Murder at Wrigley Field (23 page)

O
kay, maybe there was still something that could be done.

What I needed was to connect Bennett Harrington with Curly Neeman. By killing Neeman, Harrington had effectively severed the direct connection between them, but perhaps I could link them indirectly. There had to be some way of proving that Neeman had fired his rifle into Cubs Park on Harrington’s orders.

I remembered what Karl Landfors said about conspiracies: people talk. If anyone was likely to shoot off his mouth, it would have been Curly Neeman. When Willie was working in the chemical plant, Neeman taunted him with threats about the Knights; after he killed Willie, he couldn’t resist dropping hints to Aggie that he’d done it.

So I’d expect that if Curly Neeman shot a German, he’d want the glory of bragging about it to his comrades in the Patriotic Knights of Liberty. And if he was in league with such an illustrious figure as Bennett Harrington, he’d certainly want that to be known as well.

This was my one hope: that Curly Neeman talked before Bennett Harrington silenced him.

Wednesday night I went to where Neeman was most likely to do his talking: the Knights meeting in Cicero.

Unfortunately, Wicket Greene was absent again, so I couldn’t use him to introduce me to anyone. Without Greene to smooth the way, I artlessly approached the Knights on my own, making inquiries of as many of them as I could.

I wasn’t subtle in my questions. I was too desperate at this point to have time for discretion. And I had no success. All I did was antagonize the good white men of the Patriotic Knights of Liberty to the point where I knew this had better be the last meeting I attended.

The next morning, I discovered the first evidence of compatibility between Agnes O’Doul and Willie Kaiser. Her small three-room apartment was as sparsely furnished and meticulously neat as Willie’s bedroom. I was sure it wasn’t their tidiness that attracted them to each other, and I knew that the heart can often find a compatibility where none is visible, but I was heartened to see that they shared this trait. It helped me imagine Aggie and Willie as a couple.

I took a sip of lemonade, then put the glass back down on a thick doily, careful not to let it touch the wood of the kitchen table. “When we talked last week,” I said, “you told me Curly Neeman called it a mistake to kill Willie. What did he mean by that?”

Agnes shrugged. “How should I know what he meant?”

Lemonade wasn’t my morning beverage of choice, but Agnes wasn’t a coffee drinker and had none to offer. I felt that I needed some badly. “Okay, let me get this straight: you’re holding a blowtorch to this guy, trying to find out if and why he killed your boyfriend—” To my surprise, Agnes blushed at the word “boyfriend.” “He admits shooting Willie, says it was a mistake, and you don’t ask what he meant by that?” I shook my head. “I don’t buy it.”

The color in her face remained, but her expression changed from embarrassment to defiance. “You really want to know?” She hurled the question like a challenge. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Yes. I really want to know.” How much worse could things be?

Agnes took a breath. “He was supposed to shoot you.”

I was stunned. When I regained the capacity of speech, I could only say,
“Me?
But why?”

She warned, “You’re probably going to like that even less.”

I nodded for her to go ahead and tell me.

“Because Willie was too good a player.”

It took a minute for that to register. Then I burst into laughter. Agnes looked at me as if I’d gone mad. I wasn’t even angry at the slight to my abilities. I had to credit Bennett Harrington with one thing: he was an astute judge of talent.

When I stopped chuckling, I downed the rest of my lemonade, enjoying the coolness as it washed into my stomach. While Agnes refilled the glass from a pitcher in the ice box, I tried to gather my thoughts.

The skirt of her smart gray and white striped gingham dress swished as she sat back down across the small table from me. Morning sunlight through the kitchen window made her face seem radiant and brought out auburn tints in her neatly combed brown hair. From deep left field came the realization that I was becoming attracted to Aggie O’Doul.

I had to force myself to get back on track. “Neeman was supposed to kill me,” I said. “So he was under some kind of orders. Did he say who told him to shoot me?” Please say it was Harrington.

“No. Didn’t say.”

“You’re not holding back on me again?”

“Hell no, I’d tell you if I knew. But he wouldn’t say.” She smiled. “And believe me, I did my best to get it out of him. The little pissant held out though. I give him credit for that. I think he knew I didn’t have it in me to kill him. He must have been more afraid of whoever he was protecting than he was of me.”

With good cause. The man he was protecting did have it in him to kill Curly Neeman. Damn. I still couldn’t tie Neeman to Harrington. And I never noticed before how deep and bright Aggie O’Doul’s dark eyes were. The fact that she didn’t have it in her to kill someone made her even more attractive.

She said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before—about you being the one he was supposed to shoot. I figured you weren’t in danger anymore after Neeman got killed. And I didn’t think it was something you’d feel good about knowing.” Her head was cocked; she was obviously still puzzled by my strange reaction to the news. Since I didn’t understand it myself, I didn’t try to explain it to her.

“Neeman didn’t tell you anything else?”

“No. Nothing.”

The conversation stalled until I remembered one of the last things Willie had said to me. “Aggie, the day Willie was shot I was trying to get him to fight back when people picked on him. He told me he was fighting back but in his own way. He never got to explain what he meant by that. Do you have any idea?”

