Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City (11 page)

I finally managed to get myself up to a sitting position. Mick and Walter were over me. Both of them looked like they were dying for an excuse to start up a game of kick the detective. Naturally, I was only too eager to get it started.

“Heh. Heh. Mick. What’s the matter with your friend
?
He shy about taking his best shot?”

“You don’t know when to quit do you?” Mick said. And then Walter came at me.

I managed to deflect his punch, and then we were tussling on the floor. He was on me, but I had him in a choke hold. We might have gone on like that forever until Mick and Billy stepped in.

“Let him be,” Mick said. The two of them grabbed the pitcher from behind and pulled him off me. Billy managed to lead Walter away. Meanwhile, I was in the midst of hacking my guts out all over again.

“So,” I said between hacks. “You boys had enough?”

Mick just looked at me with disbelief.

“Well
?
I’m waiting.”

He shook his head. “Look Crager. Shut up. Just
shut
up.”

“C’mon big guy. You can do better than that.”

“Get out of here Crager
…”

“C’mon. Mick. What are you hiding?”

He glared at me for the longest time. “Billy,” he finally said. “You and Walt go back to your workout,” he said. “Me and the good detective here are going to finish this once and for all. He looked at me and nodded toward his office.

“Those two kids. They don’t got a clue.”

I sat in a chair watching Mick make tracks back and forth in his office. Normally, watching someone pacing would have driven me nutty, but I was in no condition to yap about it. My chest still felt like Sherman’s Army trashing Georgia. On the wall behind Mick’s desk, the words, No Pain, No Gain, stared back at me in big bold letters. I figured I could live with those words. At least for now.

“Relax. They didn’t say anything to incriminate you.”

“No. But you were fishing for stuff just the same.”

“This is a gym for Chrissakes. These places aren’t exactly foreign soil for steroids.”

Mick suddenly stopped pacing and wheeled to face me. “Not my gym.”

“Maybe the things are here
,
and you just don’t know it.”

He thought about that one for a moment. And then he went behind his desk and fell into the chair, allowing himself a deep-chested, husky laugh as he did so. Laughter from a guy like Mick Slaughter was all wrong. Kind of like listening to Sinatra at a hoedown.

“You think that’s funny. Stick around for my next act,” I said. “I’ll have you and the rest of these muscle boys howling like hyenas.”

“You’re too much Crager. You come in here accusing me of murder and then you turn around and play the good cop with me.”

“Okay. How about this. Just where were you the night of the murder?”

“Oh. It’s back to that again huh?”

“Well?”

“Okay. What night was that? Sunday?”

“Saturday.”

“Let’s see. Saturday
…
Saturdays are usually busy days here at the gym, but I normally only stay till about lunch time when someone else comes in to watch the place the rest of the day.

“How late were you here that Saturday?”

Mick leaned back in his chair. He laced his hands and brought both thumbs to his chin. “Let’s see. Probably till one. That’s when I went down to the marina. A buddy of mine was showing off his new boat. He was to have a little party on the thing.”

“Ballplayers there?”

“Ah
…
yeah. As I remember there were a few guys from the team there.”

“That’s crap Mick. The ball club had a game that afternoon.”

“Okay. Wait a minute. You’re right. There weren’t any players there.”

“How long did this party last?”

He shrugged. “Most of the afternoon.”

“Five o’clock. Six?”

“That would be about right.”

“Then what?”

“Marcia and I headed over to her place.”

“Marcia?”

Mick frowned. “Marcia’s my fiance. Listen. You don’t need to be asking her a lot of questions now.”

“Fine. So you went over to her place. What did you do once you got there?”

“Marcia cooked me dinner.”

And then the phone on Mick’s desk rang. It was one of those portable, cordless jobs. He had barely spoken into the thing before he gave me a funny look and went out the door with it cradled to his ear. A few moments later he was back.

“One of your adoring fans?”

He was studying his watch. “You’ve got about three minutes Crager. I’ve got to meet with someone.”

“We were just sitting down to dinner.”

“That’s right. Marcia and I had dinner.”

“Then what? You tucked the little lady into bed for the night?”

“I’m a healthy, robust guy. What do you think?”

“So you spent the night?”

He let out a sigh. “That’s right Crager. I spent the night with my fiance. Are we done now?”

I slowly got up. “There’s just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

I shot my fist into his upper abdomen. He was hard all right, but I knew I’d gotten him good. He let out a mean gasp as the flesh of his stomach collapsed around my hand.

Yeah. It was a sucker punch. But no sucker punch ever felt sweeter.

“Guess that makes us about even big guy.”

He was on his knees still gasping for air when I left the place.

“Gooden. You got to be kidding. He couldn’t hold Koufax’s jock.”

Red shook his head and moved away to the television down at the end of the bar.

The TV picture had begun spinning like shish kebab turning over a flame, and Red began banging away on it with an open hand.

“But you admit that nobody was ever any better than Gooden in ‘85.”

Red wasn’t even listening. The noon news had just come on, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to miss it. Red was no news junkie, but some cutie with a husky voice had just been hired for the mid-day broadcasts. He wouldn’t consider wasting time continuing the baseball argument when he could be ogling the pretty talking head reporting the day’s fatalities, betrayals and scandals.

“Hey,” I said. “Give the boob tube a rest and name me one pitcher in the past twenty years who had a better year than Gooden.”

