless bubble gum in bags and envelopes. When he was through, the only thing left was a strip of adhesive tape on the metal frame above the locker that read, “FURTH #29.”

  Before long, Tim Bayman, the Jewels’ pitching coach, came out of Felix’s office, where Linderman was conducting his interviews. The detective stood in the doorway looking at the team roster in one of the official programs. “Blissberg,” he called out and showed Harvey in. Linderman perched on the edge of Felix’s desk and waited until Harvey settled into a chair.

  “I’ve got a shirt like that,” Linderman said, pointing at the dark green Chemise Lacoste from which Harvey had painstakingly removed the alligator. “Mine’s red.”

  Harvey surveyed the detective. One of his legs was hooked over the desk corner, baring a pale patch of hairless shin above a thin white sock. He wore a big Timex. An extensive collection of Bic pens was jammed in the breast pocket of the seersucker jacket. Harvey was blearily staring at the pens when Linderman spoke again.

  “I know this is tough,” he said. “You feel like talking?”

  Harvey wondered what it was like to be a guy who was about to spend an afternoon telling thirty people how tough it was.

  “So,” Linderman said. “You got any ideas about Rudy Furth?”

  “Okay,” Harvey said in a daze.

  “Okay? Yeah, I like that. But it’s not much of an answer.”

  “We were roommates.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah, I guess I knew him pretty well.”

  “Do you know anybody who would want to kill him?”

  Harvey shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

  “Was he in any trouble?”

  Harvey just looked at him.

  “Let’s see,” Linderman said. “There’s gambling, for starters. How’s that? Or maybe he ran around with the wrong people. Woman trouble? Maybe he was sleeping with somebody’s wife. Am I making any sense to you? Did he ever tell you somebody was after him?”

  “No. I can’t see any of that.”

  Linderman waited for Harvey to continue, which he didn’t. “I mean, your roommate’s been murdered. You must know something about him.”

  “I know he was one of the few guys on the team I really got along with.”

  Linderman pushed himself off Felix’s desk and began circling it. “What’s wrong with the rest of the guys that you didn’t get along with them?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “How’d you mean it, then?” The detective stopped behind the desk to thumb through Felix’s desk calendar. He was working his mouth as if he had something lodged under his gum.

  “I just meant that Rudy and I—you know, roommates grow on each other. Can I have a cigarette?”

  “Take this one,” Linderman said, tossing him the unlit Marlboro he had been holding since the beginning of the interview between his thumb and middle finger. “It’s not doing me any good.” He fumbled another cigarette out of his pocket and began playing with it.

  “He was a funny guy,” Harvey said. “Like a big kid.”

  “Rest of the team get along with him?”

  “As far as I know.” Harvey glanced around the tiny office, trying to recall that he was at the ball park.

  “But not like you got along with him?” Linderman craned his neck to look at Harvey.

  “Maybe not. One thing about Rudy, he had a mouth on him. Some players don’t like that.”

  “You mean he talked too much?”

  “More like at the wrong times. He could get on a guy.”

  “Look,” Linderman said, walking again, “I know there’re about seven or nine things you’d rather be doing, but bear with me, will you? What do you mean, he could get on a guy?”

  Harvey struggled for an anecdote. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. The questions themselves fogged his memory. “Well, one thing he’d always do was if some guy complained about something, Rudy liked to say, ‘B.F.D.’ It didn’t matter what you were complaining about; it was just his way of getting attention, I guess. He was an orphan; he wanted people to like him, but he could rub them wrong. Rudy didn’t always wear real well.”

  “Am I supposed to know what B.F.D. is?”

  “Big fucking deal,” Harvey said.

  “I get it. But you don’t know who could’ve been rubbed the wrong way hard enough to kill him for it?”

