Dead Ball (19 page)

“There’s a confusing lack of pattern,” Bellaggio said, his portable oxygen unit sitting discreetly next to him in the wooden booth. “Almost deliberately so. A deliberate smokescreen, perhaps.”

“But for what?”

“If I had to choose, Harv, I’d say the first act was a smokescreen for the second.”

“That the general threat—to stop the hitting streak—is a screen for the specific one—cutting off his relationship with this group?”

“Yes.”

“Jerry, that presupposes that the hitting streak came along at just the right time to provide a smokescreen.”

“Fine. So it did. If I’m right, and there hadn’t been a hitting streak to provide cover for his true business, he would’ve used something else.”

“Like what?” Harvey asked.

“What else you got? Where else is Cooley vulnerable to racist attack?”

“He’s got a white girlfriend.”

“There you go.”

“But this guy doesn’t seem to know it.”

“If he knew it, he would’ve used it.” Jerry pointed a forkful of chicken parmesan at Harvey. “Instead he had the streak. Here’s the conjecture, Harv: By using the lawn jockey, the guy wanted to establish himself as a guy who means business, lending force to any later threat or demand, which would be his real demand.”

“You really think this?”

“Let’s say I do. Then I’d want to know more about his relationship with GURCC.”

“Cooley couldn’t think of any reason why his involvement with GURCC would be a specific problem for anyone. He says he’s only been lending them his name. And making financial contributions.”

“This chicken is delicious, Harv. Want a bite?”

“No, thanks.”

“Look, I could be all wet. Surely Cooley’s self-interest would prevent him from concealing anything.”

“You would think.”

“Just the two threats, huh?”

“That’s it.”

Jerry chewed thoughtfully. “If GURCC was the point, and the guy’s really clever, he’ll do something else, an ex post facto smokescreen. Really confuse the hell out of Cooley.”

“On the other hand, another threat could be taken as evidence that the guy
has
no specific message other than racial hate.”

“This is a tough one, Harv.”

“Well, I’m relieved to know you think it’s a tough one, and it’s not just that I’m out of practice.”

“How worried are you about Cooley’s safety?”

“I don’t know. The team’s on a road trip now, so I’m trying to relax about it. Anyway, the owner and general manager took me off the case. It’s their problem now.”

“Is it?” Jerry said, concentrating on spooling some pasta marinara around his fork.

“No,” Harvey said ruefully. “Of course not. You know I don’t let go of things that easily.”

Jerry smiled, his gray face brightening a bit. “That’s why I thought you’d make a good private investigator fifteen years ago.”

“But I did let go. Four years ago I let go of investigating and became a motivational speaker.”

“You thought you’d try living life as an optimist, huh?”

Harvey smiled.

“Thought you’d try being a cheerleader instead of a player, huh?”

“Okay, okay.”

“You can run from your melancholy, Harv, but you can’t hide.”

“That’ll be enough, Jerry.”

When he got home, Harvey went to his study, where he’d been keeping the headless lawn jockey. He lifted it out of its box and set it on his big rolltop desk. He put the grinning, deferential head next to it.

When his cell phone started up with “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” he fumbled the phone out of his pocket and brought it to his ear.

“Bagel Boy?”

“Moss. Hey, what’s going on?”

“I’m still on his list.”

“What happened?” Harvey walked into the living room and sat on the sofa.

“There was a message waiting for me at the hotel when I got back tonight after the game.”

“You’re sure it’s from him?”

“Same cutout letters. It says, ‘You better not be making no Fudge Ripple Babies.’ ”

“No Fudge Ripple babies?” Now their man was affecting bad grammar.

“Down South, that’s what they call ’em—half-black, half-white babies.”

“He’s figured out who your girlfriend is.”

“He’s in New York.”

“The letter wasn’t mailed?”

“It was left for me.”

“Where are you?”

“Marriott Marquis.”

“Are you in your room?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to go down to the front desk and talk to the desk clerk who handed you the letter. See if he or she remembers who left it for you.”

“I’ll try, but there was a bunch of messages waiting for me.”

“Just give it a shot. Did you call Cherry Ann yet?”

“You think I should?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“She’d be at the club right now.”

“Can’t you call her there?”

“I can try. I don’t want to scare her.”

