Dead Game

by Michael Avallone

  Dead Game

  Michael Avallone

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  BEVERLY HILLS

  2012

  Copyright © 2012 Susan Avallone and David Avallone. All rights reserved.

  http://mouseauditorium.tumblr.com/

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

  Story Merchant Books

  9601 Wilshire Boulevard #1202

  Beverly Hills CA 90210

  http://www.storymerchant.com/books.html

  For

  SIDNEY PORCELAIN

  who’s always in there pitching

  WHO’S WHO

  … according to what they do in the game

  ED NOON • he leads off with a walk

  MR. ARONGIO • a clean-up man who bats second

  LARRY LAKE • he dies on third

  PATROLMAN WALSH • he pinch-hits and strikes out

  MONKS • warms up in the bullpen

  MRS. ARONGIO • gets caught stealing

  MIMI TANGO • she sacrifices

  BANJO BRICE • plays a bad shortstop

  MEL TRILLY • put out trying to score

  … and some of them never get to play again

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ONE

  The shadowing job’s name was Arongio. Mrs. Arongio had been worrying about him. Worrying about him fifty bucks’ worth. It seemed Mr. Arongio as a husband had turned out to be a lemon. He was an East Side antique dealer who had been spending too much time on the West Side. Mrs. Arongio had her doubts that all of Mr. Arongio’s daily chores kept him busy with antiques. For fifty bucks, I had all of Mrs. Arongio’s doubts. And some of my own.

  I waited across the street from the “Antiques” Shop in the East Fifties that bore the name, THE KITTY CORNER, in plain block black letters on the big window. Behind the glass was everything from old spinning wheels to World War trophies to dusty heirlooms. There wasn’t any sign of a cat, let alone a kitty.

  I’d gone through half a pack of Camels and all the patience of the proprietor of a small lunch counter when Mr. Arongio came out. I nailed him in a flash. Mrs. Arongio had given me a very good description of him.

  He was as big and as wide as Broadway with a nose like the pistol grip of an old Western shooting iron. His mustache was early Wild West too. Except for his dark olive look, he could pass pretty easily for a reincarnation of Buffalo Bill.

  Whatever he was, he was a man in a hurry. I stayed on my side of the street and kept up with him. He was eating up the sidewalk with big lumbering strides. I had just a moment to wonder where the hell he was heading for. He braked to a halt on Fifth Avenue and flagged down a passing cab.

  I stifled a curse because I had decided on foot patrol for this job and now it looked as if it might cost me. But with Arongio pulling away from the curb in his cab and me thinking about the brand new Buick nestling outside my office, a green and yellow monster slid up in front of me.

  “Cab, Mister?”

  I hopped in, fanned open my wallet, and let the driver see the gleam of the bright, ten-cent badge pinned inside. I had picked it up in a novelty shop but he could never know that.

  “Government business, Mac. Keep that red cab in sight and there’s a five in it for you.”

  The chance to help the government and earn a five-dollar bill besides worked wonders. We careened through early-afternoon traffic. I leaned back against the cushioned rear as the broad red back of Arongio’s cab loomed through the windshield.

  The driver was gulping. I could see his eyes goggling at me in the rear view. But he’d seen just enough gangster films to know how to behave.

  “One of them subversives, eh?”

  I masked a grin. “That’s it. Keep him in sight.”

  It turned out to be an easy job. Traffic was lighter than an early snow for that time of day. The big rear of the red cab just ahead stayed in sight, no more than a length ahead at any time.

  Street signs fell behind in short order and soon both our cabs were playing tag on the long curving slab of East River Drive. It was nothing for Arongio to get suspicious about. Just another cab driver taking the shortest route to the Bronx. You hardly ever hit the Drive if you don’t have the sunny Bronx in mind.

  I checked my watch because there was nothing else to do. One-fifteen. It had been three whole hours since the smart-looking chick had walked into the mouse auditorium that passes for the Ed Noon private detective agency and said, “Here’s fifty bucks. Go see what my antique dealer of a husband does with his time in the afternoon. I have my doubts.”

  Like I said before, for fifty bucks I had her doubts too. Pickings were pretty lean these days, what with my penchant for getting mixed up in big murder cases. Those are murder in terms of dollars and cents to you even though they mean a helluva lot in prestige. But all the prestige had meant so far was exactly one bodyguard job for a visiting Turkish importer who was really a connoisseur of American women—which meant he got into a lot of trouble. That and this current fifty-dollar caper.

  Thinking of the fifty bucks reminded me of Mrs. Arongio. A tiny, redheaded beauty who did nothing to suggest the hulking monster that Mr. Arongio had turned out to be. But that’s life. A clean-cut American boy like me should never have been a private detective either.

  Arongio’s red cab wheeled off the Drive onto the bridge. We stayed with him, cutting ahead of a south-bound cargo truck to turn the trick. I shook my head, feeling just a bit of a come-down in my present occupation. It was a nice, cool April day and a sun as big as a silver dollar was smiling to beat the band in a tufty-clouded sky. Spring.

