Murder at Wrigley Field (20 page)

Curly Neeman was gone, of course; I briefly wondered if there’d been a funeral and if he had any family to grieve for him. Lefty Rariden, who’d survived his bar fight with the sailors, was on a road trip to St. Louis with the rest of the Pittsburgh team. Wicket Greene was simply a no-show.

Their absence wasn’t all that these men had in common. All of them worked for Bennett Harrington in some capacity: Neeman and Rariden in his chemical plant, Greene and Rariden as part of his scheme to oust Charles Weeghman from the Chicago Cubs organization.

Harrington certainly arranged things carefully. He needed men to undertake some clandestine activities for him, so he enlisted members of the Patriotic Knights of Liberty, a group ready-made for such trouble but with nothing to do. If any of them got caught, he could disavow them and claim they were doing it for their own political reasons. To further distance himself, Harrington had several Knights working for him, each taking a different approach so there was no visible pattern to the sabotage. According to Harrington, he didn’t even know the specifics of what his minions were doing.

All the side deals had me confused, though. Wicket Greene threw games to hurt the team and maybe picked up some money on the side from gamblers. Lefty Rariden planted the smoke bombs and earned extra cash by selling gunpowder to Frank Timmons.

And Curly Neeman? All he got was killed, after he’d murdered Willie. I still didn’t think shooting Willie was part of the sabotage, but it could have been the result of him stumbling on to what Greene or Rariden or somebody else was doing.

Frank Timmons surprised me from behind. “Are you
prepared,
Brother Rawlings?” he bellowed.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Got a whole bunch of baseball bats at home. Any Germans come around my place, they’re gonna get bopped in the head.”

His round red face beamed at my enthusiastic response. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and drew me within inches of him. I smelled whiskey. In a low voice, he asked, “Have you given any thought to my proposal regarding the gunpowder?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m trying to get transferred to that building. I think it would have helped if Curly Neeman was still around.”

Timmons adopted a sorrowful expression. “Well, his death is a great loss. But I’m sure you can find somebody else to arrange the transfer.”

I evaded. “You know, I think we should be getting revenge for Curly. I mean there’s all this talk but no action. Oughta find the guy that killed Curly and string him up is what we oughta be doing.”

Taking me by the arm, Timmons walked me out of earshot of the other Knights. “No, no, no,” he said in a soothing voice. “Killing is bad for business.”

“Business?”

“Yes, of course. The, uh, business of recruiting and making sure everyone is prepared. We don’t want anyone doing anything rash—getting themselves in trouble, drawing attention to us, hurting the cause. You understand?”

I was starting to. Business. “I just think we should be doing something about Neeman. You know, if we showed that we take care of our own, it might draw more recruits.”

Timmons considered that idea for a moment, then rejected it. “No, no. We don’t want trouble. I appreciate your zeal, and I share your loss at Curly Neeman’s death. No hotheaded action though, okay?”

With exaggerated reluctance, I agreed.

“Good. Now you’ll see about getting that powder?”

“Sure. But couldn’t that cause trouble? I mean, somebody making a bomb—”

“Don’t you worry. Nobody’s going to actually use it. We just want them to be prepared.”

Right. Just sell the stuff. Business.

I
was the second player in Cubs Park this afternoon. Wally Dillard—he’d rejected my latest nickname for earliest so was not “Opie” Dillard—had beaten me as the earliest to arrive. He was carefully prowling the infield, examining the ground, occasionally giving it an exploratory kick with his spikes. It was too bad, I thought, that he hardly ever got on the field once the games began.

So far, I hadn’t made it beyond the dugout. I was hunched over on the bench, the business end of my bat resting on the floor and my chin propped on the knob. I absently watched Dillard check out the field as I brooded over the situation with Bennett Harrington and Wicket Greene and the Patriotic Knights of Liberty.

Somebody was lying—either Wicket Greene or Bennett Harrington. It was difficult to determine who was the more credible. As far as I could tell, the two of them combined had less integrity than a common stickup man.

Wicket Greene. He openly antagonized Willie Kaiser and benefited from Willie’s death by inheriting the starting shortstop position. He was a member of the Knights, an organization that sold weapons and ammunition. Greene admitted helping Harrington to hurt Charles Weeghman’s reputation and business. Yet he claimed that he did not do the one thing Harrington wanted him to: throw baseball games. But his record was one of committing more errors than seemed humanly possible.

Wally Dillard started bouncing a ball on the infield grass to see how it would play. The grass had been cropped much too short and was starting to die. It looked like ground balls would skip across it quickly. But I knew that when the grass was cut that low, the groundskeepers tended to overwater it in the hopes of keeping it alive, and ground balls would actually be slowed down in the boggy turf. Dillard discovered the same thing from his experiment. He was doing it exactly right: you can’t go by appearances; you’ve got to get underneath them and find the reality.

I sighed. Bennett Harrington. Talk about “appearances” —he was an actor, playing a Southern gentleman in the toughest blue-collar city in the North. He claimed a genuine love of baseball going back to the days of the old Orioles and gave ballplayers night jobs in his munitions plant so they could keep playing. Harrington also claimed that the National League owners wanted Weeghman put out of business to punish him for his involvement in the Federal League. That rang true. Magnates could keep feuds running longer than the Dodger–Giant rivalry. But Harrington said the owners did not sanction throwing games. That, too, on the face of it, I believed. Not even an owner would dare that. I hoped.