  “No, I’m telling you, this whole thing doesn’t, it’s—”

  “You mean he had a mouth on him, but he never used it to give you, his roommate, any clue as to what he was doing in the whirlpool this morning?” Linderman heaved himself up on the desk and finally lit his cigarette with an 89-cent lighter he ferreted from his pants pocket. “There was no special tension between Rudy and any of the others?”

  “I don’t know of anything out of the ordinary.”

  “What’s the ordinary?”

  “Look, I don’t know. One guy doesn’t like another guy’s attitudes or his politics, or the way he borrows your shampoo and doesn’t give it back, or the fact that he gets more playing time. Do you like all the guys on the force?”

  “Did he carry a lot of money? Cash?”

  “He wasn’t broke.”

  “I mean, a lot of money. Like try a thousand dollar bill.”

  “A thousand?”

  “We found one in there with him.”

  “Where?”

  “In the whirlpool.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “No reason why you should’ve. They don’t float. There was a crumpled thousand dollar bill at the bottom of the whirlpool.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Sure it’s interesting. If it belonged to Rudy, then robbery probably wasn’t the motive. And if it didn’t belong to him, I’d like to know who.” Linderman tapped some ash into his palm, bounced it once, and let it fall to the floor. “Harvey, do you have your own key to the clubhouse?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, but that doesn’t—”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. I’m just asking. My keen deductive mind tells me that whoever killed your roommate didn’t have to have a key to get to him. See, Furth could’ve let his killer in, or he could’ve been in there all along and no one knew it. I might even entertain the thought that Furth could’ve been killed somewhere else and then put in the whirlpool.”

  Linderman spotted Felix’s ashtray, a ceramic piece in the shape of a hollowed-out half-baseball, and poked out his cigarette. Harvey did likewise. “See,” Linderman said, “the field’s wide open. I just thought you might want to narrow it for me.”

  Harvey shook his head.

  “All right,” Linderman said, pushing himself off the desk and walking to the door. “Why don’t we take this up again some other time?”

  Harvey got out of his chair. “You’ll find the bastard who did this,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Linderman took the rolled-up roster out of his inside jacket pocket and moved his finger until he found the name after Blissberg.

  “Les Byers,” he said thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the black kid who homered in extra innings a couple of nights ago?”

  WHEN HARVEY LEFT LINDERMAN, he still had the eggy taste of vomit in his mouth. He went over to the ice chest and pulled out a root beer.

  Happy Smith detached himself from a clutch of teammates standing nervously by the coffee machine and approached him.

  “You’re the smart one, Professor,” he said with the air of one old-timer consulting another. “You tell me since when they murder guys in the clubhouse.” Happy was thirty-four and had spent the last twelve years of his life as a second-string catcher for five di
fferent teams, like a seldom needed spare part kept in the trunk of the car.

  “I don’t know, Happy,” Harvey said between pulls on the soda. “I don’t know when they started doing it.” The door to the equipment room opened and Cleavon Battle, the Jewels’ first baseman, came out ahead of Bragalone, the other detective. “I need some air,” Harvey told Happy.

  “You’re lucky your name’s Blissberg,” Happy said.

  “How’s that?”

  “They’re going alphabetically, aren’t they? I’ll be here all day before the cops get around to me.”

  “I feel for you,” Harvey said and made for the clubhouse door.

  Frances Shalhoub was at the wall phone attached to one of the peeling pillars, her slender hand pressed to her forehead. “No, no, no, of course,” she was saying into the receiver. “I understand. You are his only family, though…. No…. Yes, as I said, we’ll be happy to take care of all that at this end….”

  In the players’ parking lot, a couple of newspaper reporters were talking to Campy Strulowitz. A van from one of the local stations had pulled up, and a television reporter in a Dacron blend suit stood next to it, grooming his hair in the sideview mirror.

  On the sidewalk, a nut vendor in a canvas porkpie hat glanced up from his cart. “What’s up, Harvey?” he called.

  “Knock off, Sam. No game today.”

  The old man ate one of his own pistachios. “No game? On account of what?”