“You don’t want anything to happen to her, either. See if she can stay with a friend and tell her to call me. Let’s play it safe.”

“Wait till I get my hands on this motherfucker.”

“You predicted we’d hear from him on some other subject. And now it’s happened. Listen—don’t talk about this with anybody, okay. Except for Marshall and Felix.”

“They’re in Providence.”

“I’ll call Marshall at home,” Harvey said. “See what he wants to do. Now get hold of Cherry Ann and then call me back either way after you’ve talked to the desk clerk. And stay in your room.”

“Me and my Spectravision.”

“By the way, Moss, did you ever call your friend Charlie Fathon?”

“Yeah, I called him and told him about the note and that when this thing was resolved, I’d be GURCC’s boy again.”

“Did he have any ideas?”

“No.”

“Good.” Maybe it
was
a meaningless, scattershot campaign. Except that he’d gone to the trouble, apparently, of identifying Cherry Ann. “Incidentally, how’d you do tonight?”

“We lost, three-one.”

“And you?”

“Zip-for-four. I had no focus.”

The rest of the night was a flurry of phone calls. First, to owner Marshall Levy, who rehired Harvey to bodyguard Moss on the road trip until further notice. Next, from Moss, who had had no luck at the front desk. None of the three clerks he spoke to had any recollection of who might have left
any
of the dozens of letters for hotel guests that evening. There had been, the clerks all agreed, no unusual transactions at the desk, no suspicious characters. One told Moss that letters and messages for guests were sometimes just left on the front desk. There was a brief, angry call from Cherry Ann Smoler, letting Harvey know that she didn’t appreciate being caught up in the continuing intrigue, as if he were responsible for it, and that she would be staying with a friend named Dawn on the East Side. Then he left a message for Mickey on her voice mail, letting her know he was headed for New York in the morning.

Shortly after eleven
P.M.
, as Harvey was packing his bags, the phone rang one last time.

“Is that you, Blissboig?” a voice barked in a Brooklyn accent.

“Arnold?” Harvey said.

Arnold Slavin, civil rights lawyer, activist, litigator, former all-Brooklyn high school basketball star, was one of those guys who used his courtroom voice whenever possible. It was part of a general strategy to browbeat others into submission. To him, every conversation was a contest that could have only one winner. And that would be him. You came away from a conversation with Arnold feeling psychologically manhandled. Not that he didn’t use humor to distract you from the pummeling. Arnold once greeted Harvey at a restaurant in Manhattan by saying, “I can’t tell you how good you look now that you’ve put on a little extra weight.”

“You’re not sleeping, are ya?” Arnold said now. “You’re not in the middle of making love to my daughter, are ya?”

“No and no. Mickey’s in St. Louis tonight, doing the game.”

“It’s not her I want, anyway. She told me about the job you’ve been doing for Moss Cooley.”

“You know, I keep telling—”

“You don’t think I can keep a secret? You find the slime-ball yet?”

“No.”

“Guy left Cooley a lawn jockey?”

“That’s right.”

“Without a head?”

“That’s right. The head came later.”

“Well, now that his streak’s been stopped, I don’t know if you’ll be interested, but I’m convinced it must’ve resonated for her.”

“Resonated? What resonated?”

“The lawn jockey without a head,” Arnold Slavin said. “You know, sitting around the dinner table in the sixties, she heard a lot of interesting stuff.”

“Like what, Arnold?”

“You know, Harvey, the unconscious mind stores all sorts of impressions that can resonate years later with something that crosses your path.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“And that’s why I think she mentioned the lawn jockey to me. She was only six or seven when I represented those SNCC boys after their malicious arrest on bogus state anti-boycott laws. Imagine the impression that would make on a little girl.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Back in the sixties, Harvey, at least when I was close to the situation, Klansmen and their sympathizers used to try to intimidate blacks by spray-painting ‘KKK’ on church doors or throwing acid on their cars or just driving around nigger knockin’—leaning out the window and whipping them with a detached car radio antenna. But there was one Ku Klux Klan klavern outside of Atlanta—the Wyckoff Klavern, if I remember correctly—whose members preferred a more metaphorical twist. They’d leave the decapitated head of a lawn jockey on the front seat of a car, or on the doorstep of the local preacher’s house. And that’s the only other instance of decapitated lawn jockeys I know of.”

