Murder at Ebbets Field (14 page)

Margie chuckled. “Some picture companies are moving there.”

“To California?” I didn’t see why anyone would want to go to the West Coast. There wasn’t any big-league baseball beyond St. Louis.

“Uh-huh. There’s plenty of sunshine, and they can shoot pictures all year round. We have to shut down in the winter.”

While reaching for an egg, I successfully knocked the champagne bottle onto the ground. It was as accidental as the spiking I’d taken in Boston. The liquid vanished into the sand, allowing me to switch to ginger ale.

“Mr. Garvin is thinking about going to California for the winter,” Margie continued. “And bringing the whole studio out there.”

“This winter?”

She nodded.

So that’s what she was getting at. “Oh,” I said. Well, baseball season would be over, maybe she’d want some company. Maybe we could both see what California beaches looked like. As I thought about it, I found myself developing a powerful curiosity about them.

After we polished off most of the pie, I pulled out my pocket watch. “Ten to one,” I said. “Should we go back?” The sun had dried my pants, so there would be no problem facing the rest of the movie company.

“Oh, I suppose,” Margie sighed. “I’d rather go swimming, but I guess it’s work time.” Too bad—I’d have liked to see her in a bathing dress.

We packed up the basket and went back to the pie truck. I was so stuffed, walking was a major effort.

Elmer Garvin stood with one foot on the running board of the fire engine, and a watch in his hand. When he saw us, he checked the time, then gave us an approving nod. “This afternoon,” he said, “we’re going to change things around. You two will go on the Human Roulette Wheel.”

Spinning around didn’t seem such a good idea on a full stomach, and my head was starting to hum from the champagne. But we obediently followed Tom Kelly to film some more shots.

It turned out I was right. After the second spin, my stomach was cramping and my head throbbing. After the third, I was doubled over with pain and looking for a place to throw up.

Margie came over to me. “What’s wrong?” she asked in a concerned voice.

“Don’t know,” I answered brusquely. I hated being sick this way. Especially in front of her. This wasn’t an honorable malady, like a broken bone or a gaping bloody wound. It was embarrassing.

She put a hand to my forehead. I don’t know exactly what she detected, but she concluded, “You don’t feel right. I’m taking you home.”

I nodded okay.

Margie checked with Tom Kelly, who didn’t care if we stayed or left.

Outside the park, she commandeered the milk truck and a driver to take us to Red Hook.

By the time we were dropped off at Margie’s apartment, I could barely straighten up enough to walk to the door. I walked bent, hugging my belly to stifle the pain that clawed at my gut.

Inside, I ran to the bathroom and dropped to my knees in front of the commode. Expelling the lunch made me feel no better. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I vaguely wondered if the ham sandwiches were bad.

Margie knocked at the door. “Are you all right?” she called.

Between heaves, I weakly replied, “I’ll be okay in a while.”

“I’m going to call a doctor,” she said.

“No!” I yelled with all the strength I could put into it. I never let doctors near me. A doctor might find something really wrong with me, something that would mean I couldn’t play baseball. I sure wasn’t going to let a doctor poke around at me just for a bellyache.

We argued back and forth, Margie giving sensible reasons why I should be seen by a physician and me repeating “No” to every argument. She finally gave in.

When I finished with the bathroom, I felt weak, and chills started to shake my body.

Margie took me to the bedroom. I mumbled that the couch would be fine. She insisted I take the bed and she’d take the couch. It was my turn to give in. I even agreed to drink a cup of milk that she’d heated.

I immediately fell into a dark oblivion that muffled all thought and feeling.

It was dark when I woke with a shiver. In a moment, I realized it wasn’t internal this time. Margie was brushing my forehead with a damp cloth. Nothing in my life ever felt so soothing. I was almost surprised that this girl who fought lions could have a touch so tender. I reached up and grabbed her hand. I brought it to my lips and softly kissed it. Then I plopped my head back on the pillow and slipped into an easy comfortable sleep.

It was light when I woke again, the daylight of early morning. My head was groggy, and my stomach felt emptier than it ever had before. I was feeling stronger, but disoriented. Since I wasn’t in my own bedroom, I first thought I was on a road trip, in a strange hotel. The furniture was what one would typically find in a hotel—plain, sturdy, sparse.