  I shook the birds and the bees out of my head and lit a cigarette. My driver was quite a cabbie. He kept one eye on Arongio’s cab and the other on me. He grinned sheepishly when I told him as much.

  “When you gonna put the arm on him, Mister?”

  I played along with the gag.

  “We expect him to make contact with another agent in the Bronx. As soon as he does, we step in and it’s all over.”

  “Serves him right, the no-good—”

  I didn’t listen to the rest of it any more, having heard it all in bars, shoeshine parlors, and barber shops. I was impatient besides. If Arongio was rushing to meet some lovely young thing in search of a few laughs, who was I to horn in? Even for a miserly fifty bucks.

  I told myself to grow up, that I needed the money, that I couldn’t pay my rent with such lofty ideals. Just about when my hard common sense won the day, the red cab up ahead slithered to a halt in front of the Chandler Arms Hotel.

  “Don’t stop. Keep moving. Turn in at the corner.”

  I craned for a look through the back window. Arongio had bulled out of the cab, flung a bill to his driver, and literally dashed inside.

  I climbed out of my cab at the corner, rewarded the government’
s little helper with a five-dollar bill, swearing him to solemn secrecy, and waited until he drove out of sight. I walked back leisurely in the direction of the hotel.

  The doll, assuming Arongio had one, was no dope. You can’t do better than the Arms for a place to flop. Of course, Arongio could have come on business. But when a guy’s wife ups you fifty bucks to follow her man, you can stake the family bank account on it that it’s monkey business.

  I walked real slow, trying to make up my mind on a course of action. I couldn’t work my phony badge routine on the hotel help. Hotels like that don’t hire idiots. I could stick around until later and maybe soften up the elevator starter with a fin for information. Or …

  Arongio made up my mind for me by charging right out of the building. The same way he had gone in. I was close enough at this point to count the hairs of his mustache.

  But there was more than that to notice. His face was red, nearly purple with anger, and the way his lips were moving, I could tell he had just run through a string of some plenty mean cuss words. There was something else, too.

  The thick lump under his left armpit was too crazy a place to carry a handkerchief or a money belt. The old buffalo was packing hardware. That really puzzled me. Who calls on lady friends with a gun?

  He ran out to the street and hailed another cab. Due to the proximity of the Court House, it’s a great area for cabs.

  It was my turn to curse. Arongio was turning out to be an expensive shadowing job. He sure was cutting into his wife’s fifty.

  I caught another cab just as his was swinging around toward the Yankee Stadium. I was too tired to work the badge gag again. At any rate, this driver looked smarter and more close-mouthed so I just told him to keep Arongio’s job in sight and let it go at that.

  The trail was shorter and crazier this time. We sailed past the Stadium in high gear, took the Harlem River Bridge at an easy gallop, spun around into the drive that curves down into the back yard of the Polo Grounds, and hissed to a halt on the smooth macadam.

  We stopped because Arongio did. He was paying his bill and flinging down the lane toward the customer’s entrance. It was kind of a queer jolt to realize that the flags were flying over the huge, horseshoe-shaped arena, that even though the official baseball season was still two weeks away, the Giants were at home for exhibition games. Baseball. Like I say, at nine o’clock in the morning in this racket, you can never tell where you’re going to be at two-thirty in the afternoon. And for all the world it looked like I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon at the Polo Grounds.

  It certainly looked like it. Arongio had rushed up to the booths where they sell lower grandstand seats, bought one, and whipped on inside. The uniformed attendant, a toothless thin guy with a leathery puss, grinned at what he guessed was an incurable baseball fan. Who knows? Maybe, but where did the gun come into the picture?

  I dug into my fast-dwindling fifty-dollar fee, bought a ticket, and piled in after Arongio. I caught up with him on one of the runways, slowed down, and then followed right after him as he turned off into the stands. Section 28—the third-base side of the Polo Grounds.

  I didn’t run into anybody because we were late. The game was well into the third inning. A quick glance at the scoreboard across the diamond right over the right-field foul line told me so. The fans, not more than seven or eight thousand, ware all in their seats. The Grounds was as quiet as a big graveyard. You could have heard a private card game going on out in the center-field bleachers. For a ball park that can seat more than fifty thousand for a Fourth of July double-header, eight thousand cash customers was far from a mob.

  Arongio’s broad bulk was just settling down in one of the seats close to the railing when the batter up at the plate caught one on the nose and sent it soaring out to deep center field. I forgot Arongio and halted to watch the guy out in center loaf back gracefully and haul it in after a short run. Bobby Thomson. The Giants were in the field.

  Grinning like a Giant fan, I sidled over to my job and took a seat on the long benches directly behind Arongio. With the natural camouflage of the game, he’d never suspect me in a million light years. I was beginning to enjoy myself. I could keep an eye on him and see a ball game at the same time.