“You’re sure about this, Arnold?”

“Don’t tamper with my integrity, Harvey. I have to believe that your girlfriend there must’ve picked that up at the dinner table when she was still playing with Barbie dolls, and that’s what I mean when I say it resonated.”

“This is the only instance you know of involving decapitated lawn jockey heads?”

“What did I just say, Harvey?”

“All right, Arnold. Thank you. I believe you’ve done me a big favor.”

“Now do me a big favor and make an honest woman out of her, Blissboig. Don’t you think fifteen years is enough pussyfooting around?”

When he got off the phone, Harvey looked into his dark study through the open door and saw the lawn jockey, its alienated head smiling at him in the blue light of the moon pouring in through the study window. Harvey smiled back. His man had made his first mistake. He had spoken in a dead language from the past, and Harvey had found someone who spoke it too.

C
HARLIE FATHON OF GURCC
had a slow, plush drawl that made him sound much older than his childhood friend Moss Cooley. Harvey felt as if someone were pouring sorghum syrup over his head.

“No, suh,” Fathon said when Harvey reached him at GURCC’s offices on Saturday morning, “Maurice only enlightened me in a most general way as to the other incidents. He called mostly about the note demanding that he suspend his public relationship with us. I don’t believe you have to fight every battle, so I told him not to think twice about doing what was right for him and that I was sure the time would come again for him to lend us his spiritual help.” Fathon emphasized “spiritual” in a way that implied that Moss planned to continue his financial support.

As Harvey told him about the lawn jockey and his conversation the previous night with Arnold Slavin, Fathon kept up a steady, soothing stream of “uh-huhs.” “I can’t help thinking,” Harvey concluded, “that this all has something to do with Moss’s association with GURCC. Problem is, Moss can’t think of why he’d be a threat to anyone. Does Moss know something he’s not supposed to as a result of his association with GURCC?”

“I can tell you that he’s familiar with some of the cases we’re investigating. I went over some of the high-profile cases with him and his friend, so that he could speak publicly about our work here with some degree of intelligence.”

“What friend?”

“Maurice’s lady friend. As cute as a speckled pup. But that’d be true of all Maurice’s lady friends. I can still see him holding hands with May Alice Hughes, the prettiest girl in second grade.”

“Was she a young white woman?”

“Yes, but I can’t recall her name to my mind at the moment.”

“Cherry Ann.”

“That’s the one. Studying to be a chef. Why, Claude Reed—he’s the young man who answers our phones—Claude couldn’t stop talking about her for days. Between Cherry Ann and meeting the great Moss Cooley, I thought we were going to have to take Claude out back and hose him down.” Fathon laughed a dark, rich laugh.

“When was this?”

“Oh, maybe three weeks ago. Maurice had a day off, and bless his heart, he flew in with Cherry Ann. I don’t get to see that boy enough anymore. All I get to do is watch him swing that stick on TV.”

Three weeks ago placed the visit more than a week before the lawn jockey showed up at The Jewel Box. “Did they come to your offices?”

“Yes. I introduced Maurice to everyone, he signed a mess of autographs and chatted with the staff, and then we sat down, and I showed him some of the case files. I don’t know if you happen to know about Maurice’s own grandaddy.”

“I do.”

“Then you know that his interest in seeing justice done is not abstract. It has a personal nature.”

“What sort of cases did you discuss with him?”

“As I recall, the two or three cases we’re concentrating on at the moment. I guess I was showing off a bit for him. Have to let Maurice know he’s not the only one who’d done something with his life. So I showed him a little bit about some of the cases that’ve moved up our ladder. You know, every time we successfully prosecute one of these old cases, the others move up a rung. Now we’re focusing on Joella Barnes, a teenager raped and murdered in nineteen eighty-one in Florida, where we’ve received new information from one inmate that another has been boasting about her murder. Then we’re busier than a swarm of dog peter gnats working on the unsolved lynching of two black men, itinerants, Gomez and Spellman, back in ’seventy-six. That case wasn’t just cold, it was frozen solid, until, once again, a fellow already in prison on assault and battery charges began reminiscing about some fun he had with a couple of nigger boys once near Huntsville, and after that we were able to place the gentleman in the employ of a machinist shop in the area at the time of the lynching.”