Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  Harvey hawked on the dugout floor. “If they always work, how come you have so many of them?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just a bad joke.”

  “No, I’m serious, Harvey. Why the slap at me?” His eyes got small and dark.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, but he knew he was going to say it anyway. “I heard you had some trouble in the sixties, that’s all.”

  Linderman looked around, then poked a square finger in Harvey’s chest. “I want to know something, good buddy. Are you one of those guys that’s got to run the whole show? Is that what I’m dealing with here?”

  “No,” Harvey said blandly.

  Linderman hiked up his pants. “Good. Because if you are, you may have some trouble right here in the eighties.” His pants fell back down around his hips, and he left them there. “What a smart-ass,” he muttered and walked back toward the clubhouse.

  At seven-thirty, the Jewels were all standing in the Yankee Stadium visitors’ dugout listening to a man with three chins and legs like duffel bags sing the national anthem at home plate. By seven-thirty, they had gone down one-two-three in the top of the first. Manomaitis popped up to third for the first out. Harvey stepped in, looked at a slider low and away, and lined the next pitch, another slider from Bruce Taunton, to that vast terrain that is left center in Yankee Stadium. Hazelwood was an eight-dollar cab ride from the ball, and Harvey was already thinking triple on his way to second when he looked up and saw Hazelwood flag the ball down, taking the last ten feet in a horizontal position. Hazelwood sat cross-legged way out there on the outfield grass, holding up his gloved hand with the ball in it for the second base umpire to see. Forty-five thousand fans got to their feet cheering. Harvey loped back, head down, to the dugout.

  He had barely shoved his batting helmet back into its cubby hole when Cleavon bounded Taunton’s first pitch to Rumpling, who threw him out by two steps.

  Harvey found Cleavon’s first baseman’s glove and infield ball and carried them out to him at first base, then ran out to center. Something didn’t feel right about his own glove when he slipped it on. He knew it so well—it was a MacGregor with an open web he had been using for five years—that he would have noticed if the thumb strap had been tightened a sixteenth of an inch. But it wasn’t the thumb strap. There was something wedged deep into the glove’s middle finger. When he got to center, he reached into the finger and pulled out a small piece of paper folded into quarters. When he opened it, he saw that it was a corner that had been ripped off a larger piece of wrapping paper, and there was a message on it, printed in childlike block letters:

  HE KNEW WHO HADN’T written it. Ronnie Mateo’s style of intimidation was less poetic, and he probably wasn’t even in New York. Someone could have been acting as Ronnie’s messenger, but that someone had to be connected with the club. His glove hadn’t been lying unattended in the dugout for more than twenty minutes before the game while he took batting practice; it was unlikely that anyone not with the club would have walked casually into the dugout and sifted through the various gloves until he found the one with BLISS written along the thumb in black marker. Whether or not Ronnie Mateo had had anything to do with it, the note was the work of somebody on the Jewels, somebody who would look perfectly natural picking up a glove, somebody, perhaps, who also liked to handle rats. It couldn’t have been Frances; if she wanted to send messages, she would find more civil ways. Had somebody seen him talking with Linderman and, putting that together with what Harvey had said to Bob Lassiter, figured that Harvey knew more than was good for him? If so, somebody was giving him too much credit.

  Harvey juggled Huddleston’s easy fly ball before catching it to retire the Yankees in the bottom of the first, and jogged in on heavy legs. He was playing one game against New York in front of forty-five thousand people. He was playing another, but he didn’t know against whom.

  The Providence dugout was quiet in the way dugouts are quiet when they’re occupied in September by teams with nowhere to go. Harvey tossed his glove on the bench near the end where Felix and Frances were sitting and sat down next to it. Felix clapped his hands slowly, like a man doing it underwater. Frances had a clipboard on her crossed legs and was doodling in the margin of a pitching chart. Harvey looked the other way, down a frieze of profiles: Salta, Rapp, Penzenik, Wilton, Van Auken, Wagner, Crop, Stiles, Manomaitis, Byers, Vedrine, Smith, Bayman, Bentz, Battle, Potter-Lawn. He looked across the field to the distant Jewels bull pen at Marlette, Other, O’Donnell, Weatherhead, Storella, Charness. One of them was a good enough poet to rhyme “eye” and “die.”

