Strike Three You're Dead (7 page)

“You’ll be lucky to re-sign, period,” Steve Wilton, the right fielder, said. “Don’t you ever get tired of riding the bench and wish you were doing something useful in life?”

“When I re-sign,” Happy said, “I know one thing I’m going to get in my contract. I’m going to get a clause that says I don’t ever have to be within fifty feet of you.”

“Man, this organization just nickels-and-dimes you,” Les Byers, the third baseman, broke in. “When I send my shirts out with Dunc, they come back with heavy starch and broken buttons. I’m gonna call my agent and tell him I want a clause next year that says
light
starch, man, and no broken buttons. Those shirts don’t come back right, I want them replaced. Then I want me some incentives like this guy on the Sox, but I mean real incentives. I want it in writing that any time I got to leave my feet to make a play at third, it’s a couple thousand bucks right there. Hey, man, if I’m going to dirty myself up, I want to be compensated, hear? And then, like if I get hit with a pitch, man, risking my life up there, I want a new car with a quadrophonic tape deck. I’m serious about this.”

“You’re forgetting the masseuses, Lester,” Happy said, laughing. “We got to have masseuses in every hotel room on the road. How they expect us to play good ball if we don’t have masseuses?”

Harvey stood next to them, shaking his head. “What’s the matter, Professor?” Steve Wilton said. “You need some incentives, too?”

“You guys are really something,” Harvey said, pulling a terry-cloth sweatband on his wrist.

“Hey, man, everyone deserves a spoonful of the gravy,” Les said.

“I mean, one of your teammates was murdered two days ago, and you guys are throwing a party.”

“We were just goofing around,” Les said. “No harm, my man, no harm.”

“I didn’t kill the guy,” Steve said.

Harvey bent down to tie his spikes. “You guys are assholes.”

“We didn’t mean anything,” Happy said.

“Look,” Harvey said, “I know you guys didn’t think Rudy was the greatest thing since free agency, but the man was murdered in our clubhouse. Do any of you guys find that weird, let alone a little disturbing?”

“Yeah, man, I find that weird,” Les said, “and that’s why I’m trying not to think about it. Look, Professor, I’m sorry your roomie was killed—”

“My roomie? Les, you really surprise—Look, it’s not like Rudy was some total stranger. The least you guys could do is—Oh, screw it.”

“We told the cops everything we know,” Steve said, with his hands out. “What do you want us to do, wear black?”

When Harvey stepped into the batting cage to take his cuts off Tony Cantalupa, he wanted something to be different. But the park was the same, the pocking of wood against horsehide, the smacking of horsehide against leather, the pitchers running wind sprints along the warning track, their spikes kicking up small clumps of dirt behind them. There was no sign that Rudy was missing. Harvey stroked a couple of Tony’s pitches to center and watched them tail lazily.

Campy Strulowitz leaned on the aluminum frame of the cage behind him. “Bring it to him, Tony,” he yelled to Cantalupa on the mound. “Come to this guy with some heat, Tone, hum-a-now, be a hitter, Harv, be a stick up there, you’re the kid.” Harvey slammed one through the hole at short. “Way to come to the ball, way to come.” Harvey flattened a couple more to left, then lofted one into the left field seats. “Just a bingle, babe, just a bingle.” Harvey moved over to the left side of the plate and sliced one down the left field line. He jumped on the next one, too, and the ball arched down the right field line, climbing as if under its own power, and curling around the 339
FT
sign at the foul pole. He was smoking. Tony mopped his face with the back of his glove and reached into the basket for more baseballs. Campy was still at it. “That’s the sweet,” he said, “that’s the stroke, babe, way to be, you’re the kid.”

Harvey topped the next two pitches feebly toward the mound and turned to Campy. “Not today, Campy,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

“All right, babe,” Campy said, “no chatter, big batter, no chatter, you’re the one,” and then he fell silent.

After Harvey took a few more of Tony’s pitches—big, fat, sweeping curves now—and hoisted them deep against the fences, Les Byers called out, “Hey, man, don’t hurt the fences. Save something for us two-thirty hitters, hear?”