  Harvey decided to walk home and took the enclosed pedestrian crosswalk over the expressway into the Portuguese neighborhood. Suddenly, he felt his stomach surge again, and he retched under a tree by the curb.

  The thought occurred to him that he hadn’t told Linderman about Rudy and Mickey when the detective asked if Rudy had any woman trouble. It sickened him to have to fight off thinking about the one time he had really hated Rudy. Of course, it had really been Harvey’s woman trouble, anyway, not Rudy’s. Soon after Harvey had met Mickey Slavin, while she was shooting a feature story about the team in May, he had introduced her to his roommate, and the three of them quickly formed a trio for occasional dinners out, movies, short trips. From the beginning, Harvey felt he had a claim on Mickey, but she clearly enjoyed the company of the two roommates too much to risk jarring the symmetry of her affection. Gradually, though, Mickey warmed up to Harvey, and when the two of them started sleeping together in June, Rudy took it in stride; as it was, he certainly got enough on his own. Then came the night at the Boston Sheraton, when somehow or other—in any case, Harvey didn’t blame himself—Mickey ended up in Rudy’s bed. Harvey and Mickey soon picked up where they had left off, but Rudy, who was pleasantly indifferent to the complexities of their threesome, had never mentioned the night at all.

  Harvey made his way down the brick sidewalks of Hope Street, past clapboard houses of yellow, ocher, turquoise, and pale green. They were set, without yards, directly into concrete. An old man in slippers was hosing down his car in a driveway. On a street corner, a few teenage boys in T-shirts and girls in tube tops and red toenail polish silently smoked. One of the boys recognized him: “Hey, Ha’vey, youse guys gonna win de pennet?”

  Harvey raised a noncommittal hand at him and kept walking. He was wondering what it said about him that Rudy had been as good a friend as he had on the ball club, even though just about the only thing they had in common was a fascination with Mickey Slavin.

  That Harvey was a baseball player at all, let alone a major leaguer who was batting .309 with just over a month to go in the season, still struck him as bizarre. He had grown up in a Jewish family outside Boston, where his father owned an Italian restaurant. Neither Al nor Mary Blissberg felt that baseball was the proper career for a child only two generations removed from a Polish shtetl. “My childhood,” he had quipped to a magazine writer back in the days when he talked freely to reporters, “was colored by a deep historical prejudice against wearing spikes to work.” Nonetheless, his aptitude for playing baseball attracted several pro offers, and he signed with Boston after his last year at the University of Massachusetts. His mother was able to overcome her opposition to his choice of career—death had by that time rendered his father’s opinion academic—when Harvey pointed out how vulnerable he would be to invitations to Sunday brunch once the Red Sox brought him up from the minors, which they did after a single minor league season.

  However, Harvey had never shaken off his inherited ambivalence toward the game; he continued to feel that he had somehow missed his proper calling, although he had no idea what that calling might be. For Rudy, on the other hand, the game was an all-day sucker. Baseball rescued him from a life of raising veal calves on his foster parents’ farm in southern Wisconsin; he had lost his parents in a car accident as a teenager. Now he always behaved like someone on furlough. “I love this game,” he once told Harvey, actually grabbing Harvey’s shirt to make his point. “I love it even when I lose.”

  Rudy wore fifty-dollar designer jeans and boots with three-inch heels, and he told all the tasteless jokes that had made the rounds the year before. He wore a gold I.D. bracelet on his right wrist and ignored his agent’s advice against making risky real estate investments. Rudy and the Minnesota Twins had parted company the previous winter shortly after he announced to the press that the Twins were “the horniest team in baseball and the guys want to get laid so bad they don’t have time to think about fundamentals.”

  Harvey liked Rudy for the very traits that some of their teammates regarded as bush league. Even when Harvey was angry at him, it was with the affectionate disdain of an older brother. At the same time he knew, even if Rudy didn’t, that their friendship would never have existed outside of baseball.

