Dead Ball (8 page)

“Who knows about it?”

“The team’s top management and me, basically.”

“They haven’t gone to the locals?”

“No. I’m their insurance policy right now against having to open the thing up to a public viewing. That’s why I need you.”

“Well, go on, give me my marching orders.”

“First of all, can you get on the Web while I’m baby-sitting and find out everything you can about Negro lawn jockeys, especially cast-iron ones—who still makes them, who distributes them in Rhode Island, any news stories or legal cases involving lawn jockeys? This one’s about two feet tall, goes about fifty pounds. He’s hunched over, wearing a red vest and cap, and he’s holding a hitching ring in his extended right hand. His head is a caricature—bulging eyes, obsequious grin. You still have access to FBI databases?”

“I’ve got a friend in the BAU, but the bureau frowns on the abuse of database privileges.”

“Doesn’t it count for anything that you’re a proud member of the Society of Ex-Special Agents?”

“Yeah. That and six dollars will get me an FBI souvenir key ring. I don’t like to call in too many favors, Harvey. It puts my buddy at risk.”

“Oh, for chrissakes, Jerry, I’m feeding you data the FBI can use in their profiling.”

“But it’s not their case.”

“Some day it might be theirs. I just need to run with it for a while.”

“Well, tell me what you want,” Bellaggio said, wheezing.

“I need to know about any right-wing or racist activity in southern New England, especially groups or incidents where death threats involving lawn jockeys or other segregationist symbols are the signature. Also anybody in southern New England currently under federal surveillance for suspected hate crimes.”

“All right. Let me see if I can get my buddy to tap in for you. What about the note?”

“What about it?”

“Is it handwritten or typed?”

“Neither. Cut-out letters from magazines.”

“Did you know that ninety percent of those are written by the so-called victims themselves?”

“You’re kidding,” Harvey said.

“Nope. It’s a curious fact, since the bad guys would be better off using that technique, but for some reason they insist on writing or typing them themselves. Bureau’s got a huge repository of death threats and ransom notes to draw on, but cutouts aren’t going to help you.”

“In any case, I seriously doubt that Moss Cooley sent himself a decapitated lawn jockey with a note telling him to lay off DiMaggio’s streak. He doesn’t need publicity that bad.”

“No, I suppose not. So where do I reach you?”

“I’ll be on the fly, Jerry, so use my cell phone number the minute anything lights up.”

On the way out of the house, he gave Mickey’s ass a fierce squeeze, and she gave him two sheets of computer downloaded printout, folded in thirds, saying, “Read this before you see Cooley today.”

As Harvey drove from Boston to Providence, there was a moment—it was soon after he hit the straight leg of 95 that began around Norwood and shot south to Rhode Island’s capital—when he felt like he was passing through a membrane from one world to another. It was hard to explain to others, the uncanny feeling he had about Providence, that it existed in another place and time. Maybe it went back to his childhood outside Boston. Providence was only fifty miles away, yet he had never gone there as a boy. It lurked on the edge of his awareness, like an aunt too eccentric to visit. That he had finished his playing career there, in the costume jewelry capital of America, only enriched its personal mythology for him.

No matter how many television shows were set in Providence, no matter how much they gussied it up with canals and urban renewal, it was still a city ensnared in the past. In fact, it was the only major American city whose entire downtown was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. For forty years, from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, there had been virtually no money for new building downtown. Despite its recent growth spurt, the city continued to exhibit what a
Christian Science Monitor
journalist once called “a curious lack of bustle.” Who could explain Providence? The New England mob, with roots in Prohibition, when Narragansett Bay was a rum-runner’s paradise, made a Federal Hill storefront its headquarters, while only a mile away, on College Hill, Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design churned out the power elite and the avant garde. In this tight town, everything was a stone’s throw away from its contradiction. Its mayor was a man who had once extinguished a lighted cigarette on the forehead of a man he suspected of sleeping with his estranged wife, but now sold “The Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce” on the Internet.

On the empty straight stretch of 95, Harvey unfolded the printout Mickey had given him, propped it up on the steering wheel, and read it in snatches. It was a short item from
Sports Illustrated,
published almost six years ago, headlined “Farewell to Al Molis.”

