The Cincinnati Red Stalkings (19 page)

“What was it like?”

“Union Grounds was a pretty little park, but it’s not the structure that made it so special. It was everything that surrounded a ball game in those days: the parades, being taken to the game by carriage, bands playing, banners waving, the crowd cheering ...” His eyes looked upward, and I was happy to see that they did still have a spark of passion for the game, at least for the one he used to play. “To take the field and see the flags flying from the cupola over the Grand Duchess—”

“Grand Duchess?”

Wright explained that it was the nickname for the grandstand which was reserved for the ladies. “And, oh, how the ladies adored us,” he added with a twinkle in his eyes. “They’d wave red handkerchiefs, and some of them would wear red stockings. Of course they had to lift their skirts above their ankles for us to see them, and that was considered quite provocative in those days.”

“Speaking about the ladies,” I broke in, “I heard that’s why Dick Hurley left the team—something about a girl named Sarah. They eloped, some say. Do you know if that’s true?”

“I don’t recall the name of the girl,” he answered. “But I do believe I heard something about an elopement.”

I then asked him about the homecoming on July 1, 1869, and the banquet that night. He gave me a recounting of the parade, the exhibition game, and the dinner. Although I enjoyed hearing it from his perspective, he didn’t say anything that I hadn’t already read or heard about. And, again, it all sounded smooth and polished.

“Mr. Wright,” I said, “this might be important. Could you please try to think back if anything happened that night with Dick Hurley? Did you see him with a girl at the banquet? Or did anything unusual happen?”

He frowned and studied me for a moment. “You sound serious.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Hurley was shot last week. And it may have to do with something that happened in the summer of ’69.”

“Shot!” Wright repeated. “Did he survive?”

“So far, but the last I heard, he’s still in the hospital. He came to Cincinnati for the opening of an exhibit on the Red Stockings, and a woman shot him at his hotel.”

“Oh, my.” Wright appeared to be searching his memory. His tone no longer sounded like he was giving a banquet speech when he said, “I believe the story about Hurley running off with a girl was just a rumor. The team never discouraged it, though.” He smiled wryly. “Been telling the same story myself for so many years, I suppose I got to believing that’s what really happened. But it’s not why he left the club.”

“Do you know the real reason?”

He answered sadly, “My brother fired him for drunkenness. We were trying to make baseball respectable, and Harry had no tolerance for drunkards. In fact, Harry Junior, my nephew, was a fine ballplayer and could have made the big leagues in the eighties, but his father wouldn’t let him play because of all the rummies in the game. We weren’t exactly saints, mind you. Charlie Sweasy and Asa Brainard in particular could be problems. But Hurley embarrassed the team in public.”

“What did he do?”

“He was so inebriated at that homecoming banquet that he couldn’t walk under his own power and had to be carried out. In front of the city’s leading citizens. Harry fired him the next morning. We didn’t want to humiliate him by giving the reason publicly, and of course it would have reflected badly on the team to say why he’d been dismissed. So Hurley just quietly went away. Must say, I prefer the story that he ran off with a girl.”

“Thanks, Mr. Wright. I may be seeing you soon in Cincinnati. I hear you might be coming to the opening of the exhibit for your old team.”

“I’m not sure if I can. I’m awfully busy here. But I do hope we get a chance to chat again. Not many people ask me about my baseball days anymore.”

During my nightly phone call home, I asked Margie if there was any news yet on why Charlotte Ashby had shot Dick Hurley.

“No,” she answered. “According to the papers, she hasn’t said a word to anyone about why she did it. I do have some news for you though.”

“What’s that?”

“Spider Jenkins, the gambler you met at the Stars game, called. He was pretty skittish—wanted to talk only to you, and really didn’t want to give me a message. But I coaxed him into it. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. What did he say?”

“Lloyd Tinsley did bet on the 1919 World Series.”

“Huh! So maybe—”

“But he bet on the Reds.”

“Oh.” So he and Rufus Yates weren’t in on a fix together. According to Kid Gumbert, Yates had wanted the Reds to lose the series. Tinsley had bet on them to win. “Did he find out anything about Yates?”

“Not yet. He said he’ll keep looking into both Tinsley and Yates. Oh—he also says you owe him twenty-five dollars for the information. You can leave it with Ralph at the Palace, he said.”

“Pretty steep, but okay.” I had told Jenkins to name his price, after all, and a deal was a deal.

“How’s Karl?” Margie asked. The two of them had met several times when we lived in Detroit.

“Uh, you’ll be seeing him for yourself soon. He’s coming to stay with us for a while.” I held my breath.

She didn’t yell at me for not asking her about it first. “That’s wonderful! It will be nice to see him again. And I wish
you
were here tonight already.” I assumed her desire to see me had a romantic basis, but she added, “I could use your help. I’m going to the zoo later to dig up a wildebeest that died last week.”

