Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  Molikoff clucked his tongue. “No, no, I am fine.” He took off his suit jacket and turned over a new page in his notebook. “So,” he said, “what about your family? They are baseball fans?”

  Molikoff was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and Harvey saw the pale blue numbers tattooed on his forearm.

  “This?” Molikoff said, raising his forearm.

  “You know,” Harvey said, “when I look at that, it makes me feel slightly ridiculous being a baseball player.”

  Molikoff regarded his tattoo impassively. “Not to worry. My bat luck. But you see”—it was his turn to spread his hands and shrug—“my luck was not so bat. Here I am.”

  On Friday night, the Yankees beat the Jewels and Bobby Wagner 7-2, dropping his record to 8 and 17. On Saturday, Harvey’s ankle was strong enough for Felix to insert him in the lineup as the designated hitter while Dan Van Auken scattered nine New York singles for a 5-3 victory, the Jewels’ second in their last nine games. On Sunday, Andy Potter-Lawn was cruising along with a four-hitter for six innings before three Providence errors in the seventh cost him his composure and the lead. New York won 6-4. Harvey went 4-for-9 in the four-game series and was batting .304.

  Baltimore was next, and the Orioles were as hot as the wilting weather. On Tuesday night, Baltimore’s Henry Ludell held the Jewels to two runs and four hits, but twenty-two-year-old Eddie Storella, after vomiting twice in the clubhouse before the game, proved better, and Providence won 2-1. Stan Crop took the loss on Wednesday, 8-2, and Bobby Wagner could barely get anyone out in the first inning on Thursday on the Jewels’ way to a 5-1 defeat. The Toronto Blue Jays had somehow managed to win five of six in the past week, and Providence was only two games out of the Eastern Division cellar, with a record of 66 wins and 78 losses. They were 3-11 since the night Rudy was murdered; the team batting average had dropped from .256 to .246. Harvey kept his average afloat at .306. It was September 13, and there were seventeen days left in the season.

  On his way down to the Baltimore Hilton coffee shop on the morning of the team’s last day in Baltimore, Harvey ran into Les Byers in the elevator. Byers was dressed in a purple acetate shirt and ivory pants, and he was complaining about a bad investment in a friend’s soybean curd dairy in upstate New York. “I underestimated the future of tofu, my man,” he said. “Join me for some eggs over easy?”

  Les spotted Steve Wilton alone in a booth in the coffee shop and dragged Harvey over. Steve was absorbed in the Jumble word puzzle in the Baltimore Sun and mumbled an unintelligible greeting when they sat down. He was running the eraser of his pencil back and forth over his lip.

  The menu was written on the placemats, and a waitress in a stiff red uniform, her lacquered hair set in swirls like the icing on a chocolate cake, took down their orders for two Number Threes and a Number Four. Steve pushed his newspaper under Harvey’s nose.

  “I can’t unscramble this one,” he said. “Take a crack at it, will you, Professor? The letters spell ‘nigame.’”

  “Enigma,” Harvey said.

  “What?”

  “I said ‘enigma.’ As in who killed Rudy.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Steve said.

  Les jumped in. “Man, this club is bad news. I don’t know who killed him, but just about every mother on the team thinks some other mother on the team did it. So nobody want to bring it up with anybody ’cause they afraid they might be talking to the dude hisself.”

  “You’re not afraid to bring it up,” Steve grumbled without raising his eyes from the newspaper.

  “And, man, nobody want to bring it up ’cause they afraid the people’ll think they the murderer. You know, like just by talking about it the people’ll think they covering up.” Les took a few sugar packets out of the wire holder and began dealing them out on the table in front of him. “You’d think that if anyone of us the one,” he went on, “we be acting weird. At least he be screwing up on the field, and then the people’d know. Man, there no way you kill some dude and then go out and play good baseball. The problem is”—he shuffled some sugar packets—“everybody on the team be acting weird, so how do you know? Now, all I know, man, is that there no way it be somebody in the infield. See, infielders social. We all nice dudes in the infield, get along with everybody else. Infielders just don’t be the killing kind. But outfielders, they something else.” He panned from Harvey’s face to Steve’s. “You guys loners. You stand out there all alone having evil thoughts, man. Your basic antisocial type of dude. What you think of that, Steve?”