It took a minute for me to remember that I was in Margie’s apartment. I lay still, listening, and could hear her moving quietly in the kitchen and humming to herself.

I pulled off the blanket and saw that I was down to my underwear. I was pretty sure I hadn’t undressed myself. As I swung my legs out of bed, I also noticed that the bandage on my left calf had been changed.

I quickly dressed. The kitchen sounds were now accompanied by the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. After slicking down my tousled hair, I almost raced to the kitchen.

Margie was stirring a pot on the stove and humming snatches of
“The Merry Widow Waltz.
” She was wearing a billowing lavender summer dress that didn’t look like something to be worn around the house. Her long brown braid was carefully wrapped in fashionable pile atop her head, with tortoise-shell hairpins holding it in place.

“G’morning,” I said.

She turned around. “You’re up! How do you feel?”

“Much
better, thanks.”

She came over and felt my forehead. “You feel better,” was her verdict. “Hungry?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good! That’s a good sign. I made oatmeal. It’s not fancy, but I thought something plain would be better for your stomach. I know how to make other things. Do you want eggs instead?”

“No. Oatmeal sounds great. And the coffee smells wonderful.” She took the hint and poured me a cup. “Aren’t you going to be late for work?” I asked. “I don’t want to get you in any more trouble with Garvin.”

“I called in. Mr. Garvin gave everybody the day off today. He’s trying to edit the film they shot yesterday.”

She spooned the oatmeal into bowls and set them on a small kitchen table next to a window. It overlooked an alley that wasn’t very scenic. Not that I was looking anywhere but at Margie.

The oatmeal seemed the best food I’d ever eaten. And I kept it down, all three servings of it. My stomach felt better, warm and full. I felt strong enough to play against the Phillies this afternoon.

“Thanks for . . . uh, taking care of me last night,” I said. “I’m sorry about all the trouble.”

“It was no trouble. It was actually . . . well . . . I liked . . .” She averted her eyes and pointed to a vase on a small shelf next to the window. “It was very sweet of you to send the roses. And you remembered my favorite color.” The flowers were wilted and more brown than yellow, but I liked the fact that she saved them. “It was sweet of you to bring the champagne yesterday, too,” she added. “I wish I could have had some.”

The champagne. I didn’t bring the champagne.

A
t eight o’clock that night, I was home alone, seated in my chair, basking in the glow of two victories.

One was against the Phillies, a win that kept us a game up on the Braves in the standings. With my leg starting to heal, I played the entire game at third base and went two for four at the plate.

The other victory was against a killer. I knew I hadn’t brought the champagne to the picnic, and if Margie didn’t, then somebody else had planted it in the basket. To avoid scaring her, I’d chosen not to tell Margie that somebody had tried to poison me—or us or her. I wasn’t sure about the poisoner’s intent, and I figured I’d wait until I was more certain before telling her about it. My guess was that I was the target, and whoever planted the bottle simply didn’t care if Margie died, too.

Right now I wasn’t trying to figure out who did it or why, nor was I considering the prospect of another, possibly more successful, attempt in the future. Instead, I was celebrating our survival. I thought perhaps the fact that we were both still alive was a sign that we were meant to be together.

Actually, considering all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I was in a surprisingly cheerful mood. The two things that mattered most to me were baseball and Margie, and both were going well. The way Margie had taken care of me stayed in the back of my mind and comforted me throughout the day. And the two hits I’d gotten in today’s game gave me 36 hits in 148 at bats for the season.

Ah! The batting average. I still had to work out my new average. I grabbed a pencil and sheet of paper from the coffee table. I never had much in the way of formal schooling, but somewhere I’d picked up enough long division to calculate a batting average: 36 into 148—no, it’s 148 into 36 ... comes to ... 0.2432. Rounded off, that’s .244, just six points shy of .250.

1 slapped the pencil on the table with a satisfied thwack. The door seemed to echo the sound as somebody started knocking on it.

I hopped out of my chair and swung the door open.

My visitor was a towering young man with small black eyes deeply set above a broad squat nose. He wore no tie or jacket; just a red flannel workshirt and denim trousers that looked new and stiff. A misshapen tan crusher was perched on his head.

