Strike Three You're Dead (25 page)

They went for broiled Lake Superior whitefish at Berghoff’s in the Loop, where the waiters embodied the efficiency and kindness of a family doctor, even though the hour was late. Norm wanted to talk about their childhood—about Big Al Blissberg’s old restaurant, summers on the Cape, endless games invented to pass the time growing up. By the time Harvey had laid two beers on top of the one he had drunk in the clubhouse, he, too, was in a nostalgic mood.

“Remember the summer we played stickball against the grammar school every day and kept records for each game?” Norm was saying. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that I struck you out four hundred twenty-three times in one summer.”

Harvey piled fragments of a parsley potato on the back of his fork. “You were crazy about statistics even then.”

“Speaking of which, Harv, I’ve got another one for you.”

“You promised.”

“All right, forget it,” Norm said.

“Well, one more can’t hurt. Let me have it.”

“No, no, I don’t want to…”

“Damn it, Norm, what is it?” The restaurant was almost empty, and a white-haired waiter a few tables away looked up in their direction, then resumed collecting silverware.

“Okay, I was looking over the pitching statistics for the entire season—”

“What do you do, anyway? Cut out every Jewels box score?”

“And mount them in a scrapbook. Now listen. This is interesting.” Norm swabbed his plate with a piece of seeded roll. “You guys have used four pitchers in the starting rotation most of the year: Stan Crop, Bobby Wagner, Dan Van Auken, and Andy Potter-Lawn. I was going over the season, and I began to notice how many times they had actually carried a lead into the late innings, only to be taken out of the game with men on base.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin.

“It happens all the time, Norm.”

“I’m not through. Seventeen times, Harv, seventeen times your starting pitchers have been taken out of the game with a lead in the seventh, eighth, or ninth inning, and then you guys have gone on to lose the game. Is that bad managing or what?”

“I know we’ve lost a lot of games in the late innings,” Harvey said between sips of decaf, “but that’s what happens when you’ve got a mediocre team. The starting pitcher gets tired, and Felix isn’t going to leave him in the game in the late innings, even if he’s got a small lead. We’re not a high-scoring team, and we’re not going to pad that lead and make the pitcher’s job any easier for him, so Felix wants a fresh arm in the game. You’ve got to use your relievers even if you’ve got a weak bull pen. Anyway, Norm, a bull pen that loses seventeen games in the late innings sounds about average to me for any second division team.”

Norm was finishing his last few string beans with his fingers. “Okay, but you can’t fault me for trying. It beats preparing for my lecture tomorrow on Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet.”

“There’s a limit to what you can squeeze out of statistics.”

“I still think I ought to be managing a major league ball club.” Norm wiped his fingers along the tablecloth, leaving parallel smudges.

It was two days before Harvey understood the meaning of what Norm had told him.

It had been raining for two solid days in Providence. When the team returned to town on Friday, the city looked like something that had been left out in the yard overnight. On Friday afternoon, in his damp apartment, Harvey opened the sports pages of the
Journal-Bulletin;
he and his exactly .300 batting average clung to the bottom of the American League’s top ten batters list. Next to it were the standings.

AMERICAN LEAGUE

East

W L Pct. Games Out

New York 95 63 .601 —

Boston 94 64 .595 1

Baltimore 90 67 .573 4½

Milwaukee 87 71 .551 8

Cleveland 78 80 .494 17

Detroit 72 85 .459 22 ½

Toronto 69 89 .437 26

Providence 68 90 .430 27

Harvey counted the satisfactions left to him in the season: spoiling the Yankees’ pennant hopes on this final weekend; helping the Jewels creep out of last place; getting an average of at least three hits in ten at-bats against New York pitching; and finding Rudy’s killer.

He finally put in a call to Linderman. “Tell me something,” he said.

“Well, let’s see. We got a guy down here at headquarters right now who might’ve killed those two kids on the East Side. A Brown University senior, no less. I know the Ivy League has had to lower its admission standards to fill its dorms during economically hard times, but child-murderers is really stooping. That is, if this guy’s our man.”