  Steve looked up, then slid his newspaper under Harvey’s nose again. “I’m having trouble with this one, too, Professor.” He pointed to a scramble of letters that read “davip.” “Take a crack at it for me, will you?”

  Compared with Baltimore, where the weather still thought it was summertime, Providence had autumn written all over it. The air was cool and thinned out, and the trees up on College Hill were blotchy with red, gold, and orange. The fall semesters at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design were a week old, and the sidewalks were filled with students in their baggy corduroys and knee socks. At the bottom of the hill, the sun struck the planes of the buildings at a sharp angle. On the north side of town, the white Georgian marble dome of the State House glistened like a varnished egg. The city almost looked like a place you would want to live.

  The Jewels were glad to get to Providence, but so were the Toronto Blue Jays. Before two more healthy Rankle Park crowds, the Blue Jays embarrassed the Jewels 4-0 on Friday evening and 7-5 on Saturday afternoon. The two teams were now tied for the honor of last place in the American League East. A winning percentage of .452 was among the highest in years for a last-place team this late in the season, but it was little consolation for the Jewels, who only two and a half weeks before had been on speaking terms with .500.

  Harvey was having bad dreams. On Saturday night, he dreamed he came up to bat at Rankle Park and the scoreboard flashed his average as .044. Rudy Furth was pitching to him, and he was throwing the ball underhand.

  FRANCES WAS WEARING A shrimp-colored knit dress and sunglasses with huge circular lenses. Linderman was in his polo shirt with the sailboats again. It was eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, September 16, and they sat together in the fourth row of the boxes behind the Jewels’ dugout at Rankle Park. They both had their feet hooked over the seats in front of them, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  Harvey was on his way to the batting machine under the left field stands, carrying two new bats that were a couple of ounces lighter than his usual. His arms had been tired at the plate for the last few games, he hadn’t been getting around well on the fastball, and he wanted to see if a lighter bat made any difference. The field was empty and peaceful except for two members of the grounds crew motoring around the outfield on their Lawn Boys. Then he heard Frances’s light laugh, and he turned to see her in the boxes, her head thrown back so that the rich fall sun burned whitely on her arched neck. Linderman was leaning toward her with his arm resting casually on the back of her seat, and he was explaining something to her with the aid of his left hand. He was animated, like a man who thinks he may be getting somewhere with a beautiful woman, and Frances was laughing with a forced gaiety that showed he wasn’t.

  That afternoon, Harvey carried one of his new bats to the plate in the ninth inning of a 4-4 with Toronto, singled to left center, stole second and third, and came home with the winning run on Randy Eppich’s sacrifice fly. Providence was a game ahead of Toronto, and Harvey was back at .309.

  “Hi, Norm,” Harvey said Sunday night when he picked up the phone in his living room.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “The ring of the phone has a certain insistent quality when you call. What’s up?”

  “How could you guys let the Blue Jays take two out of three?”

  “I’m tired, Norm.”

  “And how could Felix pull Van Auken out of the game on Friday night in the fifth, when he’s only one run
down and he’s throwing smoke?”

  “What makes you so sure it was Felix? Maybe it was Frances Shalhoub.”

  “Are you telling me those rumors are true—that she’s actually calling the shots in the dugout? What kind of shit-shack ball club are you?” Norm’s voice was careening.

  “Look, Norm, I don’t know what she does or doesn’t do in the dugout. Half the time I’m standing out in center field. But even if she is making decisions, she’d be no worse than Felix.”

  “Listen, Harv, if you’d study the statistics, you’d know that Van Auken gets stronger the longer he’s in the game. If he makes it to the fifth, he’s usually good for a full nine. Now look”—Harvey heard him rustle some papers—“Van Auken’s taken a lead into the sixth inning nine times this season, and he’s won seven of those games. In none of those seven wins did he give up more than a run after the sixth. How could they take him out?”

  “He had a blister, Norm. On his index finger. And he broke it open in the sixth. And you can’t pitch if you have an open wound on the index finger of your throwing hand.”

