Murder at Wrigley Field (16 page)

T
he Friday morning papers provided ample evidence that the Committee on Public Information—or the Illinois State Council of Defense or whatever group was in charge of censoring stories this week—was diligently at work. According to the sketchy articles published in the newspapers, Cecil “Curly” Neeman was killed in a holdup. The evidence for this conclusion: no money, watch, wallet, or other personal possessions were on him when he was found.

Neeman’s body, with a gunshot wound to the chest, had been pulled from the Chicago River near the mouth of Ogden Slip. Since there was no identification on him, I wondered who identified him and how the papers knew his real name was Cecil.

More troublesome was the idea of a holdup man who bothers to dump his victim in a river. It didn’t make sense. The robber shoots his prey, loots him of his belongings, and then? Instead of beating a quick getaway, he slows himself down by lugging the body to the river. I didn’t buy it. Any of it.

The nonsense they were printing was so useless that I renewed my resolution to not read the newspapers anymore.

And I worried that, with Curly Neeman dead, I might have lost the weakest link in the conspiracy that led to Willie Kaiser’s murder.

Buck Herzog led off the Braves’ fifth inning with a bunt single to the pitcher’s mound that Hippo Vaughn wasn’t agile enough to field (he wasn’t called “Hippo” without reason). Before taking his lead off first base, Herzog exchanged a few friendly words with Fred Merkle. The two of them had been teammates on the 1908 Giants during the first of Herzog’s three stints with John McGraw. All three of us had played for McGraw for about one month in the summer of 1916. Allies one month, enemies the next.

Boston’s small southpaw pitcher Art Nehf was next in the batter’s box. On Vaughn’s second pitch, Nehf poked a medium speed bouncer to Wicket Greene at shortstop. Easy double play for anyone but Greene, who turned every fielding chance into an adventure.

I scooted over to take the throw at second base, silently urging him, “Catch the ball! Catch the ball!” It took a true bounce, reached him belt-high, and he caught it cleanly in his mitt. Yes! Then the transfer to his throwing hand. Again clean. I straddled the bag, ready to sweep one foot across it and relay the throw to first base. Then Greene slowly double pumped before throwing me the ball. Damn! I had to remain planted on the base and wait helplessly for the ball to arrive while Buck Herzog bore down on me to break up the double play. The ball struck my mitt a split second before Herzog’s spikes, with one hundred sixty pounds of Herzog behind them, impaled themselves in my left shin.

I flipped over and hit the earth hard but held onto the ball. Herzog was out; Nehf was safe at first. Herzog paused before trotting off the field to see if I was going to come up fighting. I didn’t. He wasn’t to blame. It was Wicket Greene who’d broken up the double play and got me spiked. For form’s sake, I gave Herzog a cussing as I rose but let it go at that. Greene wasn’t going to get off so easy.

The next two Braves went down on strikeouts to end the inning. Running off the field, I caught up to Greene by the third base bag. “After the game,” I said. “Just you and me.”

Greene bared his crooked brown teeth. “You want a piece of me?” He poked me in the chest.

“Yeah!” I shoved him in return. He tripped over the base and fell backward to the ground.

“Then get it now,” he snarled. Faster than I thought he could move, Greene flung off his mitt and sprang up at me.

I dropped my glove and threw a sharp left jab at his nose. Contact! He quickly recovered, responding with a hard upper cut to my stomach. Those were more good punches than usually get thrown in a baseball fight; after that brief flurry, we settled into the traditional grappling and wrestling.

Fred Mitchell barked, “Get in here you idiots!”

Teammates pulled us apart and dragged us to the dugout. I was put at one end of the bench and Greene was placed at the other. Fred Mitchell paced the length of the dugout and launched into a managerial tongue-lashing directed at both of us. It was cut short when the umpire called for a batter and I remembered that I was leading off the inning. As I grabbed my bat, I stole a look at Greene and saw he was shoving the twisted corner of a towel up his nose to stem the flow of blood. It was a highly satisfying sight.

We played the rest of the game without exchanging blows or words. I was only vaguely aware that the Braves won the game, and I didn’t know by what score.

In the locker room afterward, Fred Merkle made sure he was always in our proximity ready to break us up again if needed. Greene and I both dawdled; neither of us was going to leave before the other did—that would have seemed like running from a fight. Wally Dillard hung around, too, until he and Merkle were the only ones left besides Greene and me. “Want me to stick around?” my roomie whispered.

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

As Dillard started to leave, Fred Merkle said, “Hold up, kid. I’ll go with you.” Looking back at Greene and me, he said, “Go ahead and kill each other if you want. I don’t care no more.” He joined Dillard at the door, telling him, “This could be your big break, kid. If one of them ends up dead, you’ll get to start tomorrow.”

Don’t call him “kid,” I thought to myself.

Wicket Greene was the first to get off his stool. He walked slowly toward my locker and I stood to face him. His nose was red and swollen. “Why don’t we just drop it,” he mumbled.

“Drop it?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to fight.” He exposed his rotting teeth in a smile that was supposed to look friendly.

“Okay,” I agreed warily. I didn’t really want to touch my fist to a face that ugly again anyway.

Greene sat down on Wally Dillard’s stool. “Been some crazy kind of year, ain’t it?” he said.