“Congratulations. Tell me something else.”

“We had Ronnie Mateo down here the other day, and I showed him the bank statements. Is that what you want to know? He said to show him what he was paying Rudy off to do and he’d consider making a confession. Otherwise, he said, quote quote, leave me the hell alone. We had a couple of men in Wisconsin asking some questions, but anyone who knew Rudy there seems to think he was a gentleman and a scholar. I’m sorry, Harvey. We’re still looking for threads. I’ve got two commissioners on my back about this thing, the police one and the American League one.”

The clouds broke by game time Friday evening. The Rankle Park crowd, inspired perhaps by Lassiter’s column in the morning paper suggesting that the financially troubled Jewels might be moved to another city before next season, swelled into the low twenties. The weather was balmy. Behind Andy Potter-Lawn, the Jewels rewarded the fans with a 6-0 shutout victory. Boston had already won in Baltimore, pulling the Red Sox into a first-place tie with New York. Toronto beat Seattle at home and remained a game ahead of Providence.

At eleven-thirty that night, Harvey watched Mickey do the sports wrap-up in his apartment. She narrated a minute of tape showing the Jewels’ fourth inning rally. Harvey saw himself leg out a double, executing a perfect hook slide to the right field side of second base. Then he heard his name again. “During the last month, when the Jewels have been anything but a good baseball team,” Mickey was saying, “one of the few bright spots has been Harvey Blissberg’s race to finish with a three hundred batting average. Tonight’s action left him batting just that. If he finishes the season this Sunday with nothing less, it will be his first three hundred season in six years of major league play. From all of us here at ‘Eleven O’Clock Edition,’ Harvey, we wish you good luck.” Mickey had finally mentioned him on the air. Harvey toasted her image with a bottle of Rolling Rock.

On Saturday, Providence beat New York for the second day in a row, on Les Byers’s home run leading off the bottom of the tenth. That night, after Mickey made salad and spaghetti carbonara for Harvey at her place, they made slow, anxious love. When Mickey fell asleep, the white bedroom was so quiet that Harvey heard the little numbered metal leaves of her digital clock radio fall into place every sixty seconds. He watched her roll over on her back, clutch a pillow to her breast, sputter dryly, and melt back into a dream. He got up and went to the living room, where he pressed his forehead against the cool window and gazed down at the throbbing sign of the Play Den Disco on the other side of I-95. When he returned to bed, the clock read 3:57
A.M.
Behind the clock, propped up against the lamp, was the baseball card that Mickey had taken from him after he found it at Rudy’s place. He stared at it, saw himself smiling back, and closed his eyes, afraid that the mere tension in his body might wake her up.

Suddenly, a small opening appeared in his thinking, and through it he saw his brother and him eating dinner in Chicago. “Seventeen times,” Norm had said, “your starting pitchers have been taken out of the game with a lead in the seventh, eighth, or ninth inning, and then you guys have gone on to lose the game.” It hadn’t seemed an especially interesting statistic at the time; Norm’s obsession had yielded far better. Seventeen was not an ungodly number of times for relievers to lose a lead in the late innings.

But Norm hadn’t said which relief pitchers had squandered how many leads held by which starting pitchers. “What can a relief pitcher
do?”
he had asked Mickey at the batting cage. It was simple: a relief pitcher could prevent a starting pitcher from winning games. But why would he do it?

The figures on the digital clock changed from 3:59 to 4:00. With what seemed like a series of mental clicks, the leaves of the crime’s logic fell into place. Harvey sat up in bed, sweating profusely, and wondered if it could all possibly be true. It had taken him less than two minutes to finish the work begun almost five weeks ago. Whoever had written the death threat—and he now knew who had—had been afraid of just these two minutes. The whole thing was too incredible, but what little doubt he had could be removed by some quick statistical research of his own.

