Strike Three You're Dead (10 page)

“Back off, man.”

“Hey, bag it, you guys,” Randy Eppich said.

“Yeah, shut up, Steve,” Rodney Salta chipped in. “When you start to hitting the cutoff man, maybe then you have a right to be bitching.”

“Rodney,” Steve said, “when you start lining yourself up with the bag like you’re supposed to, maybe I’ll think about it.”

“C’mon,” Harvey said, “just cut it out.”

“Well, well,” Steve said. “I figured we’d hear from you eventually, Professor.”

“Steve,” a voice said from the end of the bench, and everyone turned toward Frances. “Why don’t you sit out the ninth? Rick? Where’s Stiles? Rick, you go to right field, and Happy, you DH next inning.”

Steve picked up a batting helmet and flung it at the water cooler. It bounced off and spun slowly on its crown at Frances’s feet.

“That’ll cost you, Steve,” Frances called after him as he stormed off to the runway leading back to the clubhouse.

“Yeah, that’ll cost you,” Felix said next to her.

The Jewels lost it a dozen to zip. Half an hour after the last out, Harvey was driving with Mickey to her place.

“There was trouble in the dugout tonight,” he said.

“It’s always that way with you guys,” she said, pulling a pack of Camel Lights out of her bag.

“It’s worse now. And since when did you start smoking?”

“I stopped before you met me. Rudy’s murder’s got me going again.” She lit a cigarette and blew a thin jet of smoke against the windshield. “Detective Linderman swung by to see me at work today. I never saw a man with so many Bic pens in one pocket.”

“Well?” Harvey turned onto Washington Street. Even on a Friday evening, the city seemed barely alive.

“I gathered he went over the same ground with you this morning. Boy, the typewriters and that three thousand dollars. It doesn’t sound like Rudy.” Then her voice grew edgy. “I also told him he was wrong about Rudy and me and that you’d been wrong about it, too, although I don’t know how that concerns Linderman. I appreciate your spreading lies around about Rudy and me.”

“I didn’t spread lies. Bobby Wagner got it out of me in a bar one night on the road. I’m sorry, Mick. I feel worse since I found this yesterday.” He took the baseball card out of his wallet and handed it to Mickey. “Rudy kept it under the glass on top of his dresser.”

She studied it with a half smile and turned it over. She took a last, petulant drag on her cigarette and snuffed it in the car ashtray. “I think I’d like to hold on to this,” she said and slipped the baseball card into her bag. “Sentimental value, if you don’t mind.”

“You were right the other night; maybe if I’d been a better friend I’d know why he ended up in the whirlpool.”

“Maybe not. Maybe there was nothing to know, or nothing that he ever would’ve told you, anyway.”

Harvey turned on the car radio, punched a few buttons, then switched it off. “Mick, am I crazy to think the guys on the club should be reacting more to Rudy’s murder? It’s weird. I’ve seen guys more shaken up when someone’s traded.”

“Unless they’re really covering up for someone, it’s probably just that no one really liked him that much. Rudy could be a pain in the ass.”

“We didn’t think so.”

“Oh, I like pains in the ass,” Mickey said. “You, for instance.”

Harvey pulled into the parking lot of the Beaumont West, twelve stories that were 70 percent glass, 30 percent poured concrete, and 100 percent ugly. The only ornament on it was a ring of widely spaced white lights that circled the building above the first floor and looked like after-dinner mints.

“Let Linderman handle it,” Harvey said, mostly to himself.

“I wanted to tell you something about Linderman,” Mickey said. She explained in the elevator on the way up to the tenth floor. One of her co-workers, a veteran reporter at the station named Judy Martinez, had taken Mickey aside after she had seen Linderman questioning her. In the late sixties, when she was a crime reporter for the
Journal-Bulletin,
Judy had covered the story of two Providence patrolmen charged with being the bagmen for a local book-making operation. One of them was Linderman. They were suspended without pay following an internal investigation. While the DA’s office prepared for trial, Linderman happened to learn through a friendly police informant that the son of the Providence deputy mayor was dealing hard drugs out of an East Side flat. The mayor himself was facing stiff opposition in his coming re-election bid. The DA, also a Democrat, had political ambitions of his own. And so it came to pass that a single late-night phone call hushed up the deputy mayor’s son’s East Side activities, caused the DA’s office to find insufficient evidence to prosecute Linderman, and restored Linderman to the force, this time wearing plain clothes in the Homicide Division.