  As soon as the beautiful green of the playing field had whammed me in the eyes coming out of the dark runway, the old fever had come back. There isn’t a second when I’m in a ball park that I don’t feel like laying that pistol down and trading it in for a right-fielder’s glove. The warm sunlight, the green grass growing all around all around, the nice white uniforms, do things for me. But I had missed the boat as a kid and gone on to other things.

  I looked at Mr. Arongio and felt like a private detective again. I watched him as the Giants ran in for their fourth time at bat. He was hunched forward, staring. I followed his line of sight. For a guy whose wife suspected him of horsing around, he was behaving pretty funny.

  Out at third base a short, wiry kid was punching his glove and shouting something encouraging to the rest of the infield. He bent down, scooped up the imaginary pebble that all infielders find, and whipped it beyond the baselines. I checked back to Arongio, then back to the third baseman again. The guy was walking around his position nervously, alternating between looking around the stands and looking at his infield.

  But Arongio was looking at him all right. No two ways about it. Monte Irvin was in the batter’s box at home plate, getting ready to work with a bat as big as a plank of flooring, and Arongio had never taken his eyes off the rival third baseman.

  I couldn’t figure it. Rushing around town like a maniac, going to a ball game, carrying a gun no less, and now concentrating all his attention on some bush-league ball player whose name I didn’t know.

  There was one way to settle that. I spotted a kid selling scorecards and bought one. Irvin lined a hard single past short as I glanced up at the scoreboard.

  Right over the inning-by-inning summary of runs scored, I found what I was looking for:

  RAVENS 0 0 0 0

  NEW YORK 0 0 0

  The Ravens. Who the hell were they? I’d expected any one of the National or American League teams for competition but not the Ravens. They were a new one on me. The only Ravens I was familiar with was Poe’s black bird. And he was singular.

  I thumbed through the scorecard for the line-up of teams. Above the half of the book allotted to the Giants, was a lot of guys named Joe I had never heard of. The Providence Ravens. I indexed through the batting order. The third baseman’s name was Lake and he batted clean-up. I was more puzzled than before. The fourth spot in any batting order is usually occupied by big six-footers or two-hundred-pounders. Heavy hitters who will get those runs in. But this Lake, I took another look at him, was barely five-feet-nine and would pass more easily on a dance-hall floor than a baseball diamond.

  Well, whoever the Ravens were or whatever Lake’s qualifications were, Irvin never got past first base. The Raven pitcher set the next three Giants down in order with some fancy breaking stuff.

  I lit a Camel and took it easy. Arongio hadn’t relaxed his strange vigil, his black eyes following Lake all the way into the visiting team’s dugout which was off to our right. But at least he didn’t seem in any particular hurry any more. And what was even better, neither of his big mitts had come even close to the unmistakable bulge in his coat. I guessed whatever it was was going to wait until the game was at least over.

  It was a beautiful April afternoon and as the game wore on, Arongio’s behavior was monotonously repetitious. That is, he relaxed when Lake’s team was at bat and then coiled up as tight as a spring when the kid was out at his position making like a third baseman.

  Lake wasn’t bad either. He made two or three good plays, one a honey of a stop and throw on Dark’s line smash that few of the big boys could have made on their best days. But from what I could see of Arongio’s reactions, Lake meant something to him only as Lake—not as a ball player.

  It was a crazy kind
of game for the exhibition season. Normally, these games are pretty free and easy, with lots of run scoring, extra base hits, and daring base running. That’s because the games don’t mean anything beyond getting in condition for the coming season grind and everybody cuts loose and tries things they’d never try in the regular campaign. But not this game.

  For one thing, neither side had scored and for another, the Raven hurler, a guy named Ballen, was tossing them in as if he had written Strikeout Story instead of Bobby Feller. Giant pitching was going great guns, too. Maglie had made a shutout of the first three innings, then Jansen had duplicated the feat and now Jim Hearn had taken up the chucking, and all of a sudden it was the ninth inning. And still no score. Durocher was giving his Big Three some necessary work while the Ravens were leaving Ballen in for glory’s sake alone. If he could shut out a big-league team in its home park, I imagine he’d have a lot to talk about during those coming cold New England winters.

  Arongio was getting restless. He kept shifting on his bench seat but he didn’t change position. And his pistol-grip nose kept leveled out at third base as if it were a sign pointer.

  We were right above eight rows of box seats and barely fifty feet separated Lake from Arongio’s evil eye.

  He might have been an omen of some kind because in the top half of the ninth, Lake, batting with two men on, teed off on a Hearn fast ball and drove it far back into the seats over the left-field scoreboard. Just like that, the Giants were trailing three to nothing. Just like that, I knew why Lake was clean-up man. The kid packed some muscle on his wiry frame.

  Hearn locked the door for the third out and the Giants came in and the Ravens went out. Ballen almost strutted as he went back to the mound. I could see what he was thinking. Three more outs and he’d have something for his scrapbook, even if he never graduated from the Class D League.

  I had almost forgotten Arongio by this time. Hell, he wasn’t going any place and my Giants were losing 3-0 and in danger of a shameful shutout. I forgot what racket I made my bread and butter in, and got into the spirit of things.