On his way back to the dugout, Harvey was startled to see Ronnie Mateo in a first-row box seat, eyes closed and sallow face tilted toward the midday sun. He was wearing a muted green leisure suit with five-inch lapels and chrome buttons. It looked more like a ’58 Buick than an article of clothing.

One of Ronnie’s eyelids eased open, and Harvey heard him say in a low voice as he passed, “That was a horrible thing happened to your roommate, Professor.”

Randy Eppich, the Jewels’ starting catcher, was sitting on the bench with Bob Lassiter, babbling about the effect of the murder on “the team as a whole.” He sounded as if he could have been speaking about the effect of groin pull to a key player.

At the end of the bench, filing her nails, was Frances Shalhoub. She was a tall woman, in a navy skirt, white blouse, and spectator pumps. Her long brown hair was streaked with blond and her face had a fine, disdainful beauty, something designed to be admired rather than touched. Her wide green eyes were set above severe cheekbones. Her nostrils, thin as shells, always looked flared. She reminded Harvey of a well-groomed Afghan hound with earrings.

To explain her thirteen-year marriage to Felix, you had to believe that Frances at twenty-seven had been a naive or desperate young woman, neither of which seemed likely, or that Felix at forty possessed charms no longer apparent. Because she looked younger than her years and Felix older, together they gave the impression of a kindly father with his stunning oldest daughter proudly in tow. They had no children. All the men on the team guessed much more about the Shalhoubs’ marriage than they actually knew.

She was a businesslike woman. For the last three years, while Felix managed the New York Mets, Frances ran a public relations firm in Manhattan, selling it over the winter in order to accompany her husband to Providence. She had helped Marshall Levy and the public relations director, Buzzy Stanfill, devise some publicity gimmicks for the team. On Ring Night, the first five thousand fans to pass through the turnstiles received a Pro-Gem ring with black and green stones—the team colors. Fifteen thousand had shown up, but after that, attendance dropped again.

Twice during the summer, the Shalhoubs had invited the players and their wives to barbecues at their rented home in Barrington. At the first, in May, Frances and Harvey had found themselves alone in the garden. Harvey, indicating her simple black dress and thin gold belt, had said, “You look like an expensive Dunhill lighter in that outfit.”

“That’s a better line than I expect from a baseball player.” She smiled and swirled the ice in her gin and tonic.

“That’s what college will do for you.”

“You know, Harvey,” she said, “I just want to say that we’re glad to have you.”

“I’m glad to be here,” he said. “It’s a nice house.”

“No,” she said, grazing his arm with her free hand, “I mean on the team. I can’t for the life of me understand why the Red Sox didn’t protect you in the draft. How many years were you with them, five? All right, for them you may not have been the hitter you’ve turned out to be for us, but you had consistent RBI production, you know how to advance a baserunner, and you’ve got a gun for an arm out there in center field. You weren’t having problems with the owners, were you?”

Harvey shook his head and finished chewing a boiled shrimp.

“You’re good for at least four, five more years, barring injury, of course,” she continued. “This is what I want to say. We’re an expansion team, and frankly, I don’t care much if we win a whole lot of ball games this first year. I’d be happy with sixty, tickled with seventy. Now, what I want to see is Felix begin building a solid franchise for next year and the years after that. We need a solid nucleus. Every winning team has that. And you’re a big part of the nucleus. If you ever lose a step or two in center, we can always move you to left, and when you’re old and gray”—she actually winked at him—“we can always keep first base open for you. You know, I can almost see you as one of baseball’s elder statesmen, bringing along the younger guys.”

Harvey picked at the deviled egg on the cocktail napkin in his left hand. It was before Felix’s absence from the team, and since Harvey had only the vaguest idea about her interest in baseball or in the Jewels in particular, her speech came as a refreshing surprise.