Journeyman catcher Al Molis was found dead last week in an Ohio motel, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Thus ended one of the saddest major league baseball careers in recent memory. Molis, 35, who had been released this spring by the St. Louis Cardinals, failed to catch on with another team and at the time of his death was contemplating a coaching offer from an undisclosed minor league team, according to his estranged wife Jeannette.

He had a major league lifetime batting average of .244 with six teams, but was perhaps best known for his highly unorthodox political activities in a sport not known for its players’ political involvements. A professed right-winger and member of the rogue white supremacist group Izan Nation, based in Virginia, Molis recruited fellow major leaguers to his cause. As a member of the Colorado Rockies, Molis was arrested, along with teammates Andy Cubberly and Rod Duquesne, for disrupting a Black Pride parade in downtown Denver by shouting racist slogans and hurling white paint-filled balloons at the marchers. The charges were eventually reduced, and all three were required to perform community service.

On the field, Molis was twice reprimanded by the league for his habit of whispering racist comments to black batters from his position behind home plate, but his defensive skills and knack for handling pitchers—yes, even African-American ones, as long as they were his teammates—kept him in the league for twelve years.

Always prone to erratic behavior and drug use, Molis’s troubles seemed to worsen over the winter. Police in his hometown of New Welford, Ohio, arrested him in January for possession of crystal methedrine and had to subdue him with pepper gas.

Molis once said to a reporter who asked him what it was like playing for so many different teams: “I’ve only played on one team my entire life—the white team.”

Harvey gunned his Honda southward. As he approached the gleaming domed Rhode Island State House off 95, just north of downtown, he was surprised by Snoot Coffman’s face smiling down on him from a billboard. Coffman was holding up a baseball glove, which seemed to be catching the line of copy “
CATCH EVERY JEWELS’ GEM ON WRIX WITH SNOOT COFFMAN
.” A cartoon bubble coming out of Snoot’s mouth contained his signature “Now how ’bout dat?”

Harvey stopped at the AG’s office to fill out his pistol permit application and get fingerprinted, then got back on 95 South, making Rubino’s Warwick real estate office by eleven-fifteen.

The house in Exeter was just right: a dark, shingled colonial on the far loop of a high-end development, set well back from the street, protected from its equally affluent neighbors by phalanxes of evergreens. Inside, it was tastefully furnished and boasted a fully equipped designer kitchen. Harvey trailed behind the matronly Rubino, now only faintly reminiscent of the buxom blond he had once wooed, as she led him from one room to another. She pointed out each of the house’s virtues with that absurd zeal only real estate brokers can summon while keeping a straight face. With the possible exception of the first seven years of sex with Mickey, Harvey had never achieved the levels of enthusiasm Debbie Rubino expressed as she pointed out the flagstone fireplace and the northern light in the master bedroom. Harvey occupied himself with mentally calculating the added security arrangements he would have to make to keep them secure at night until Cooley’s hitting streak was over.

Back at Rubino’s office, Harvey wrote out checks, received two sets of keys in return, thanked her profusely, and retired to his Honda to call a local home security firm with whom he’d had dealings on a few occasions. Within half an hour he was walking through the colonial again, this time with two of the firm’s installers, indicating where he wanted motion and sound detectors, pressure mats, and pressure switches on the stairs to the second floor. He left the men his second set of keys so they could begin work as soon as possible and then took off for the University of Rhode Island’s Crime Lab, glancing over his shoulder now and then to make sure the box containing the lawn jockey was still wearing its seat belt.

“Don’t see many of these anymore, not even with their heads on,” Professor Roy Hinch said once Harvey had lugged the boxed lawn jockey upstairs and hoisted it onto his office desk. Although Harvey had done all the heavy lifting, it was Hinch who dabbed his forehead with a neatly folded handkerchief, took a plastic comb out of his shirt pocket, where it had been hiding behind a trio of cheap Paper Mates and a rectangular magnifying glass, and carefully tucked the hair on his graying temples back behind his ears. As he groomed himself, he never took his eyes off the jockey and the grinning head that lay gruesomely on the desk next to it. Professor Hinch worked his lips, saying nothing for the longest time. He picked up the head and examined its surfaces, then ran his finger over the severed neck of the figure.

