The Tomb That Ruth Built (A Mickey Rawlings Mystery)

by Troy Soos

  At the far end of the clubhouse was a locker with “Rawlings” written on it in chalk. The starters got metal name plates; utility players and rookies got chalk.

  With the silent Andrew Vey standing so close that I felt like he had me under arrest, I changed quickly from my perfectly clean Yankee pinstripes into a suit and tie. The uniform belonged to the team, but the spikes, along with my mitt and an old homemade bat, were mine and I wasn’t sure if I should take them. I decided against lugging the equipment with me. I left my gear in the locker and closed the door quietly, figuring I could come back later. Maybe, I thought hopefully, I’ll be going to a ball club that will actually want me to put the equipment to use.

  Some of the other players were already in the showers, sending wisps of steam to the ceiling. Most sat around in various stages of undress, chatting, smoking, and chewing tobacco. I tried not to catch anyone’s eye as I followed Vey out.

  Vey led the way upstairs through hallways that smelled of fresh paint and plaster. The playing field had been finished by opening day, but much of the stadium’s interior was still under construction. My escort didn’t say a word, but continued to hitch his shoulders like he had ants in his suit. I was content to forego conversation since I was busy wondering where Margie and I would be headed next, and trying to figure out how we would get by financially if I wasn’t quickly picked up by another team.

  We arrived at a pebbled glass door with “Edward G. Barrow” painted on it in gold lettering. Vey rapped on the glass. At the gruff command to “Come in!” he opened the door for me to pass through. I did so, and Vey followed me to take a position like a sentry just inside. Three other men were in the room and I wondered how many they thought it took to fire a mere utility player.

  The spacious office was still unfinished and painters’ drop cloths covered parts of the floor. It was furnished, however, and appeared fully operational as the team’s headquarters.

  Ed Barrow, a hulking man with hedgehogs for eyebrows, sat at a massive mahogany desk with several empty bookcases towering behind him. Barrow was the Yankees’ business manager and the only man in the room whom I’d met before. That was a few months ago, in the team’s Times Square office, when I had signed my contract to play for New York.

  I had never met Jacob Ruppert in person, but the club’s primary owner was easy to recognize. As usual, he was impeccably dressed and groomed. The wealthy Ruppert, whose fortune had been made in beer, was known to employ an extensive staff of servants including a full-time valet. He was in his mid-fifties with thin graying hair and a trim mustache that was almost pure white. Ruppert paced agitatedly in front of a credenza. His aristocratic face was flushed, as if he had over-imbibed in the Knickerbocker beer his brewery used to produce. He was muttering to himself in a German accent.

  Leaning nonchalantly against a file cabinet was a lean, dark-haired man I didn’t recognize. He wore a rumpled khaki suit and a world-weary expression. A long-stemmed briar pipe was between his lips, but no smoke came from the bowl, and an old fedora was atop the file cabinet. He held a notepad in one hand and a pencil stub in the other. Probably a reporter, I thought, although I couldn’t see that my dismissal from the team was all that newsworthy.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Rawlings,” Barrow began courteously. “I’m sorry to have to get you up here so quickly, but we’ve run into a bit of difficulty and it needs immediate attention.”

  Ruppert squawked, “ ‘Difficulty’ you call it? It’s a disaster is what it is! He’s out to ruin me!”

  How the hell was I going to ruin Ruppert? I wondered. Was my three thousand dollar a year salary going to bankrupt him?

  Barrow let the team president rant for a while before calmly replying, “It isn’t a disaster yet, Colonel, and we are going to do everything we can to prevent it from becoming one.” Ruppert had once been given the largely ceremonial rank of “Colonel” in the National Guard and he enjoyed being addressed by that title. Barrow looked up at me with sharp dark eyes under his massive brows. “And you, Mr. Rawlings, seem to be in a unique position to help us with that task.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said honestly. I didn’t recall ever being so thoroughly flummoxed.