  “Oh,” Norm said, finally. “Listen, I didn’t call about that, anyway. I called because I’ve been looking over some Jewels statistics—”

  “You don’t say.”

  “—and look what I found. This is fascinating. Stan Crop has started twenty-five games for you this season. In all but two of those starts, Harv, he’s given up at least one run in the second inning. In twenty-three out of twenty-five second innings, he’s scored on. You know what that tells me, Harv? The guy ought to come into the game in the third inning, that’s what. You ought to throw a reliever in there to pitch the first two, then bring in Crop because, I’m telling you, the guy’s a wizard after the second inning.”

  “That’s fascinating, Norm.”

  “C’mon, Harv, this is me, your brother. We grew up together. We used to spend hours over the box scores, quizzing each other about starting lineups. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll bet you can’t remember the starting nine for the ’sixty-two Washington Senators anymore.”

  “You win.”

  “Okay,” Norm said. “Harry Bright at first, Chuck Cottier at second, Bob Johnson and Johnny Schaive split the job at third, Ken Hamlin at short, an outfield of Jim King, Jimmy Piersall, and Chuck Hinton, and Bob Schmidt behind the plate.”

  “Norm?”

  “I know, Harv. You’re going to tell me how crazy I am.”

  “Ken Retzer, Norm.”

  “Ken Retzer?”

  “Yeah, Norm, Ken Retzer. I think you’ll discover that Ken Retzer started more games behind the plate in ’sixty-two than Schmidt.”

  “Ken Retzer?”

  “That’s what I said, Norm. Ken Retzer.”

  There was silence for ten seconds. “You’re right,” Norm said at last. “Damn you, Harv, you’re absolutely right. Okay, I owe you one. Remember, dinner’s on me in Chicago next week.”

  Monday morning’s paper contained a squib on page three saying that the police investigation into Rudy’s murder was continuing, but had not turned up any convincing leads. “We’re not giving up by any means,” Linderman was quoted as saying, “but this is one of the more baffling murder cases we’ve seen in a while.” The sluggishness of the investigation was indirectly explained on page one. A few days earlier, two schoolchildren had been found strangled to death in a playground on the city’s affluent East Side. Rudy’s death had taken a back seat.

  Harvey fried an egg, melted some grated Parmesan over it, slapped it between two slices of toasted rye, and dialed the phone number of Pro-Gem, Inc., in Pawtucket. Marshall Levy’s secretary, who sounded as if her larynx had ascended into her sinuses, put him right through.

  “Well, how nice to hear from you, Harvey,” Levy said with executive cheerfulness. “It’s not contract time yet, is it? I thought you guys only spoke through your agents.”

  “Actually, Mr. Levy, this call has nothing to do with me. It’s about someone else.”

  “Well, I’ve got a few minutes. Go ahead.”

  “It’s something I’d rather see you about in person. As soon as possible.”

  Levy hmmmed. “Let me look at the old calendar. Hmmm. I’ve got lunch at one, and it looks here like I’ll be tied up all afternoon. But I’ll tell you what. If you can get over here this morning, I don’t see why we can’t chat for a minute or two.”

  Lost in thought, Harvey sped through a red light on the way to Pawtucket. If Frances did own a piece of the team, how could it possibly profit her to put Rudy in a position to be killed, or to have him killed, or—the likelihood of this was so remote that he flicked it off his thoughts like a crumb—kill him herself? He tried to draw lines from Frances through Ronnie Mateo to Rudy, then from Ronnie through Frances to Rudy. If the thread passed through someone else entirely—a player on the team, perhaps—he was still at a loss there. He had ceased trying to read significance into his contact with his teammates—into Les Byers’s nervous chatter, Steve Wilton’s sullenness, Cleavon Battle’s protestations. If he ever learned what he didn’t know now, it would probably come in an unguarded moment, like a fastball up under the chin when you were expecting a curve.

  Harvey drove up to the low white brick plant in a Pawtucket industrial park and slipped his Citation in among the Buick Regals, Chrysler Cordobas, and Ford Grenadas. Next to the path leading to the smoked-glass entrance, a rectangular sign in the grass read: Pro-Gem: Distinctive Jewelry for America.