  Harvey turned to Felix on his right. “How’s it going, skipper?”

  Felix closed a fist over his big nose and milked it a few times. His eyes were rheumy. “Going good,” he said, “going good. I think we’re about to move into a winning posture, but we’ve got to get mad to win. Mad as the snake who married the garden hose. We’ve got to get mad and play like there’s no tomorrow. This guy Taunton can be taken to the cleaners.”

  Frances lifted her eyes from her clipboard, and they met Harvey’s for an instant. He turned away and clapped once loudly.

  “Let’s jump on Taunton!” he shouted. “Let’s jump on this guy and eat him up!”

  Harvey didn’t want to leap to conclusions, but the Jewels seemed to be staging a rally. A Randy Eppich double, a Steve Wilton single, a John Rapp sacrifice fly, a Charlie Penzenik double, an intentional pass to Les Byers, and a Rodney Salta bloop single gave Providence a 3-0 lead and runners at the corners. Taunton bore down and fanned Chuck Manomaitis for the second out, bringing Harvey to the plate.

  “Some powerhouse ball club you guys got tonight,” said DiFazio, the Yankee catcher, as Harvey pawed at the batter’s box with his left spike.

  “I think somebody forgot to tell us we were playing a first-place team. We really hate to embarrass you guys like this.”

  “How ’bout a curve to start you out?” DiFazio said.

  “As long as you put it right about here.” Harvey waved a horizontal hand at his waist.

  “Would that be the usual, sir, or an off-speed curve?”

  “Surprise me,” Harvey said and guessed, correctly, a slider. He put the fat part of the bat on the fat part of the ball and drove it to the same spot as in the first inning. This time Hazelwood didn’t have the proper cab fare, and the ball rolled past him, a white pea on a shiny green cloth under a black Bronx sky. Center fielder Bob Corley ran it down quickly in the gap with a backhanded stab, and as Harvey touched the inside corner of second he suddenly had doubts about reaching third. But he wanted a triple. Doubles were banal; there were too many ways to get them. Home runs were too sudden, and the excitement was only in where the ball went, not in what was happening on the field. But triples were aberrations, the rare product of location, circumstances, and speed. The game was not built for triples. Rudy had understood about triples. “I never mind giving up a triple,” he had said once.

  Carlos Bonesoro at third was trying to decoy Harvey. He was standing casually with his feet straddling the bag, watching Harvey, who was not fooled and knew a good relay from Rumpling would beat him. He put his head down and drove for the bag. Tony Cantalupa was on his knees in the coach’s box, signaling him to slide toward the home plate side of the base. Harvey faded with a hook slide and caught the base with his right toe as the slide carried his body into foul territory. Bonesoro gave him a sweep tag and fell on top of him. Through the dust, Harvey looked for the ump. Toby Kline pointed at Harvey, as if denouncing him at a political rally, and then jerked his arm back and shrieked, “The man is out! Oh, yeah,” he repeated, “the man is out! C’mon, Harvey, pick yourself up.”

  It was a close play, and Harvey would have bitched about the call, except for two things. On a close play with a sweep tag, the baserunner rarely feels the tag at all; he had no idea whether Bonesoro had gotten him or not. The second thing was that he had turned his left ankle when his s
pike caught the dirt on the slide, and the pain had temporarily taken his breath away. He lay where he was, on his back, while Tony screamed at Toby Kline.

  “Toby! His toe was there! The man just executed a perfect hook slide! Bonesoro missed him! Carlos, you tell him,” the third base coach yelled after the Yankee third baseman. “Carlos, come back here and tell the man you tagged air!”

  “No, no, no, Tony,” Kline was saying. “He got him on the shoulder before he hit the bag.”

  “Toby! Listen to me! The man was on the bag for a week before Bonesoro was anywhere near him!”

  “Now look, Tony. Let’s be reasonable. You already got five runs out of the deal. What do you want?”

  Arky Bentz, the Jewels’ trainer, was kneeling over Harvey now, manipulating his ankle. He took an aerosol container of ethyl chloride out of his pocket and sprayed it over Harvey’s sock. Arky helped him hobble back to the dugout on his frozen ankle. “I think that’s it for tonight, Professor,” he said and took him down the runway to the clubhouse.