He stepped back from the television. The set had finally seen fit to cooperate with his back-handed blows. Red’s wet dream - a blonde, ruby-lipped anchorwoman - had appeared on the screen.

“Earth to Red.” But he just stood there, his face right against the TV.

It was after the camera broke away from Red’s fantasy girl for some footage of a warehouse fire that Red spoke. “Guidry in ‘78,” he said.

I shook my head. “No comparison. Guidry played on a World Series-winning team. Besides, his home games were in Yankee Stadium, a southpaw’s haven.”

Red shook his head. “He went
twenty-five and three
that year.”

“So. Throwing left-handed in that ball park, with Reggie, Nettles, Munson,
Chambliss in my lineup, hell
I
could win ten games at the minimum.”

“You’re nuttier than ol’ Erma there,” he said, nodding toward the far end of the bar.

“Face it Red. Gooden, for that one year at least, was all but unhittable. He won twenty-four games for a team that had to struggle just to get
ninety
wins.”

Red stood before me scraping one of his molars with a swizzle stick. “Gooden
?
Give me a break. Guidry has it all over him. And I can name you a few others too.”

“Okay. Hotshot. Sing.”

“Koufax for one. He was unbelievable in ‘65.”

“Interesting choice.”

“Interesting choice hell. He won twenty-six games. Threw his fourth freaking no-hitter. Struck out 382 hitters. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me 1965 was one of the worst years for hitters. Hell. That whole decade was a pitcher’s wet dream.”

“Shit Cozz.”

“Look it up Red. By ‘69 they ended up lowering the mound and shrinking the strike zone to bring back hitting.”

“What about Eckersley,” came a voice from behind me.

There, just inside the barroom’s front door, stood Police Chief Joe Gallagher.

Chapter 7

Joe Gallagher had no sooner settled his thick girth onto the stool beside me when
Red plunked a quart of Irish Whiskey on the bar before him.

“You can give that a rest for the day Crager,” he said, nodding to my beer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills which he threw on the bar between us. Then he held two fingers toward Red. “I’ll need a pair of shot glasses too.”

I knew right off that he’d been drinking. For one thing, Gallagher rarely was sober before coming into Red’s. Even on a Sunday with most of the city’s bars closed, Gallagher found places to drink - the VFW or at the barrooms of one of the fraternal groups he belonged to. His eyes had taken on that glass
y
-eyed look of someone who’s been into the sauce. And now he was ready to really do some serious drinking. Yeah, when Joe Gallagher set you up with a shot it was time for serious drinking.

“Sons of bitches are doing it to me again,” he fumed.

Red and I exchanged knowing smiles. Even Crazy Erma knew what was coming.
She took her drink and shuffled off to one of the booths in the dining area.

“What’s that?” Red said with a twinkle in his eye. It was all Red ever needed to say to set Gallagher off on another running diatribe of politics Centre Town style. Gallagher was forever battling city hall over the way he ran his police department. Not that he was doing a bad job from what I could see. But in a town where the city council had a long history of giving the shaft to the police force, especially its top cop, Gallagher was getting his turn to be crapped on. It usually took a few drinks for him to get through with his tirade on city politics and then he would become the jovial Irishman.

“Council voted down new radios for patrol cars,” he said, pounding his fist on the bar.

“How the hell they expect you guys to communicate?” Red said. “Us
e
donut shop pay phones?”

“Sure Red. Make jokes. But it would be money well spent.”

“Hey. The city’s all but broke.” Red said.

“That’s the thing,” Gallagher said. “They spent two hundred thousand to reconstruct that
…
that
…”

“The dome at city hall?”

“Yeah. That Goddamn monstrosity  Supposed to be someone’s idea of historical preservation. I’ll give ‘em some historical preservation.”

“Got to make city hall look good Joe. Good for the tourist trade.”

Gallagher suddenly wheeled around in his seat toward me. “Tourist trade my ass.
They can fix up that monstrosity for half the money.”

“What are you suggesting Joe?” I asked with a straight face.

“What am I suggesting? What am I suggesting? I’ll just tell you what I’m suggesting.” His big hand snatched up the shot glass
,
and he drank off the whiskey. That done, he slowly brought the glass down then motioned with a nod of the head, a conspiratorial wink of the eye for us to both come closer. He had a secret to share.

“Those little chiselers down at city hall want to skim some money off that city dome project for their own use.”

“No. Why … why that’s corruption,” I said, widening my eyes and throwing a hand across my mouth. With a laugh Red moved off to the television. He usually lost interest by the time Gallagher was off and running with his latest story of graft, scandal and larceny in city politics. Besides, Melinda, his anchorwoman princess, was back on the tube. It was left up to me to carry the burden of baiting Gallagher.

“You’re damn right it’s corruption,” he thundered. “And I don’t have to put up with it.”

I brought my fist down on the bar and leaned toward him. “Darn it. What can I as a hardworking, taxpaying citizen of this city do about it?”

And now Gallagher came to realize that he was being strung along. He managed to fight back a grin though. “I’m not shitting you Crager. We got some bad apples running this city. Some real shysters.”

He poured some whiskey into his glass and stared at the liquor bottles resting on the shelf behind the bar. “Ah, the hell with it,” he said. We both sat quiet for a few moments, the only noise in the barroom coming from the sounds of the television set.

Melinda was finishing up the news, and Red had his nose right the hell up against the screen. Gallagher drank off his whiskey then began turning the empty glass around in his hand. “You know Crager, that stabbing the other night looks pretty open and shut to me.”