  Ruppert continued to mumble about impending disaster. From what I could catch of his ramblings, everyone from New York Giants manager John McGraw to Yankees co-owner Til Huston was out to ruin him.

  The man at the file cabinet spoke around the stem of his pipe. “What do you know of a man named Spats Pollard?” He kept his thin face at a downward angle and looked at me the way people with spectacles peer over the top of them.

  There was something familiar about the Pollard name, but I couldn’t place it. “I don’t think I know him at all.”

  Barrow cleared his throat loudly. “Permit me to make the introductions.” He jerked his head toward the man in khaki. “This is Detective Luntz of the New York City Police Department.” Looking directly at me, Barrow said, “You were teammates with Spats Pollard on the Cubs.”

  That would have been 1918. “Oh, yes.” Now I remembered the name, but I barely remembered Pollard. That had been a chaotic, war-shortened season, with new players continually coming up to replace those who went into the service.

  “Did you know him well?” Barrow asked.

  “No. He was a dead-armed pitcher who would have had trouble making a minor league team if it wasn’t for the war. He could put the ball over the plate, but it usually came right back at him. I think he was only on the club for a couple of months and didn’t pitch in more than a handful of games.”

  The detective spoke again. “How well did you know him off the field?”

  “I never had anything to do with him.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  I tried to recall what I knew of Pollard. “I didn’t like him all that much,” I answered. “He thought he was the best pitcher since Cy Young and he blamed everybody else when he didn’t win. And I heard that he always had some racket going—crooked card games, selling stolen watches. But I never had any dealings with him myself, so I can’t say for sure. Why?”

  Barrow and the detective exchanged looks. The business manager straightened a sheaf of papers on his desk before answering. “Mr. Pollard was found in the wall of a concession stand this morning.” He adjusted the papers again. “More precisely, his body was found. With three bullets in it.”

  Geez. Not a murder.

  Ruppert stopped his pacing and cried, “It’s to ruin me, I tell you! What will happen to my beautiful new stadium when people learn it has bodies buried in it?”

  Luntz said quietly, “Only one body.” He smiled wryly. “So far.”

  There was no indication that Ruppert heard him. The owner walked up to me and said solemnly, “Rawlings, you do what I ask of you. Find out who is behind this terrible thing.” He made a slight bow. “You do this for me, and I promise you will have a friend in Jacob Ruppert.”

  Before I could answer, Ruppert strode to the door. Andrew Vey jumped to open it for him and the president was gone.

  I looked back and forth from Barrow to Luntz in growing confusion. I was still trying to absorb the truly important news that apparently I was not being released, and couldn’t fathom what Ruppert had been talking about. I hoped that one of the men would enlighten me.

  Ed Barrow spoke up. “Colonel Ruppert has gotten right to the point: We would like you to investigate this matter.”

  “Why me?” I gestured at Luntz. “You got a detective right here. What can I do that he can’t?”

  Barrow answered, “For one thing, you knew Pollard personally—”

  “Barely. Until you reminded me, I didn’t even remember his name.”

  “Also, it is no secret that you’ve done this sort of thing before.” A small smile creased Barrow’s bulldog face. “And you have had some rather impressive successes.”

  That didn’t mean I wanted to get involved in “this sort of thing” again. “I’m sorry, Mr. Barrow. B
ut all I want to do is play baseball. And I really don’t know any more about Spats Pollard than what I already told you.” Actually, if Barrow knew how little I was following things so far, he would probably realize that I wasn’t suited to investigating anything more than stolen bases.

  Barrow tried to look understanding. “We have no intention of interfering with your playing. I was happy to sign you to a contract and I consider you a valuable member of the team.” The words were soothing but the tone was totally lacking in conviction. He went on, “Of course, Detective Luntz will lead the official investigation. We simply hope that, as a player, you might have access to avenues of information that he doesn’t.”

  Luntz spoke up again. “You’re correct about Pollard being a petty crook, but he was trying to break into the bigtime. With Prohibition, he decided to get into the bootlegging business.”