Aggie nodded and answered slowly. “His way of fighting back was to keep doing things by the book no matter how tough it got. He worked hard at the chemical plant, he played all out for the Cubs, he would have enlisted if not for his mother being so against it. Poor kid really believed that if he did everything like he was supposed to, things would work out.” She snorted. “Lot of good it did him playing by the rules.”

Yeah, sometimes the rule book doesn’t cover everything.

She’d given me my coat and hat, and I was about to leave, when I said, “I was wondering. How did you and Willie start, you know, seeing each other?”

“You mean how did a young, good-looking kid like him hook up with somebody like me?”

“No, I just meant...”

It took a minute until she decided to answer. “It started by talking, during work breaks, same as you and me. We talked and then one day we went to a movie together.”

“Why didn’t you want people to know you were seeing each other? You said Willie wanted to tell people, but you didn’t.”

“Personal reasons.”

“Oh. Are you married?” I thought perhaps to a soldier overseas.

The question set her on fire with anger. “What are you, kidding me?” she said through sneering lips. “Look, my mama raised ugly girls, not stupid ones. I know what men want me for, and it’s not for marrying and it’s not for showing me off to their friends.” Her face and voice slowly softened. “Willie was different. He always treated me like a lady. But if it was public.... Well, as soon as his buddies started ribbing him about it, he’d have dropped me.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” I said. “From what he told me, Willie was crazy about you.” I almost added as evidence that he’d even stopped going to burlesque houses.

Aggie’s expression was anything but angry now. “He told you that?”

“Lots of times.”

If she really knew Willie Kaiser, she knew that he was unlikely to have said any such thing. But her eyes told me that she chose to believe me, anyway.

I still thought that my best bet for finding someone who could tie Curly Neeman to Bennett Harrington was the Patriotic Knights of Liberty. Neeman had taken it upon himself to shoot a German instead of the player he’d been ordered to kill—me. Why would he have done that if not to brag about it? I could almost hear him crowing to the Knights about how he’d “killed the Kaiser.”

The Knight I didn’t get to speak with Wednesday night, the one who hadn’t been to any meetings lately, was Wicket Greene. There was something he’d said to me that didn’t jibe with what I’d learned from Aggie O’Doul. I confronted him about it after the Thursday afternoon game against the Cards.

“Wick—Sammy,” I said. Calling him by his real name might help, I thought. “You told me that Harrington promised if you threw games for him you’d become starting shortstop.”

Greene took a quick look around. There was no one near us in the empty tunnel outside the locker room. “Yeah. That’s right.”

Something didn’t make sense. If I was the one who was supposed to be killed, second base would be available, not shortstop. “You remember when the Cards were here last and we got in that scuffle in the locker room?” I asked.

“I remember.”

“You said you could get my job, second base, in a minute, but you wanted to play short.” At the time, I’d thought it was empty talk.

“Oh that. Harrington’s first offer was that I’d play second base if I helped him out. I told him it was shortstop I wanted.”

“And he agreed?”

“Yeah.”

Did Harrington have Neeman kill Willie instead of me just to keep his word to Greene? Not likely. “You haven’t been to any of the Knights’ meetings lately.”

“No. Haven’t wanted to.”

“Ever talk to Curly Neeman?”

He hesitated. “Sometimes.”

“Did you a big favor by killing Willie, didn’t he?” I steeled myself for another fight.

“No,” Greene whispered hoarsely. “He didn’t do me any favor at all.” His entire body seemed to slump.

“Tell me about it.” I’d realized only recently why Wicket Greene had told me about Harrington’s proposal to throw games: because compared to the bigger secret he was hiding, throwing baseball games was trivial.

Greene pointed to the locker room door. “I got to sit down.” Once we were inside and seated, he said, “You got to believe me, I didn’t know nothing about it. Not until afterwards. Curly Neeman bragged to me about killing Willie. ‘Got me a Hun’ is what he said. Then he told me who it was. And I knew he was doing work for Harrington. Like I told you, Neeman was the one who sawed the bleacher seats for him. Anyway, I felt awful. It’s because of me Kaiser’s dead.”

“Because of you?”

“Yeah. Because I told Harrington I wanted to play shortstop. That’s why he had Neeman kill him.”

“That’s what Neeman said?”

“No. But I figured that’s what must have happened.”

All this time Greene had been feeling guilty that he’d caused Willie’s death. “That wasn’t it,” I told him. “I was the one Neeman was supposed to shoot. Harrington wasn’t going to keep his promise to you. You were going to end up at second base after all.”

Greene looked ill. “Damn.” Then relieved. “So it wasn’t ’cause of me?”

“No. It had nothing to do with you.” Making Greene feel better wasn’t my objective in revealing this; I thought he might more readily answer a few more questions. “Neeman tell anybody else about what happened?”

Greene promptly answered, “Frank Timmons.” I should have thought of that. I remembered how eager Neeman had been for Timmons’s approval. “Neeman ended up pretty disappointed, though. He thought Timmons should have considered him some kind of hero for killing Kaiser. But Timmons didn’t want to hear it, and he almost made Neeman an outcast after that.”

Killing is bad for his business, Frank Timmons had said. It also explained why Timmons had asked me to smuggle out the gunpowder when he could have asked Curly Neeman to do it. He wanted to limit his involvement with Neeman.