“You’re
what?”
And I thought I did some crazy things.

I still wasn’t sure if she was kidding me about her plans for the night when we hung up, and I went back to the room.

After packing, I checked the schedule to see when our first games in Redland Field would be. Then I looked at the date of the game when I’d met Rufus Yates outside the park: July 10. Something seemed wrong with that. I flipped the calendar back to June. According to the report Detective Forsch showed me, Yates had begun a thirty-day sentence on the twentieth of that month. Thirty days. So how did he get out after only twenty?

“
T
hanks for letting him stay,” I said to Margie.

She handed me a stack of plates and bowls to set on the dining table. “It will be fun to have a houseguest.”

Margie had to be the most optimistic person on earth to think that it could possibly be “fun” to have Karl Landfors around.

Karl and I had arrived in Cincinnati only a couple hours earlier, and I was already irritated with him. After the long train ride from Boston, we both badly needed a bath. Out of hospitality, I let him go first, and he remained in the tub for so long that I was going to have to wait until after dinner to wash off the soot and dirt from the train.

The table was set, Margie’s latest batch of burgoo was ready, and the drinks were poured by the time Karl came back downstairs wearing a clean change of clothes. The degree of cleanliness was the only variable in his wardrobe, which consisted entirely of black suits, white shirts, and black ties.

“Smells wonderful,” Karl said as he sat down. He tilted up his long nose and sniffed in about half the room’s air supply. “What is it?”

“Burgoo,” Margie answered. “Something like mulligan stew.”

“Except you probably never had mulligan stew with squirrel in it,” I said.

Karl dropped the napkin he’d been primly folding. “Squirrel?”

“Or worse. You never know what critters might end up in the pot.” I asked Margie, “You didn’t put in any of that wildebeest you dug up, did you?”

She smiled. “Just the eyeballs for flavor.”

Karl approached his first few bites skeptically, but then appeared to enjoy the food. Throughout the meal, I said little, letting Margie and Karl catch up. She told him about her job at the zoo; he talked about the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and the Defense Committee’s planned appeal.

After dinner, we went into the parlor for coffee and peach pie. Margie and I took the sofa while Karl sat stiffly on the edge of an armchair. We’d barely sat down when Margie popped back up. “Oh!” she said. “I have something to show you.” She went over to the sideboard and came back with a small stack of newspapers. “You made the headlines.”

Uh, oh. I’d made headlines before, and they rarely involved good news.

“No, you’ll like it,” she said, apparently noticing my expression. “It’s about that hidden ball trick you pulled.”

I certainly did like it when I saw the two-column headline:

Not only was it great to see my name in print like that, it was especially nice to see it given top billing over John McGraw’s. The article accompanying the headline referred to me as “the crafty veteran.” I liked “crafty,” but seeing myself called a “veteran” was probably like the first time a woman hears herself addressed as “ma’am.” On the whole, I was thrilled with the coverage, though, and I glanced around the parlor to see where best to display that game ball.

“The other stories are in there, too,” Margie said. “About the Dick Hurley shooting.”

“Shooting?” Karl asked. In Boston, I’d only mentioned my problem with Judge Landis and Rufus Yates. I hadn’t yet told him about the death of Oliver Perriman or the attempt to kill Hurley.

While he nibbled his dessert, I filled him in on Dick Hurley’s disappearance in the midst of the 1869 season, the arrival in Cincinnati of a man who claimed to be Hurley a couple of weeks ago, and on the contents of the note I’d found in the old baseball. As I talked, I skimmed over the newspaper articles about the shooting. They reported that while Hurley was recovering in Old City Hospital, Mrs. Charlotte Ashby had been charged with attempted murder and was being held in Central Station. She was refusing to make a statement to police, and the motive for her action remained a mystery.

“So your theory,” Karl said in a dubious tone, “is that the shooting was to get revenge for something Hurley did fifty-two years ago?”

“Not necessarily ‘revenge,’ ” I said, “but at first I did think it might be related to what happened to Sarah—especially if she and Hurley had eloped. Now I have no idea why he was shot. I talked with George Wright in Boston, and he told me Hurley was kicked off the team for drunkenness. So there probably never was any elopement.” I took a sip of coffee. “And as for this fellow who was shot, I suspect he’s a fraud anyway. Maybe Charlotte Ashby knows his true identity, and wanted to kill him for some reason that has nothing to do with the real Dick Hurley.”

Margie said, “Maybe you should tell that to the police—about him being an impostor.”

“I don’t know for a
fact
that he is, it’s just the sense I have from the way he talked. A lot of what he said didn’t ring true.” I dug a fork into the pie. “Sure would’ve helped if Lloyd Tinsley had checked him out first, but all Tinsley wants him for is publicity.”