  Harvey stopped into a neighborhood tavern on Hope called the Nip ‘n’ Tuck. At noon, the only other customer was a woman in a floral housedress conversing with herself and stubbing out menthol cigarettes almost as soon as she lit them with a trembling hand. Harvey drank a bottle of Narragansett, slid off the stool, and went to the phone booth by the men’s room.

  Harvey dialed his older brother’s number in Evanston, Illinois. “Hi, Norm,” he said when his brother answered.

  “What’s the good news, Harv?” Norm said. “You calling from a submarine?” The connection was bad, and Norm’s voice sounded metallic.

  “I’m calling from a bar in Providence.”

  “You guys get rained out today?”

  “No. Rudy Furth was murdered last night.”

  There was a slight pause on Norm’s end. “You called to tell me that? C’mon, Furth hasn’t been able to get anyone out all season.”

  “Someone killed him last night. Dead.”

  A longer pause this time. “Wait a second. You’re not kidding, are you?”

  Harvey supplied what he could of the details. “I had to call someone,” he said.

  “Christ, that’s really horrible.” Another pause. “Born Racine, Wisconsin,” Norm said suddenly. “Lifetime record of forty-four and fifty-nine, two years with the Reds, four with the Twins. Are there any suspects?”

  Norm was a compulsive student of baseball and its statistics; Harvey thought Norm got more pleasure out of his baseball career than he himself did. If Norm didn’t know exactly how to respond to the news of Rudy’s murder, it was because he saw ball players less as human beings than as lines of agate type in The Baseball Encyclopedia.

  “Harv? You there, Harv?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Look, I know how you must feel.”

  “Good, because I don’t. I shared a hotel room with the guy in every city in the league. I know what color his goddamn toothbrush is—” He broke off.

  “You going to be all right?” Norm said.

  “Yeah. I’ll call you soon. Say hi to Linda.”

  “Harv, if you want to talk about it—”

  “I’ll talk to you soon, Norm.”

  Harvey walked along College Hill, where the streets have reassuring names like Hope, Friendship, Benefice
nt, and Benevolent. He lived on Benefit, halfway up the hill, where most of the buildings were Federal or Victorian or Greek Revival. The beauty of the neighborhood seemed to be trying to atone for the dreariness of the rest of the city. He had a few immense rooms on the second floor of a rambling red brick Victorian mansion, owned originally by General Ambrose E. Burnside, who served as governor of Rhode Island after the Civil War. This fact interested Harvey, who had written his undergraduate thesis on the Army of the Potomac. He didn’t particularly like Burnside—neither had President Lincoln—but he was willing to forgive him his mistakes in return for an apartment with high ceilings, a bow window, and a reasonably flattering view of Providence.

  Once inside, he flipped on the air conditioner and stood in the middle of his living room looking at his two mismatched club chairs, his horsehair love seat, and the swaying stacks of paperbacks on the floor next to the windows. Two neglected scheffleras and a framed poster for a Philip Guston exhibition constituted his only attempts at interior decoration. It was no way for someone who made $150,000 a year to live.

  He went to the kitchen and reviewed the contents of his refrigerator: Frank’s Louisiana Red Hot Sauce, calamata olives, Vitarroz green tabasco peppers, Zatarain’s New Orleans remoulade sauce, Lan Chi Brand Chili Paste with Garlic, Sanju’s South Indian Lime Pickle, Bolst’s Sweet Mango Chutney. A fondness for condiments was one of the few things that tied him to his dead restaurateur father.

  Eventually, he discovered the makings of a meal. He boiled some linguini, opened a can of minced clams, and, applying a culinary lesson he’d learned from Al Blissberg, made a clam sauce with the remains of an American chablis. He carried his lunch to the kitchen table, sat looking at it for five minutes, walked over to the sink, and dropped the meal down the disposal.

  BOB LASSITER OF THE Journal-Bulletin called that afternoon to ask what Harvey thought about the murder.