“That’s just great,” Harvey said as the brushed chrome elevator doors opened.

“No, that’s just Providence,” Mickey said. “But it happened a long time ago. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything now.”

“I always thought integrity was like virginity,” Harvey said as they got to her door.

Mickey’s hand swam about in her shoulder bag, searching for the key. “You don’t think they’d put a guy they thought was a whore on an important case like this?”

“I don’t?” he said, and they went in.

H
ER APARTMENT WAS A
series of cold white compartments without moldings or baseboards. It reminded Harvey of the inside of a refrigerator. The ceilings were white stucco with recessed light fixtures. Mickey had tried to overcome the sterility by deploying Indian print cushions around the cinnamon wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room.

Harvey threw himself on her camelback sofa while she opened a German
spätlese.
By the time they were on their second bottle, the mood had lightened considerably.

“By day,” Harvey announced in his best imitation of Bob Bolington, the orotund anchorman on WRIP-TV’s “Eleven O’Clock Edition,” “she’s a reporter. She’s tough. She’s smart. She plays by her own rules… and she plays for keeps.” He sipped his wine dramatically. “But by night… by night, she’s a seething, lustful, savage beast.”

“We’ll see about that.” She laughed from her end of the sofa and began unbuttoning her blouse.

“Let me help you with that.”

“No, sir. Don’t you know that in this day and age women can unbutton their own blouses?”

“Well, excuse me.”

She wriggled out of her blouse and threw it over the lamp. “However,” she said, “getting out of this skirt is a different matter altogether.”

“Let’s live together,” he said after they had made love.

“And if I said no?”

“Why would you say something as annoying as that?” Harvey said.

“Do you want the long answer or the short one?” She had her hand on the side of his face.

“The short one. It’s late.”

“All right,” she said, reaching for her glass of wine, “let me put it this way. Due to certain emotional upheavals in my childhood, I have intimacy anxieties that make me skittish about commitment. I seduce men into expectations I can’t always fulfill—”

“You mean I’m not the first you’ve disappointed?”

“—On top of which, my father robbed my mother over the years of vital self-esteem. As a result, I associate cohabitation with a threat to my independence.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I’m afraid I’ll destroy any man I get too close to. Either that, or I’m afraid any man I get too close to will destroy me. It’s one or the other.” She jumped on top of Harvey and began tickling him.

“There’s always the nunnery,” he said.

“I don’t look good in black.”

“Then you’ll have to settle for me.”

“It’s true,” she sighed. “There’s always you. Tell me again why a good-looking lug like you isn’t already married.”

“You want the short or the long answer?”

“The true one.”

“My mommy won’t let me,” he said.

She rolled over on her back, giggling. “Be serious.”

“Okay. Where’d you get all that stuff about yourself, anyway?”

“Dr. Lovett,” she said.

“Some shrink of yours?”

“No, my dentist.” She giggled again, bringing her hand up to her face.

“You mean he can tell all that just by looking in your mouth?”

“My molars are a dead giveaway.”

“You be serious,” Harvey said.

“All right. What were you doing in Rudy’s apartment when you found the baseball card?”

He watched the sweat collect in the depression below his sternum. “I’m not sure what I was doing,” he finally said. “Did Rudy ever mention someone named Valerie Carty to you?”

“Valerie Carty? No. Why?”

“Under the glass on the dresser, next to my baseball card, he kept a love letter from someone named Valerie Carty. There was also some kind of nightgown hidden away in his closet. One of those short things that snap under the crotch.”

“A teddy?”