“What do you want to know?” he said, touching an index finger to his lips. He looked more like a man who knew a lot about wine, which he did, than a man familiar with the microscopic intricacies of crime.

“How was it decapitated? Blunt object?”

“Oh, I doubt that, Harvey. I doubt it very much. Cast iron’s very brittle. A blow would’ve broken or shattered the head. Even if it was wrapped in a towel. No, this was done with a Sawzall.”

“A Sawzall?”

“An electric reciprocating saw made by Milwaukee.” Hinch indicated a rapid forward-and-backward motion with his hand flattened into a knife’s edge.

“Oh, of course,” Harvey said, who didn’t know his power tools very well.

“You can tell by the unevenness of the cut,” he said, again running his index finger over the severed neck. “Cast iron’s hard to cut, and a Sawzall will make reasonably fast work of it, but because the blade moves back and forth at a high speed, it’s a little tough to control, which explains the undulating planes of the cut here. Now, you can cut cast iron with a hacksaw, and you’ll get a cleaner cut because its teeth are finer and the blade’s not shaking like a fat lady without a girdle, but it’ll take you forever.”

Harvey took the two bottles of Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise 1997 out of his backpack and brought them down, one in each fist, on the professor’s desk.

“That’s very kind of you,” Hinch said.

“I take it a Sawzall’s not something you’ll find in your average joe’s garage?”

“Well, now, that all depends if you’re a plumber, or the kind of joe who has to cut a lot of metal.”

Harvey was back in Warwick by three, making his way up the crushed stone drive to Marshall Levy’s nouveau French Provincial mansion on Narragansett Bay. The lawn jockey was now locked in his trunk. He was let in the house by Levy’s Cambodian maid, who showed him to a flagstone patio where the hottest hitter in baseball sat shirtless, reading a magazine by the pool in Oakley shades.

“You know what a Sawzall is, Moss?”

“You fixin’ to cut some pipe?”

“You know anyone who’s got one?”

“Not offhand. Oh, I get it. The jockey.”

“I met with a forensic friend who’s pretty sure that’s what they used.” Harvey checked his watch and said, “C’mon, we should probably head over to the park.”

“Whatever,” Cooley said, trying to appear indifferent, although Harvey could sense Cooley’s anxiety—and his own—gathering like an angry crowd outside the gates.

“Where’s Marshall?”

“Massah Levy, he out da house.”

“Very funny,” Harvey said.

Cooley put the magazine on the matching redwood table next to his chair and rose. “I’ll get my stuff.”

In the driveway, he walked to the rear of the car, opened the trunk, put on his cross-draw holster inside his waistband, and stuck his .38 into it, illegally for now. He also pulled a soft straw hat out of his duffel. When he got into the driver’s seat, he told Moss to put it on. Cooley didn’t protest.

“Noticed any strange behavior in any of your teammates?” Harvey asked as he pulled out of the driveway.

“Yeah, I notice strange behavior in them all the time. Ross Monkman has to smoke a cigar before every game. J. C. Jelsky has to spend an hour in front of the mirror checking for hair loss. Craig Venora’s got to kiss his wristbands before he can step in the batter’s box. And Hugh Croker, he’s always spitting in the first-base coach’s box. By the eighth inning, he’s knee deep in his own saliva.”

“I think you know what I mean, Moss. How about Cubberly? You get along all right with him?”

“Andy? He’s a harmless cracker. Grew up around a million like him. He was probably so poor growing up, he was afraid he might wake up black one day.”

“You know he cost you a couple at-bats last week?”

“He stole second in Cleveland, then stretched a single into a deuce in Detroit. Both times I get a free pass. You can bet I talked to the Cub Man about that.”

“You don’t think it was deliberate?”

“Cub Man’s too stupid to think that far ahead.”

“Here—read this.” Harvey handed Cooley the printout and waited for him to finish.

“Goddamn,” Cooley said, “I didn’t know that about the Cub Man. I wasn’t even in the league back then.”

“Does that change your mind about him?”

“Let’s say he
is
trying to undercut me. Goddamn it, let Cavanaugh drop him down in the batting order so he isn’t batting in front of me. Hell, the Cub Man can do my streak more damage
on
the field, and maybe that’s exactly what he’s been doing.”