Strike Three You're Dead (14 page)

Harvey hopped a cab back to the Sheraton, creeping through the thick ball game traffic along the Fens. Through the window, he saw two teenagers in Red Sox caps chasing each other through a river of fans on the sidewalk. The cab driver, a middle-aged man in an unseasonable knit cap, eyed Harvey in the rearview mirror.

“Can’t win ’em all,” he said. “Isn’t that how it goes?”

“I just don’t want to lose them by nine,” Harvey said.

“I used to come out and watch you when you was with the team, you know. Personally, I didn’t think they shoulda let you go like that.”

“They’re doing all right without me.”

“Sure,” the cabbie said, accelerating out of traffic onto Boylston Street. “But wait till they find out the kid they got in center now couldn’t throw nobody out if he had a howitzer. Then they’re gonna wake up and wish they had Ha’vey Blissberg back. Then they’re gonna wake up and wish they hadn’t thrown you away like that. You was always my kind of ball player. Never read about you fighting with the owners, holding out, getting some fancy agent to stick up the team for more dough. Some of these guys today oughta drive my cab for a while and see what real work is like. But I’m not complaining. What do you make now, just for instance?”

“Oh, I don’t talk about that stuff,” Harvey said.

“Naw, you can say. Look, I make a good dollar. I got a little summer place on the Cape. I’m putting a daughter through Emerson College. It’s not like you’re gonna say what you make and then I’m gonna say, hey, you don’t deserve that kind of dough. You’re not gonna be making it forever, are you? Go ahead, you can say. How’s this?” He pulled under the portico of the Sheraton. “Go ahead, what kind of dough do you make?”

“I make six figures,” Harvey said, counting out some bills.

“You got kids?”

“No kids.”

“You pay alimony, something like that?”

“No.”

“So what do you do with that kind of dough? You got a fetish? You blow it on dames? Drugs? What?”

“I salt it away,” Harvey said, opening the door.

The cabbie blew some air. “Six figures is good dough. I remember a catch you made last year in some game, you ran about two miles and crashed into the wall. I guess if you can do that, you deserve that kind of dough. That kid who got murdered last week—Furth? He probably made that kind of dough, too, huh? That’s a good dollar, but a lot of good it’s gonna do him now, a lot of good.”

Harvey went straight to the hotel bar, a dark lounge with a Hawaiian motif. A black-haired woman with platform shoes and enough makeup for the lead in a Kabuki play intercepted him at the door and trilled, “You must be a ball player.”

“And you must be about a hundred bucks a night,” he said and brushed past her into the lounge. It had straw mats all over the ceiling. Seated at the bar in front of a margarita was a woman less burdened by cosmetics. He circled around to get a better look at her profile. It was not her first margarita, and she was not happy.

“Aloha,” he said. “Do they make those things with real egg whites in this place, or what?”

“I was just thinking about you,” said Frances Shalhoub.

S
HE WAS WEARING A
gray shirtwaist dress and a matching jacket with pewter buttons. On the bar next to her drink was a straw hat with a band of guinea hen feathers around the crown. The outfit looked better in the bar than it had in the dugout earlier in the evening.

“How are you, Harvey?” she said.

“Fine. I won’t ask you how you are. It didn’t work too well last time.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll tell you anyway. I’m reasonably drunk.” Her green eyes shone out at him from under tweezed eyebrows. “In fact, I may be unreasonably drunk.”

Drunkenness violated her; her beauty should have been impervious to alcohol. Harvey suddenly saw in her drunkenness a basis for compatibility with Felix that hadn’t occurred to him. “What’s the occasion?” Harvey said after he had ordered a Bass ale.

“I wish to hell we would get some pitching.”

“Where’s Felix?”

“He’s at the park, where else? He needs his shot of post-game camaraderie.”

“What do you need?”

“Another margarita, a tummy tuck, and a new life.”

“Is it Rudy?” Harvey said.