“All right,” she said, “you’re part of the nucleus. You and a few others. I can level with you, can’t I? I like what I see of Chuck at short—I can never pronounce his last name. I think Randy is a major league catcher. We have to be strong up the middle. Every winning team is strong where it counts. Dan Van Auken is part of the nucleus. What is he, twenty-four, twenty-five? In a year or two, he’ll be one of the premier lefties in the league. We’ve already got Bobby Wagner. They’re all part of the nucleus.

“Of course, we’ve got to hold on to the nucleus. Wagner’s in the last year of his contract, and he’ll go free agent over the winter, so we’ve got to do everything possible to keep him here. Same goes for Randy. You, Harvey, if I’m not mistaken, have another two years to go on your current contract, which I’m sure you’ll want to sit down and renegotiate with Marshall, the way you’ve been playing. Felix and Marshall want everyone to be happy here.” She took a lusty drink of her gin and tonic. “We’ll make a trade or two in the off-season. We’ll strengthen our left-handed hitting. We’ll pick up a long reliever. We’re building, Harvey, we’re building for next year. You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this.”

“I’m wondering why you’re telling me all this,” Harvey conceded.

“I want you to be patient. Felix is tired of losing; underneath, he’s a winner. I know it’s not easy for veterans like you to start over with an expansion team. But we’re going to be a winner.”

“I hope so, too,” he said. “You know, I didn’t realize you were so involved with the team.”

She lifted her glass to her mouth, cracked an ice cube between her teeth, and swallowed it. “Your wife probably doesn’t like being left alone,” she smiled.

“I’m not married.”

“Oh. Then who’s that lovely brunette over there in the white pants?”

“That’s Randy’s wife, Karen.”

“How odd of me,” she said, pressing a finger to her lips. “I thought you were married. Oh, well, what do you say we go over and try the poached salmon?”

That had been three months ago. Now, as he bent over the dugout water cooler, he heard her say, “Hello, Harvey.”

He wiped his mouth. “Hello. How are you?”

She stroked her nail furiously with the emery board. “How would you expect me to be?”

“Yeah, I guess that didn’t come out right.”

“Felix and I were up all night.” She didn’t look it. “We racked our brains to make sense of it. It’s frightening. And the publicity—it’s not the kind we need.”

“To say nothing of the effect this’ll have on the team.”

“By which you mean?” she said crisply, raising her eyebrows. She had the capacity to make you feel as if you hadn’t brushed your teeth.

“By which I mean no one seems to have any clue, and for all we know, someone on the team may’ve been mixed up in this, and everyone’s going to be eyeing everyone else, as if enough of that doesn’t always go on around here.”

“I don’t know why you say someone on the team may have been involved. But I suppose anything’s possible. It just doesn’t make sense. That detective was here again this morning. Maybe they’ll find some fingerprints or something. You roomed with him. Do you have any ideas?”

“No, not unless Rudy was mixed up with gambling. Is that guy Ronnie Mateo a bookie or something?”

“You mean that tacky fellow who comes to all the games?”

“Yeah. In fact, he’s here right now.”

“He looks absolutely harmless.”

“Who is he?” Harvey said. “What’s he doing at a team practice?”

Frances shrugged. “Let me know if you find out. By the way, Harvey, I’m having Marshall set up a scholarship in Rudy’s name for a deserving Providence orphan. I just wanted you to know.”

“That’s nice,” he said and trotted out to the field to shag some flies. Steve Wilton was standing about twenty yards away in right center with his cap turned around, the better to tan his face. At the plate, Les lofted a fly ball that landed fifteen feet away from Wilton and rolled toward the wall. Steve didn’t make a move to get the ball, and Charlie Penzenik had to run over from farther away in right to retrieve it. It was just like Wilton. The Cubs had always considered him a head case, a good athlete only from the neck down. In a couple seasons, he’d wake up and find himself back in Bessemer, Alabama, uncrating produce at his daddy’s supermarket and wondering what went wrong.

“They can’t always hit ’em right at you, Steve,” Harvey hollered at him.

Steve turned his head slowly, like a lizard. “Mind your own fucking business,” he said.