He was buttoning his shirt when Mickey stirred, subsided, stirred again, and said hoarsely, “What? What is it? Bliss? What’re you doing?”

He bent over her. “I’ve got to go to the ball park. Go back to sleep.”

“What? What ball park?”

“I’ve got to go to Rankle Park, Mick. I’ve got to see about Rudy.”

She rose to one elbow and shook red hair out of her face. “What’re you talking about? It’s four o’clock. See what about Rudy?”

“I think I know now.”

“Know
what?”

“Know what happened to him. But I’ve got to check on something, and then I’ll know for sure. Go back to sleep, Mick. I won’t be long.”

“It can’t wait?”

“No, it can’t wait, Mick,” Harvey whispered as he zipped up his pants. “For nearly five weeks, everyone and his uncle has been trying to get me to forget about this thing. But I just figured it out, and if I wait till morning to do what I have to do, I won’t be able to do it at all, Mick.”

“Then let me go with you.”

“No, Mick. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

She fell back on the bed. “Then be careful, Bliss. I’ve got to protect my investment.”

“Sweet dreams, Mick.”

“Oh, Bliss,” she called as he was leaving the room.

“Yeah?”

“It
was
Frances, wasn’t it, who was paying Rudy off?”

Harvey nodded. “It was Frances. Why?”

“I just remembered something I have to do.”

“All you have to do is go back to sleep.”

“Will do, Bliss,” she said.

Harvey rode the too-bright elevator down to the little glazed-brick lobby and walked out to the dark parking lot. It was cool and misty; he heard a diesel truck whine into gear two blocks away on the expressway. Somewhere in the Beaumont West lot, a car started up.

He drove through downtown and up the hill to his apartment. He found the photocopies of Rudy’s bank statements in his sock drawer, got back in his car, and headed for Rankle Park. Norm, he thought, your statistics finally came in handy. Statistics—without them, the game of baseball would float away, a vapor of dimly remembered clutch hits, hot dogs, and traffic jams outside the stadium. If baseball was a religion, as Sharon Meadows had said, then statistics were its bible. They fastened the game to history, made it a science, made its fans technicians, its managers and players probabilists. With numbers, lists, percentages, averages, the game was played constantly, over morning coffee, in bars, in the dead of winter. Statistics everywhere—for Most Times Hit into Double Plays in Single Season, Most Passed Balls in a Career, Ratio of Strikeouts to Walks among National League Relief Pitchers, for, as far as anyone knew, Most Stand-Up Triples when the Moon Is in Virgo.

But there was one they didn’t keep track of—for Number of Games Lost by a Relief Pitcher in Relief of a Particular Starting Pitcher in a Single Season.

The streets in the warehouse district around Rankle Park were empty except for a few parked cars and the welter of discarded programs and Pepsi cups from Saturday’s game. The park’s monstrous black silhouette, relieved here and there by security lights, rose ominously over the warehouses. A dog stood under a streetlight near the players’ parking lot, eating popcorn out of a paper cone on the curb.

The gate in the chain-link fence around the lot was secured by a heavy chain and padlock. Harvey considered scaling the ten-foot fence, but the padlocked chain was long enough so that, by forcing the two swinging sides of the gate as far apart as he could, he made enough room to slip through. The only car in the lot was Steve Wilton’s Honda, and Harvey wondered if his battery had died on him again.

Harvey found the clubhouse key on his key chain. Inside, the locker room was filled with dark bluish light. The ice chest hummed. A uniform hung sadly in each cubicle. A scratching sound stopped him; one of Rankle Park’s rats. Harvey walked slowly across the room to Felix’s office. The door was unlocked. Everything was going his way. He reached in through the doorway and turned on the light. Felix’s office sprang to fluorescent life.

From the top of the metal filing cabinet in the corner behind Felix’s desk, he took down a heavy three-ring notebook with a piece of adhesive tape across the cover that said, S
EASON
S
TATS
. He sat down at Felix’s desk and opened it. The old General Electric Telechron clock over the door read 4:32.