Frances said nothing. She found a long chocolate-colored Sherman’s cigarette in her purse and had it lit before Harvey could reach for the bar matches. She burned half an inch of it in one drag and said, “I see that you and Bob Lassiter had a nice little chat the other day.”

“You’re the fourth or fifth person to remind me, although I’m happy to say you put it more gently than the others.”

“I guess people feel it’s the cops’ business, not yours.” She drew smoke up her two delicate nostrils and spat it out in a cirrus cloud. “You don’t owe it to him, Harvey.”

“It’s not him I owe it to. Don’t you care what happened?”

“I care about what happens to all the players. I make it my business to care. But I think I’ll leave the investigation to the guys who get paid for it.” She smiled without parting her lips. Her left hand fished for his knee and found it. “I’ve always liked you, Harvey.”

“Part of the nucleus, right?”

“I also like a man who drinks Bass ale.”

Harvey took her hand and returned it to her own knee.

“Forget it,” she said. “I told you I was unreasonably drunk.”

“Can I buy the manager’s wife another margarita?”

“No, thanks. But unless you’re waiting for someone, why don’t you walk me upstairs to my room? I don’t think I could find the elevator in my present state. In fact, in my present state, I couldn’t tell you if this place
has
an elevator.”

She signed for the drinks, and they rode up to the fifth floor like strangers, staring at the illuminated numbers. Harvey held her lightly by the elbow in the carpeted corridor. She turned to face him in front of her door.

“Come in for a second. I’ve got something to show you,” she said.

Frances disappeared into the bedroom of the suite while Harvey sat down in a brocaded French provincial chair. He was pulling some stray threads off his jacket when Frances came back into the room. She was wearing a white cotton nightgown with a low-cut lace yoke. Her feet were bare, and her toenails were painted pink.

“What did you want to show me?” Harvey said with a nervous smile.

“I’m showing it to you.” The lace yoke of the nightgown barely covered her nipples.

“That’s not what I expected,” he said.

“I thought this was pretty good for a forty-year-old woman.”

“I meant, I thought you said you were going to—I thought it might have something to do with—”

“How else was I going to get a shy boy like you into my room?” She stood so that the light from the bedroom backlit her body through the nightgown.

“Now don’t you think Felix—” Harvey began.

“No, I don’t think Felix. Felix goes out drinking after the game. You know that. Even if he walked in, he’d be too loaded to notice you. I like you, Harvey.”

“You said that before.” He got to his feet.

“But now I’m sober,” she said and stepped toward him. She let her arms fall lightly around Harvey’s neck and bent her head to one side to look at him, like someone peering around a corner. Harvey watched her face, breathing slowly through his nose. She had no scent.

“Older women don’t scare you, do they?” she said.

Harvey said nothing, and Frances locked her arms around his neck and pulled his face to hers. Her lips on his were as soft and warm as a cheek. She moaned and tried to force Harvey’s mouth open. “That’s the way,” she murmured.

Harvey felt as if he were being instructed about a lifesaving maneuver. She tried to push her tongue into his mouth and it wouldn’t go, but she kept her lips against his, and finally Harvey, despite himself, felt her tongue winding around his.

“That’s good,” Frances whispered. “You taste good, Harvey.” Her hand clawed the back of his shirt. “That’s good,” she said.

Harvey ran his hand up her back and played with the top of her nightgown.

“Everything’s good,” she was saying.

He kissed her on the side of the neck, brushed her hair aside, then moved his fingers along the border of the nightgown and toyed with the label. With a circular motion, she rubbed her breasts against his chest. Suddenly, he pushed away from her.

“I want to talk about Rudy, Frances,” he said.

“Let’s talk about you,” she breathed. “Let’s talk about you and what you like to do.”

“I like to talk about Rudy.” He dropped down into the chair. “I guess you knew him pretty well.”

“What are you talking about?” She stood over him, threading her hand through her hair and then tucking it behind her ears. “I thought we were busy with something else here.”