“Tinsley is the business manager,” Karl said. I’d pointed out most of the team, including Tinsley, Pat Moran, and the coaches, to him in the club car during the trip from Boston.

I nodded. “He also has a stake in the exhibit Ollie Perriman was setting up—a hundred percent stake now that Perriman’s dead.” I gave him a brief rundown on Perriman’s death, and on the break-ins at Redland Field and our home. “I thought maybe that could be a motive for Tinsley to want Perriman dead—to get the exhibit. But now I’m pretty sure he had nothing to do with it.”

“What makes you sure?” Karl asked.

“Pretty
sure. I’m not
certain
about anything in all this.” I paused to organize my thoughts before continuing. “I figure Perriman was killed for one of two reasons: either somebody wanted him dead, and the break-in was to cover up the motive for the murder, or somebody wanted to steal something from the collection and killed Perriman while trying to get it. If Lloyd Tinsley wanted something from the collection, he could have taken it anytime; no need to kill Perriman. And the only reason I could think of for Tinsley wanting him murdered is to inherit the collection—but that doesn’t make sense because he’d do better to wait until Perriman finished organizing it.”

“Is there anyone else who would have motive to murder Perriman?” Karl asked. “Or do you believe he was simply killed in the course of a robbery.”

Margie looked over at me, then said, “Well, his wife might have been having an affair with one of the players.”

“Curt Stram,” I said. “There
was
something between him and Katie Perriman, and whatever it was turned sour.” I told them of my talk with Stram, and about him saying that he’d done her a favor, and now she was mad at him. “Could be one of them wanted Perriman out of the way.”

Karl was rubbing his nose and blinking rapidly as he tried to absorb everything.

I pushed away my empty plate. “I think Rufus Yates is the key in all this.”

“The gambler you were photographed with,” Karl said. He appeared relieved at the mention of somebody he’d already heard about.

“Yes. He was definitely involved in trying to get the Reds to throw games during the 1919 World Series—I talked to one of the players he tried to bribe. And Yates is only part of it. There’s also whoever it was who took the photo and sent it to Garry Herrmann. For a while I thought it could be Tinsley, because Yates once played for a team he ran in the minors. I figured maybe it went something like this: Tinsley and Yates were partners in trying to get the Reds to throw the Series, Ollie Perriman came across evidence of it among the stuff he gathered for his collection, and so Tinsley had Yates kill him.” I shook my head. “But that doesn’t work. Yates was in jail when Perriman was killed, and, according to a local bookie, Tinsley bet on the Reds, not against them.”

Karl looked puzzled. “Isn’t any kind of betting in baseball enough to get you kicked out?”

“Not back then it wasn’t. Lots of managers and players bet on the games. As long as you bet on your own team to win, it was always okay.”

“So where do you go from here?” Karl asked.

That was the question. “I’m not sure. There is something new that’s come up about Yates: he was supposed to be serving a month in jail—thirty days or thirty dollars—but he got out more than a week early. And I’ve been wondering: how did he come up with the money after twenty days in jail? If he had enough to pay the fine when he was sentenced, why not pay it right away and avoid serving time? And if he didn’t have it, where did it come from? Maybe somebody paid the fine for him. And maybe knowing who put up the money will tell me who his partner is.” I leaned back in the sofa, my head tilted against the cushion. I felt tired and grimy and didn’t want to talk or think about it anymore. “Thing is, I don’t know where to start.”

Apparently the grime hadn’t escaped Margie’s notice. “Maybe with a bath,” she suggested.

We all retired early. Karl Landfors was settled in the guest room, and Margie and I were in bed.

“Do I smell better now?” I asked her.

“You weren’t bad before. I just thought a hot bath would do you good.” Margie began to massage the back of my neck. “Besides, it gave Karl and me a chance to talk.”

“About what?”

“Among other things, we decided to help you.” Her fingers dug deeper.

“Mmmm. That feels good. Help me how?”

“Karl’s going to look into how Rufus Yates got released early. And I’m going to talk to Katie Perriman; maybe I can find out what the ‘favor’ was that Curt Stram did for her.”

“Thanks, but I—”

Her fingers left my neck, and she curled up close to me. “Something else probably do you good, too.”

“Uh, Karl’s right across the hall.” His proximity put a damper on my enthusiasm for the way Margie and I traditionally celebrated my return from a road trip.

“So? The door’s closed—it’s not like he’s going to see us.”

“I know, but ... he’ll hear.” With Margie and me, there was little chance of it being a quiet celebration.

Her hands flew up under my arms and she tickled me until I was choking back the laughs and bouncing to free myself from her. “Stop,” I said. “He’s gonna think we’re ...”

She halted the tickling. “Well, if he thinks that’s what we’re doing anyway, then we might as well.”

Margie always did make such good sense.