I sat back down as well. “Yeah. Sure has.” On impulse, I decided to confront him directly. “And you been throwing games.”

Greene’s eyes flared. I tensed, still ready to fight. Then he sagged visibly. “No. You got it wrong.”

“I checked the record books. You got more errors this year than you made in the last eight years put together. All of a sudden you forgot how to catch and throw a baseball?”

“No, no. That ain’t it.”

“Then what is it? What happened?”

Greene sighed. “I got old is what happened.”

“Nobody ages that fast.”

“It’s...” He held out his hands, then dropped them. His head dropped, too; he shook it slowly, sadly.

“You were trying to throw games,” I repeated. “And Willie Kaiser found out about it, so you killed him.”

His head jerked back up. “What are you, nuts?” he squawked.

“Not yourself,” I said calmly. “You were marching along with the rest of us when he got shot. Somebody else pulled the trigger for you. Maybe one of your friends in the Knights?”

“You got it all wrong.”

“What’s wrong about it?”

“Kaiser didn’t know nothing about it! There was no reason for me to kill him.”

“So you
were
throwing games, but Willie didn’t know about it?”

“No—it’s—what happened was—”

“For gamblers? I been seeing a lot of them in the hotel lobbies.”

Greene surrendered. “For Bennett Harrington.”

“Yeah. But I never threw a game. I was supposed to, but I didn’t.”

“Why were you supposed to? Was Harrington paying you?”

“No. He promised me I’d be starting shortstop when he took over the team.”

Was Charles Weeghman right, except it was Bennett Harrington and not William Wrigley who wanted to oust him as owner of the Cubs? “You were already starting shortstop,” I pointed out.

Greene grunted something like a laugh. “Not for long. I saw how Kaiser could play in spring training. He was gonna have my job in no time. Harrington said if I threw some games, he’d guarantee me a starting job.”

“So you began making all those errors at the start of the season—”

“They weren’t intentional,” Greene insisted. “I just got so tight thinking about it that I couldn’t do anything right. Harrington thought I was doing exactly what he wanted me to, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t trying to, anyway.”

“But then Mitchell gave your job to Willie Kaiser, and to keep your deal with Harrington, you had to get Willie out of there. So you—”

“No! I had nothing to do with that. Harrington had me do other stuff when I wasn’t playing.”

“Like what?”

Greene hesitated. “You remember when somebody put pretzels in the concession stands?”

“That was you?”

He nodded. “Look, I didn’t have nothing against Kaiser personally. I just wanted him out of there so I could keep playing a little longer. That’s all.”

This was too much information for me to digest. I shifted subjects. “What about the Knights? Why’d you join them?”

“Why’d you?” he shot back.

I shrugged. “Seemed the thing to do.” No need to tell Greene the true reason.

“Same here.”

I recalled what I’d told Landfors: that I believed the Knights were somehow involved in killing Willie. “They don’t seem to do much though,” I said. “Frank Timmons makes his speeches, then tries to sell everybody guns and ammo and stuff.”

It was Greene’s turn to shrug.

“You know anything about him?” I asked.

“Not much. I hear he was with the Klan in Georgia. Came up here a year or so ago to do some organizing for them, then he started the Knights.”

“Are the Knights connected to the Klan?”

“Hell, how do I know? All these secret societies and fraternities and patriotic organizations.... I can’t tell one from the other.” After a lengthy silence, he asked, “Can we keep all this between us?”

“Who am I gonna tell?”

Greene stood and brushed off his jacket. “Well, see you tomorrow, I guess.”

I remained seated and didn’t answer.

He walked to the locker room door, then stopped to ask, “You wanna get a couple beers?”

“No.”

Much to my surprise, on Saturday night I was at the Chapman home, the recipient of an unexpected dinner invitation. Although Edna was the one who had phoned to invite me, she’d made it clear that it was her mother who wanted me to come.

Supper turned out to be a dreary affair. There were four of us, including Hans Fohl, who appeared as uncomfortable as I felt at being there. I thought perhaps Edna’s mother was trying to get back to normal, so she’d invited the same guests who had attended the last dinner she’d given before Willie’s death. It was immediately clear to the rest of us at the table that with Willie gone things couldn’t be the same as before.

Mrs. Chapman had even prepared the same dishes, though not as well as a month before: the whale meat was fatty and undercooked, the liberty bread grittier than usual, and the sauerkraut bland.

Edna said nothing throughout the meal. Fohl and I took turns murmuring sympathetic sounds at Mrs. Chapman’s oft-repeated lament that “I’m bad luck for my men, is what I am.”

Mrs. Chapman, considerably thinner than she’d been a month before, picked at her food while the rest of us finished quickly or simply gave up eating. I tried to rearrange what was on my plate to make it look like I’d consumed most of it. And I wished the dogs were under the table so I could slip it to them, though that might have gotten me in trouble with the Humane Society.

When the conversation dwindled to a long lull and we had all given up on the main course, Edna offered to serve the apple pie I’d brought for dessert. There were no takers.

“I thought maybe I’d walk off dinner,” I said. “And take the dogs out.”

“Go ahead,” Edna said curtly. I wasn’t going to have the pleasure of her company.

After getting the frisky dachshunds from their room, I asked Hans Fohl, “Feel like some air?”