“I said you knew him pretty well.”

“I try to know as much as I can about all the ball players.” She sighed.

“You knew more about him than most.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re getting at?” Two voices in the hall passed the door and faded.

“I’m not kidding, Frances. I want you to talk about Rudy.”

She went over and sat in the companion French provincial chair and drew her knees up under her chin and pulled her nightgown down over her ankles. “You’re a funny fellow,” she said.

“Tell me about it.”

The expression on Harvey’s face, or rather the lack of one, must have meant something to her. She exhaled, rolling her head down and then upward, as though coming up for air. “You tell me what you think you know. Then I’ll tell you the truth about it.”

“You two were seeing each other.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Look, Frances. He told me about it. It didn’t matter then because that was between you and him. But he’s dead now, and I want to know about it.”

“What did Rudy tell you?”

“You and he had a thing. That’s what he told me.”

“You’re wrong.” She picked up the imitation marble ashtray on the table between the chairs and held it in her lap. “Yes, I saw him a couple of times outside the ball park, but not socially. I suppose it’s just like Rudy to have hinted that there was something between us.”

“He didn’t hint, Frances. He told me about it.”

“He did think of himself as a latter-day Bo Belinsky. Or would Joe Namath be more like it?”

“I said he didn’t hint.”

She went on working the ashtray around in her hands. “Actually, he was worried about his status on the team. That was it. As you know, he wasn’t having the season we expected from him, and he was worried we might send him down to Wheeling.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’?”

“The team. The team might send him down. Felix and Marshall. He was losing games in the late innings. It was getting to him, and he wanted to talk.”

“Well, that’s funny,” Harvey said. “Rudy and I talked a lot about baseball. Sometimes, it was all we talked about. But he never said he was worried about being sent down. But Frances, why would he talk to you about it? Why not Felix?”

She had examined the ashtray from every possible angle, and she now started over again. “Felix is a distracted man. Not good with personnel matters. I guess Rudy found me more accessible, so he came to me.”

“You went to Rudy’s town house to talk about how he didn’t have to worry about being sent down to the minors?”

“I never went to his house. We went out and had a drink.”

“I thought you said you saw him a couple of times outside the park.”

“All right, we had drinks a couple of times. What’s the big deal? He was worried. You know he was a lonely guy. He had no real parents. I think it helped to talk to an older woman.”

“You’re nice that way, Frances.”

“Look, Harvey,” she said, clapping the ashtray down on the table. “If Rudy told you he was having an affair with me, he was lying to you. Men do that. You can believe what you want, but I won’t sit here and be grilled by you. Am I getting through? I don’t know anything about Rudy, and I don’t know anything about what happened to him, and I don’t appreciate you bringing it up in the middle of what I thought was a very promising kiss.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she made a strange sound at the base of her throat.

“Save it for your shrink,” Harvey said. “You’re a liar.”

She jumped to her feet, walked to the door, and leveled a finger at him. “Get out of here. Right now.”

Harvey rose and went toward her, feeling a twinge in his right leg from the dive he had taken in the outfield during the game. He stopped in front of her with his hand on the doorknob. “By the way,” he said, “I like your nightgown. I noticed it comes from one of my favorite stores—The Bare Essentials.”

“You’re not funny. You’re queer.”

“You have something else from that store, Frances. A teddy the color of cream that snaps under the crotch. You’re probably wondering how in hell it ended up in Rudy’s closet.”

Frances’s eyes had grown large and now narrowed again.

“Anyway, I was wondering about it myself,” Harvey said, opening the door.

“Wait.” She put her hand over Harvey’s on the doorknob and closed the door.

“What is it, Frances?”

“Wait, I, uh—Look, okay, I won’t lie to you anymore. There was something. Not much, but something. You can understand—with Felix—it wouldn’t be good. You can’t let this get out. You’ve got to promise me.”