  Then it’s a job for the Prohibition Bureau, not Mickey Rawlings, I thought. “I don’t know anything about bootlegging,” I said.

  Barrow countered, “You know one of Pollard’s customers.”

  Luntz answered my blank stare. “Pollard had a list of names in his jacket—names of customers, it appears.”

  Barrow said, “One of them is your roommate.” He spread his hands. “As I said, you are in a unique position to look into this for us.”

  Oh no. I knew that having Babe Ruth for roommate was going to be trouble for me.

  “Here’s what we would like you to do.” Barrow leaned forward and his eyebrows drew together in one thick furry line. “You talk to Ruth, maybe some others, and see what you can find out about his connection to Pollard. Whatever you find out, you report to Mr. Vey—he’s my personal assistant and talking to him is the same as talking to me.” He paused. “But do not talk about this to anyone else.” Luntz tapped the stem of his pipe on his teeth and Barrow added, “Of course, you may speak with Detective Luntz as well. The important thing is that this entire situation—”

  “You mean Pollard’s murder?” I interrupted. Calling it a “situation” wasn’t going to change the fact that the former pitcher had been shot and killed.

  “Presumed murder,” Barrow acknowledged. “But whatever it’s called, it must be kept quiet. Mr. Ruppert has put a lot of money into this ballpark and we can’t risk bad publicity.” He shook his head. “A body turning up in the new park, Babe Ruth being involved with gangsters… Those kinds of things can be devastating to us.” Barrow paused again. “Of course, you can only do this for us if you’re on the team, so you can think of it as job security.”

  There it was, an unspoken threat: If you don’t do it, you’re likely to find yourself off the team.

  “I’d like to think about it,” I said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Start with Pollard,” suggested Luntz. “I always try to learn about the victim first, and work back from there.”

  “Haven’t you done that yourself?”

  “I tried to.” He took the pipe from his mouth and looked down at the bowl. “The problem is Pollard disappeared two years ago. How he ends up in a wall that didn’t exist until a month ago beats the hell out of me.”

  Chapter Four

  “A little to the left,” Margie said.

  I moved the painting to the left, putting it exactly where it had been before she’d instructed me to move it to the right.

  “Perfect!” she decreed.

  I marked the spot, hammered a nail into the wall, and hung the picture in place. It was a still-life of a blue vase filled with brightly colored flowers that looked the same to me as every other painting of that sort. Margie had found it, along with a few framed prints of similar themes, at a second-hand shop on Tremont Avenue.

  This was the first chance I’d had to help her set up our new home in the Bronx. I didn’t know anything about decorating, but it turned out to be easy: I put things wherever Margie wanted them and agreed with whatever she suggested. I felt badly enough that we’d had to relocate again, and I was happy to let her set up the flat however she liked.

  We had been unexpectedly uprooted in February. I’d had a solid season with an outstanding St. Louis Browns team last year—coming within one game of winning the American League pennant—and I had expected to remain with them for 1923. Then I was traded to the Yankees for “a player to be named later” and Margie and I had to make an abrupt move to New York. I had been traded for that “player to be named later” so often, that I sometimes wondered if I had ever ended up being traded for myself.

  Together, we’d found this second-floor furnished apartment on East 170th Street, not far from Claremont Park and within walking distance to the stadium. The one-bedroom walkup was small but clean. Its kitchen was modern and we had our own bathroom supplied with hot running water. We had barely signed the lease when I had to leave for spring training in New Orleans, leaving Margie to take care of the new place alone.

  As usual, she took care of things quite well. Margie got the furniture moved in, painted the bedroom, and found herself a job at Griffith’s movie studio. All that was left for me to do now was move a few things around—and I suspected that she’d only left me this task so that I could feel I was making some kind of contribution to our new home.

  “I think the cabinet might look better on the other side of the door,” Margie murmured, with her forefinger pressed against her chin.