  The Rhode Island costume jewelry industry was in its worst downturn since World War II and a constant target for the local media. It thrived on a huge illegal underground of Portuguese and Southeast Asian immigrants, who did piecework in sweatshops and at home. The small costume jewelry operations around the state were characterized by unsanitary work conditions, metal dust and chemical fumes, unvented vats of hot acid, violations of minimum wage and overtime laws, and the threats of epoxy poisoning, chronic tracheal bronchitis, asbestosis, and severe skin diseases. Only the few big firms, of which Pro-Gem was the largest, were aboveboard, and there were rumors that even the big firms could no longer survive in the market without the help of poor people making cheap earrings in shabby back rooms without toilets.

  Harvey walked down the side of the plant to an open doorway next to the loading docks. He stepped inside to an area as large as an airplane hangar. Women in hair nets sat at rows of long tables gluing rhinestones to rings, and carding and linking jewelry pieces. The air was powdery with blue smoke pouring from two enormous casting machines off to the right. Men in T-shirts and goggles ladled molten metal into machines that pumped out tiny angel figurines into twenty-gallon tubs. Solderers in overalls pushed huge wheeled racks in and out of the chemical plating room in one corner. The floor at Harvey’s feet was covered with metal shards and glittering colored dust.

  A powerfully built short man in a Hawaiian shirt walked quickly past, looked at him, and said, “You are the one waiting for the bill of lading?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I work for Mr. Levy.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Harvey pulled a necklace out of his pocket, the one Ronnie Mateo had given him. “Is this one of the items we make?”

  The man barely looked at it. “We make about half a million of ’em a year. How come you work here and you don’t know we do about half a million of those a year?”

  “I’m new,” Harvey said.

  Marshall Levy’s office was decorated with silver Levolor blinds, a charcoal carpet, cushioned teak armchairs, George Kovacs lamps, and a marble-top desk on which you could play half-court basketball. Levy rose from behind it in a chalk-stripe gray suit, a light gray spread-collar shirt, and a red silk tie. There was nothing cheap about him, and he had enough oil in his voice to deep-fry a seafood platter.

  “Gosh, Harvey, it’s good to see you,” he said, shaking hands over the desk. “Sit down. Gee,
you’ve been playing great baseball for us this season. Frances keeps saying you’re the only offense we’ve got left. I wish your hitting was contagious.” He laughed without moving his lips.

  “It’s about Rudy,” Harvey said.

  “Gee, that was a terrible, terrible thing.” Levy lowered his eyes solemnly and pressed his palms together in front of his mouth. “You know about the scholarship fund we set up in his name, don’t you? And his pension money is going to his foster parents out in Wisconsin.”

  “That’s good.”

  “The authorities don’t seem to be getting anywhere with it.” He moved three paper clips from one side of his blotter to the other. “But you know this town, Harvey. You can never tell which side of the law anybody’s on.”

  Harvey ran his finger along the edge of Levy’s desk. “Rudy was a good friend of mine.”

  “Sure, sure. You two were roommates, after all.”

  “I’ve got this vague feeling that Rudy may have been mixed up with some unpleasant types.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a guy who hangs out at the park a lot before games. I’ve even seen him at practice once. Now, the night Rudy was murdered, this guy called me over and wanted to sell me a bunch of costume jewelry. Just like that. This same guy once tried to sell Rudy some color television sets, and I don’t know if you know, but the cops found some IBM typewriters in Rudy’s town house after he was killed.”

  “That’s interesting, Harvey. But why’d you come to me with this?”

  “As I say, he tried to sell me some of these.” Harvey laid the necklace on Levy’s desk. “It’s one of yours.”

  “Now, that’s strange, isn’t it?” Levy said evenly. “But gee, Harvey, there’re hundreds of jewelry manufacturers in this state, and a lot of them—”

  “No, it’s one of yours. I checked already.”

  “I see.” Levy reached over to pick up the necklace and played with it in his fingers. “Why don’t you describe this man to me?”