  Duncan Frye was sitting on a folding chair next to a table with a transistor radio on it. “The radio said it was a nice slide, Professor,” he said.

  Arky removed Harvey’s shoe and sock, looked at the ankle again, tied on an ice pack with an Ace bandage, and went back to the dugout. Harvey sat with his left leg up on a chair and listened to the radio with Dunc. Rick Stiles, who had gone in to play center for Harvey, made a nice running catch on a Hazelwood drive. But Stan Crop got into trouble, and New York got a couple back in the inning. Dunc wandered into the trainer’s room and returned with a pint of apricot brandy, two Dixie cups, and a paper bag.

  “Let’s you and me have a nip, Professor,” he said. “Purely for medicinal purposes.” He poured two fingers in each cup and handed one to Harvey.

  “Whyn’t you go out and look at the game?” Harvey said. “You don’t have to keep me company.”

  “I’ve seen nine hundred thousand baseball games in my life. Nothing new in it for me.” He reached for a dirty towel in the bottom of a locker and folded it and dropped it to the right of his chair. He shot about three ounces of tobacco juice on it.

  “Dunc, what’s it like drinking brandy with chewing tobacco in your mouth?”

  “What’s it like without it?” he said and fired into the towel again. He nodded at Harvey’s ankle. “Bad?”

  “Nah. Two-day sprain if I coddle it. What’s in the bag?”

  Dunc picked it up off the floor. “Some stuff of Rudy’s.”

  “Stuff of Rudy’s?”

  “Here, take it. There’s not much in there, just some stuff I found on top of his locker after the cops had gone through and taken everything else. You two being friends, I thought you’d want it. I got to carrying it around for some reason, but I’m not the sentimental type.”

  There were only a few things in the bag. One of the pocket combs Ronnie Mateo had given Angel Vedrine, a half-finished pack of Camel Lights, a pair of Polaroid wraparound sunglasses, an errant pair of dirty sanitary hose, and a hardcover book about real estate investment. Harvey remembered that Rudy and his foster father had invested some money in a town house complex somewhere in Wisconsin.

  “I don’t know what you want to do with it,” Dunc said, pouring himself another finger of brandy. “You could just give it to the cops if you want.”

  “Sure, I could do that,” Harvey said. “Why were you carrying the stuff around with you?”

  “I don’t know. Like I say, I’m not the sentimental type.” A glob of fresh tobacco juice landed audibly on top of the others. “But he was an all right kid, and I miss him, Professor. I don’t guess there was many guys here who liked him much, except maybe you and me and maybe one or two others who could stand his ratchet-jawing. So I don’t know why I held on to the stuff, except maybe that, and you and me being the ones to find him and all.”

  “What do you make of it, Dunc?”

  “Damnedest thing.”

  “You hear anybody talking?”

  “More like the guys are making a point out of not talking.”

  Harvey wanted to show him the death threat, but didn’t. “Rudy never gave you a clue?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “And the night you left him in the whirlpool, he didn’t say anything unusual?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did it seem like he might be waiting for someone?”

  “Nope. He was just like I’d seen him on other nights when he stayed late to soak.”

  “And you’re sure he was the only one left in the clubhouse?”

  “Far as I know, Professor. ’Course I didn’t look every—I guess there’re a few places you could hide. Sometimes I get this thought about Rudy’s killer waiting down in the catacombs, just waiting for everybody to clear out. Seems to me whoever killed him would’ve had to know he was already in the whirlpool and was fixing to be there awhile.”

  “So you’re thinking what I’m thinking?” Harvey asked.

  “That it was one of the guys?”

  “Or somebody who knew one of the guys who knew that Rudy liked to soak. But I guess that doesn’t get us too far.”

  “Here you go,” Dunc said and poured more brandy into Harvey’s cup. They listened to the game, which the Yankees now led 6-5 in the fifth. In the sixth, Dunc got up to putter around the clubhouse and lay out fresh towels. They had worked their way down through most of the pint, and Harvey’s ankle felt pretty good. He undressed, showered, and eased into his street clothes—a pair of lightweight gray slacks, a white shirt, and an old pair of penny loafers. Dunc helped him wrap his ankle up again with more ice, and by the time Harvey made it down the runway to the dugout, it was the bottom of the eighth and the Jewels were down 8-6. The noise of the Yankee Stadium crowd, an endless liquid tittering, surprised him after the silence of the clubhouse.