  I stifled a groan. With all our moves over the years, we’d learned to limit ourselves to the bare minimum of furniture. There were two luxuries we always took with us, though: my floor-model Victrola and a china cabinet of Margie’s that she kept as a family heirloom. Moving that massive walnut piece would require first removing every piece of china to avoid breakage and then a great deal of muscle strain on my part.

  “Well, let’s leave it there for now,” she decided, much to my relief. “I want to get the prints up first.” Standing away from the wall, and eying the possibilities like an artist stepping back from his easel to study a partially finished painting, she said, “How about putting the one with the daffodils to the left of the window?”

  I grabbed a framed print of a flower-filled basket. The blossoms in the picture nearly matched the color of Margie’s gingham frock.

  “Those are lilacs,” she said.

  I put the wrong print back on the floor and picked up another. At Margie’s nod, I lifted it to the wall and slid it around until I hit the spot she wanted.

  I had to tell Margie about my meeting with Jacob Ruppert and Ed Barrow, but I wasn’t eager to raise the subject. She had readily gone along with us suddenly moving halfway across the country, but I doubted that she would be as agreeable to me getting involved in another murder investigation. When I opened my mouth to broach the subject, my tongue balked. The words that came out instead were, “How are things at the studio?”

  “Confusing,” she answered. “With Mr. Griffith away, no one seems to know what to do. I was hired to help design stunts and double for the actresses in action scenes. It would be like making my old serials again. But for some reason, Tom Van Dusen has me organizing clothes in the wardrobe department.”

  “It safer than doing stunts,” I said. Margie’s career as a leading actress had come to an abrupt end when she fell off a camel while filming one of her exotic action pictures. The injury required hip surgery and she was left with a slight limp that was exaggerated on screen. I thought it just added an appealing little hitch to her walk.

  “It’s not about safety,” Margie snorted. “Tom simply likes to play the boss while Mr. Griffith is away. He loves giving orders.”

  “He did seem awfully full of himself,” I said. “I know he’s a friend of yours, but—”

  “Oh, Tom’s a complete ass—and we’re not friends. I was friends with Natalie in the old days, and she’s his…” Margie stepped back and studied the print. “You know, you were right,” she said. “The lilacs would look better there.”

  I swapped prints again. I hadn’t liked Natalie Brock
man much more than I did Tom Van Dusen, but who was I to judge Margie’s friends? After all, I’d certainly had a few odd—and sometimes unsavory—companions during my baseball career. “How did you and Natalie get to know each other?” The mounting wire on the frame was frayed at one end, so I unwound it and tried to make it more secure.

  Margie sat down on the sofa and tucked her legs beneath her. “When I first went to Hollywood, a few of us girls rented a bungalow together. Natalie was one of them. She was so much fun—always playing pranks and cracking jokes. She once crashed a stuffy party at Mary Pickford’s house by pretending to be a countess from Transylvania!” Margie laughed. “We were like kids. Nobody took the movies all that seriously back then, so we had fun at work and even more fun after work. And it was all pretty innocent—not like what you read about.”

  “I can’t imagine Natalie being fun,” I said, recalling Brockman’s bored expression and whiny voice.

  “Oh she was.” Margie’s smile faltered. “Then she started to enjoy the parties a little too much, and they weren’t as innocent any more. Eventually she’d show up at the studio too tired to work. One of the older actors gave her a ‘pick-me-up’ and she got hooked on them. You remember what happened to Wally Reid?” Only three months ago, Wallace Reid, the All-American movie star, had died in a sanitarium from morphine addiction at the age of thirty-one.

  “She was an addict?” I asked, putting the final twist on a loose strand of wire.

  “Natalie would try whatever drug anybody gave her, and if she liked it she’d take a lot of it. She got hooked on dope and it almost killed her. Eventually she kicked the habit, but she’s never been the same. Now she goes from day to day and doesn’t seem to care about very much at all. Instead of making movies, she attaches herself to the men who make movies. They keep her in bit parts and nice clothes. And champagne—she won’t take anything stronger than champagne.”