“That’s it.”

“You think this Valerie woman had something to do with it?”

“Be sure to let me know if you have a better idea.”

On Saturday morning, they ate Rice Chex with sliced bananas on the vestigial balcony outside Mickey’s living room. Thick gray clouds were wadded up over the skyline, and the air was hot and heavy. There was no more news about Rudy in the paper, and Harvey turned to the sports section. The headline on Lassiter’s account of last night’s game read: “Jewels Lack Luster on Diamond, Tarnished by Brewers.” Harvey allowed himself a contemptuous laugh. When they won, the
Journal-Bulletin
always said, “Jewels Sparkle” or “Jewels Shine” or “Jewels Prove Priceless.” When they lost, it was “Jewels Prove Counterfeit in Loss to Pale Hose” or “Jewels Only Semiprecious.”

They walked down to a bookstore where Harvey bought a new biography of G. S. Grant. He didn’t know what he was going to do when his playing days were over—a time he judged to be not so far off—so he tried sporadically to keep up with the latest Civil War scholarship. Harvey knew this was a charade. The prospect of returning to school for a graduate degree depressed him. Like baseball, college would be a kind of protracted adolescence. Well, he thought, there were always endorsement contracts.

“How do you think I’d look modeling Jockey shorts?” he asked Mickey at the cash register.

“In the privacy of my bedroom, I’ve been impressed.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a national audience, Mick.”

“I suppose they could always airbrush that little roll of fat around your waist.”

It reminded him that he and Bobby Wagner were scheduled to shoot a television commercial for a local insurance company at the park that morning before the game.

When Harvey walked onto the field at noon, Wagner was standing on the mound next to a man who wore a bird’s nest of blond hair and a plaid shirt open to the navel. A cameraman and an audio man were setting up in front of the mound while a young woman with a clipboard kept glancing up at the cloudy sky.

“Burt Elias,” the man with the permanent said to Harvey, offering a hand burdened with rings. “I represent Regional East Insurance.”

“My favorite insurance company,” Harvey said. “Sorry I’m a little late.”

“No problem. I was just explaining to Bobby what we want to do.”

“Welcome to Hollywood, Professor,” Bobby said, speaking with a slight drawl. He was a couple of inches taller than Harvey, and he had the lean, symmetrical face of a male model, with strong black eyebrows that threatened to merge into a single one. They were arched in an expression of boredom. If Harvey was considered aloof, Wagner verged on arrogant. But since he was a bona fide star—he had come in second in the voting for the Cy Young Award twice in his career—his cockiness was credited as a kind of authority. That his talent had been less evident this season only increased his defiant pride. “Let’s get on with it,” he said to Elias.

Elias put on a pair of aviator sunglasses. “First we’re going to zoom in on Bobby on the mound,” he said to Harvey. “He’ll pretend to throw a pitch that gets hit deep to center field, and he’ll say, ‘You know, folks, every once in a while something goes wrong when I’m pitching. And when it does’”—he grabbed the script from the young woman and consulted it—“‘and when it does, it’s nice to know someone is backing me up.’ We cut to you, Harvey, in center. You catch the ball, see, then turn to the camera and say, That’s right. I like to think of myself as Bobby’s insurance policy when he’s out there pitching.’ Cut back to Bobby on the mound, mopping his brow in relief. Then he says, ‘On the field, I rely on Harvey Blissberg. Off the field, I put my trust in Regional East.’ Then, Harvey, you join Bobby in the frame and say, ‘Me, too. When it comes to my family, my home, my car, I count on Regional East. We know how important teamwork is. And in the game of life, it’s good to know that Regional East is on your team.’ That’s it, gentlemen. Take a few minutes to study your lines. I want this to come out nice and natural.”

“You’re talking to a man who sold deodorant coast-to-coast for two years,” Bobby said impatiently.

“As I recall,” Harvey said, “you have very photogenic armpits.”

“You guys should be glad to get me out here for the peanuts you’re paying,” Bobby told Elias.