  In the top of the ninth, Chuck Manomaitis walked to lead off, but was erased when Rick Stiles hit into a tailor-made 6-4-3 double play, and the Jewels were one out away from their ninth straight loss. Cleavon blooped a single to left, but when Randy bounced one down to Rumpling at short, the dugout began to pack up. However, the ball hit the lip where the infield grass meets the dirt and skidded under Rumpling’s glove and out into short left center. Two men on and Steve Wilton was up.

  Steve soaked a 3-2 count for all it was worth, fouling off five straight fastballs from reliever Jerry Flacke. Some of the players stood in the dugout and told Steve to have an eye and be a hitter and bear down up there. The next Flacke fastball was in Wilton’s wheelhouse, and Flacke turned away in disgust. The ball swam up into the night and reached the apex of its arc tiny and white against the sky. Hazelwood huddled in a crouch against the left field wall, waiting to leap, but as the ball descended, his body relaxed and straightened, and he turned back toward the infield, slapping his glove against his leg. The ball fell in the fifth row, and the Jewels were leading 9-8.

  When Steve crossed the plate in his high-waisted, self-satisfied trot, a few of the players went out to greet him and clap him on the back and rub his head. In the dugout, Felix got up and tousled Wilton’s hair. “How to be, big kid, way to hack it,” Campy hollered, “you’re the stick up there.” To show there were no hard feelings, Harvey yelled, “Nice job, Steve.” It would have been just like the old days, if there had been any old days for the Providence Jewels.

  Marcus Marlette mopped up in the bottom of the ninth, and the Jewels had broken the string. They were 64 and 74, still five games ahead of Toronto, and Harvey, with his l-for-2 showing, was batting .302.

  Back at the Warwick Hotel, just before eleven, Harvey asked at the front desk if there were any messages for him.

  “Sir, may I inquire how you fared tonight?” the desk clerk said. The British inflection covered his Queens accent about as thoroughly as The New York Times covered professional wrestling.

  “Sir”—Harvey winked—“the awesome Yankee juggernaut was repelled by the lowly Providence armada by a tally of nine
to eight.”

  “My felicitations,” the clerk said and gave him a note scrawled on hotel paper in a large looping hand. It said, “You’ll find me in the bar. Sharon Meadows.”

  SHARON MEADOWS WAVED ENERGETICALLY to Harvey from a table in the middle of the bar, and he hobbled over. She was a small woman in her late thirties with short black hair cut to look like a helmet. She had on a peach-colored blouse and over it a magenta Chinese tunic with embroidered parrots and pagodas and over that some kind of fuzzy shawl. She was wearing too many clothes, too much makeup, and too much jewelry. Her smile revealed a lot of gum, and she spoke with the adjectival incontinence of a press release.

  “Please don’t apologize,” she said after Harvey excused himself for being late. “Apologies are so useless most of the time, don’t you think? I mean, they’re squandered on such small occasions when we really ought to save them up for those larger moments when we really need them. I’m so happy you won tonight. The Yankees deserve a periodic lesson in humility. Winning must be such an exhilarating experience.”

  Harvey asked her to move to a more obscure table at the back of the bar, in case Frances Shalhoub made a practice of drinking in hotel lounges. As they threaded their way among the tables, he said, “Well, you sound like a baseball fan.”

  “Oh, I am. It’s such a tranquil, yet somehow passionate game. It’s somehow larger than life. I knew who you were the moment you came in because you have that marvelous, sturdy, athletic, tall look about you.”

  “I’m only five-one. It must be the lighting.”

  “You know—here, let me get the waitress—you know, it was Frances who first exposed me to baseball. We were doing some public relations for the Mets—special events and such—and I went to some of the games and met some of the players. I mean, they were such driven individuals, yet so relaxed at the same time. I don’t suppose that football players are quite like that. Their sport isn’t so… so what—so leisurely, so pastoral. Baseball absolutely fascinates me, it really does. I must confess”—she blushed into her drink—“I must confess that I’m somewhat awed just meeting you. I mean, baseball is something of a religion in this country, isn’t it, and that makes you what—that makes you, it gives you an aura, a kind of glow. I’m so pleased to meet you.”