It was that bonebreaker friend of Virgil Ewing. The one from Marsten’s Billiard Parlor. Spike—no, that was the other one. “Uh ... Billy, isn’t it?” I greeted him.

His greeting was a right hand that shot up and grabbed me around the throat, his thumb and fingers nearly meeting behind my neck.

Without a word, he took a step forward, forcing his way into my apartment. I brought my hands up and dug my fingertips into his wrist, trying to loosen his hold. Impervious to the pressure, he lifted me by the throat, swung me around, and slammed my back against the wall. My head ricocheted off the hard plaster and bounced forward. With just his one meaty paw under my jaw, Billy held me so that my head was pinned against the wall and my toes dangled loosely. We were almost eye to eye, which meant I was half a foot above the floor.

I hoped a neighbor might see us through the open door. I couldn’t turn my head, but I strained to look from the corner of my eye. Then I saw Billy’s left arm reach out and I heard the door slam shut.

My mind raced. What’s going on? And why?

He leaned over, planting his face inches from mine. “Who you work for?” he growled in a soft drawl similar to Ewing’s.

“Nnnggg,” I answered. My jaw and tongue were pinned together by his fist.

He eased up a little, lowering me until my heels touched the floor and loosening his fist until it made a U around my throat. “Who you work for?” he repeated.

The question threw me. So I told him the truth, although he already knew it. “The Giants,” I said. “I work for John McGraw.”

That wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. His fist tightened again. “What was that business in Marsten’s? How come you was asking Virg all them questions?”

“It was just like I told him,” I croaked. “We were all at a party just before Florence Hampton died. Miss Hampton was a friend of the lady I was with. I was just trying to find out if Ewing knew what happened to her.”

“You’re trying to pin it on him.”

I tried to shake my head no but I couldn’t move it. “I’m not trying to pin it on anybody,” I said. “I’m just trying to find out what happened.”

“What you gonna do if you do find out?”

I didn’t know. I guess I hadn’t thought things out that far. My shoulders were free enough to shrug them. “I don’t know,” I admitted lamely.

I’d finally given him a satisfactory answer. He let go of my throat and took a step back. I started to reach up to rub the pain away, then dropped my hand. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

Billy pulled a package of Beechnut chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and held it out to me. “Have a chaw,” he said. It sounded more like an order than an offer.

“No, thanks.” It was one of the few baseball traditions I didn’t follow. The one time I tried it, I got almost as sick as I had last night.

Opening the pouch, Billy shook his head. “Where I come from it ain’t polite to say no. This here is from Virg. If you got nothing against him, you’ll take a chaw of his tobacco.”

Well, I didn’t want to be rude. I reached in the pouch and pinched together a wad of the brown stuff. As I lifted it to my mouth, I could feel my mouth start to water, not with appetite but in self-defense.

Just before it passed my lips, Billy’s hand shot out even faster than it had before and knocked the tobacco from my fingers. What was he mad about now?

“This stuff just killed Larry Harron,” he said.

“It what?”

“The tobacco got poison in it.”

“You tried to kill me!”

“Naw, I didn’t. I just wanted to see if you was gonna take it.”

What the hell.... “Who’s
Larry Harron?”
I asked.

“You seen him. At Marsten’s. The boy with the shoulder.” Billy hunched up his right shoulder.

Jeez. The Dodger batboy. “He’s dead?”

Billy nodded.

“Why? He was just a boy. Why would anybody want to kill him?”

“Hell, nobody wanted to kill Larry. He was a good kid. It was Virg Ewing they wanted dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“Like I said, this is Virg’s tobacco—”

“I don’t get it. When—”

“Just listen, and I’ll tell ya.” He looked around the room.

“Let’s sit down,” I offered.

Billy took my chair and I sat on the sofa without objection.

“It happened this afternoon at Ebbets Field,” Billy began. “Larry didn’t come out to the dugout when the game started, so Virg sent me to look for him. I checked all around, but I didn’t find him till the game was over. He was in the tool shed. Poor kid was puking his guts out and he looked just about dead. He gimme this tobacco, said he took it from Virg’s locker and thought he was being punished for stealing. Poor kid was always trying to be just like Virg, so I guess he wanted to learn to chew. Anyway, we took him to Kings County Hospital, but he died by the time we got there. Doctors said he was poisoned—”

“By the tobacco?”

“Naw, the doctors didn’t have no idea what killed him. I figgered out it was the tobacco.”

“Somebody poisoned Ewing’s tobacco?”

“That’s the thing. This ain’t really his tobacco. It was in his locker, but it wasn’t his. See, Virg always mixed licorice with his tobacco.” He smiled. “We used to rib him about it when we was kids—adding candy to your tobacco ain’t considered real manly.” He held up the Beechnut. “No licorice in this.”

“So if Larry Harron took it from Ewing’s locker, somebody else must have put it there,” I said. “And there’s poison in it.” To my mind, chewing tobacco was lethal enough without adding poison.

“Yep. And they meant to kill Virg with it.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“I figured it might have been you.”

“No,” I said firmly, as another suspect immediately sprang to mind: Sloppy Sutherland. He had the means: access to the locker room. No, that was
opportunity.
But wouldn’t Sutherland know about the licorice? “Who knows that Ewing mixes licorice with his tobacco?”

Billy shook his head. “Nobody, I don’t think. Like I said, it ain’t manly. Virg don’t want people to know about it.”

Okay, what about motive? Maybe it goes back to their competition for Florence Hampton. Sutherland thinks Ewing killed Miss Hampton, so he tries to kill Ewing to get revenge. Or Sutherland killed Miss Hampton and thought Ewing was on to him, so he tries to kill Ewing to shut him up. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Miss Hampton’s death. Maybe their general hatred of each other had just boiled over.

While I thought over the possibilities, I asked Billy, “You and Ewing grew up together?”

“Yep. In Gatlinburg, Tennessee.”

“You’re related?”

“Probably, but not close.”

“How come you’re trying to protect him?”

“Well, he had some trouble when he first come up to the city. You folks do things different than we do back home. Just ’cause we talk a little slow, you figure we think slow. So you try to take advantage of us. That happened to Virg a lot his first year. Then his ma asked me to come up here with him.”

“To protect him.”

“Naw. To protect other people. Virg don’t take it kindly when people try to take advantage of him. He got a temper.”

“Seems like you do, too.”

“Yeah, well, sorry ’bout that.” Billy looked a little ashamed. “You know,” he said, “when you was asking Virg about where he went after that party . . . and he said he went to Marsten’s . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he didn’t come to the pool hall.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh. You think maybe he got into something that night that made somebody want to kill him?”

“Hard to tell. Do you know where he did go?”

“Naw. I asked him about it after you came to Marsten’s. He wouldn’t tell me.” Billy cleared his throat noisily. “So, do you or don’t you think it’s tied in to what you was asking about?”

I thought for a moment, only to find that I didn’t have an answer. So I picked one at random. “Probably,” I said.

“Good.”

“Why good?”

“Then you can help me find out for sure.” It sounded as much like a request as a bunt sign from John McGraw. I was not expected to decline.

“First you almost strangle me, and then you ask for my help? Why the hell should I?”

“I expect whoever tried to kill Virg is gonna try again,” Billy said calmly. “And I ain’t sure what I can do about it. Leastways not by myself. I liked what I saw of you in Marsten’s: you woulda fought us if it come to it, but you was smart enough to avoid it.”

Lucky, was more like it.

“You’re asking questions ’bout Virg anyway,” Billy continued. “So you can do a little more poking around for me.”

Actually, I could see some advantages to joining up with him. If Ewing wasn’t at the pool hall the night Florence Hampton drowned, I still had to find out where he was—and why he’d lied about it. Having Billy on my side could come in handy.

I also saw a possible disadvantage. “If it turns out that Ewing did something,” I said warily. “That he hurt somebody maybe. Would you still try to protect him? I mean, if I found out he did something wrong, are you going to come after me?”

“If Virg did something, he had good reason for it.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“You find out the truth and that’ll do me jest fine.”

“Okay. You got to help though.”

“How?”

“Keep an eye on him. If you see him doing anything strange, going someplace unusual, meeting with somebody you don’t know, let me know. Especially if you see him with Sloppy Sutherland.”

Billy frowned. “You think it was him?”

“I don’t think anything yet. Just watch and let me know.”

“And what if he does get together with Sutherland?”

I wasn’t sure. “Call me,” I said. Maybe by then I’d know.