Statement by statement, Bennett Harrington’s words were more believable. So why did I find myself thinking that on the whole Wicket Greene was the more trustworthy of the two? Perhaps it was because Greene admitted to so much else that I couldn’t dismiss his claim that Harrington wanted him to throw games. Or perhaps I was biased: whatever else he was, and as much as I disliked him, Wicket Greene was a ballplayer. Bennett Harrington was a magnate.

I raised my bat by the handle and started whomping the thick end on the dugout floor, seeking and crushing peanut shells that were littered about.

No, there was one thing Harrington said that wasn’t true. At least there was more than just Greene’s word against his. What Lefty Rariden had told me about planting smoke bombs and smuggling powder supported Greene’s contention that Harrington did know the specifics of what was going on, something Harrington denied to me. Of course, if Lefty Rariden and Wicket Greene were working together on a scheme of their own, they would make sure they had their stories in line.

“Hey, Mick. Wanna have a catch?”

The magic words:
Wanna have a catch?
Wally Dillard stood in front of me tossing a ball up and down in his glove. He looked like such an innocent with that babyface. Babyface Dillard? Babe, Peachfuzz, Kid... Kid Dillard.... No, he’d already told me how he felt about being called “kid.”

“Wanna have a catch?” he repeated. Wanna be a boy again? Playing on a sandlot from first sunrise, with the only worry being that sunset will eventually arrive and put an end to the game.
Wanna have a catch?
A seductive incantation, a promise to make all troubles vanish for a while if you accept the invitation.

A catch. Yeah, I felt like a catch. “Sure,” I said, grabbing my mitt from the bench.

We threw along the third base line, and I tried to let myself fall into the trance of the catch. But Dillard kept up a distracting chatter that broke the spell. I started to throw harder, to get him to shut up and pay attention to the ball. He threw harder to me in return, the little...

Dillard stopped yattering and the competition was on. Each of us snapped faster and faster tosses; each tried to catch the other’s softly to avoid giving the satisfaction of a popping sound; neither would take a step backward to make the distance more comfortable. He threw a low one at my ankle; I stepped forward to catch it in the air and refused to step back again. Dillard promptly took a step closer, too. We were throwing so fast, at such close range, that it took every bit of our concentration.

I finally threw one that Dillard didn’t handle cleanly. It struck the heel of his mitt, skimmed off, and nailed him on the wrist. The ball plopped to the ground as he dropped his glove and shook off the sting.

We both burst out laughing.

After he retrieved the ball, we backed up and started exchanging easy sidearm tosses.

“In a game,” I told him, “don’t ever shake it off. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

“Hell, that didn’t hurt,” Dillard said with a smile. “My hand fell asleep and I was trying to wake it up is all.”

I laughed again. This kid had definite potential. Then I drilled the next one at him and he barely got his glove on it in time. “Better work on those reflexes,” I said.

He started chattering again, talking about how happy he was to be playing in the big leagues. I listened to him more tolerantly now that I was in a better mood.

“I’m lucky,” he said. “The season could have ended any day. I didn’t think there was a chance of me getting called up to the majors.”

That’s it!

His next throw bounced off my chest as I neglected to put my glove up.

“Sorry!” he called. “You okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” I mumbled. Then I perked up and said, “Felt like a butterfly ran into me!” Waving Dillard in, I suggested, “Come on, let’s work on turning a double play.”

At second base, I broke the play down into four steps: take the throw in your mitt, transfer the ball to your throwing hand, brush the bag with your foot, get out of the way to avoid the runner’s spikes. I stressed that if he couldn’t do all four of those, the last step was the one to omit. Getting the out is more important than getting out of the way. I also told him that it had to be done in one smooth motion. Told him, but couldn’t show him. Willie Kaiser was the only player who could really achieve that ideal liquid move.

Other early arrivals made their appearance on the field. Among them was Fred Merkle, and I recruited him for our practice. Merkle hit me grounders that I fielded and flipped to Wally Dillard so he could practice his pivot moves. It would be a while before they’d blend into “move,” singular.

I was feeling good, better than I had in quite a while. There’s nothing like teaching somebody baseball to make you feel like you’re doing something worthwhile.

And I was now confident that I knew how Willie’s murder fit into things.

After considerable difficulty getting the telephone number, I was eventually connected long-distance to the Harlan and Hollingsworth Shipbuilding Company, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel, in Wilmington, Delaware. Pretending that I was calling from the office of Charles Comiskey, I was put through to their most famous employee.

That was the easy part. Because once I told Shoeless Joe Jackson why I was calling, he clammed up and made it clear he didn’t want to answer my questions.

It was the same reaction he’d had when we were walking in Philadelphia and I’d mentioned Bennett Harrington. That was what I was asking now: Why did he have such an aversion to Harrington?

I pleaded, badgered, persuaded. Jackson didn’t want to say, but he was too well mannered to hang up on me.

“It’s important, Joe. Please.”

Finally, I must have exhausted him. “Oh, all right.” Jackson’s drawl crackled softly across the phone line. “What the hell.” He took a deep breath. “It was four years ago—June nineteen-fourteen. I was still with Cleveland at the time and we came in to Comiskey Park to play the White Sox. After the first game—I hit two triples off Ed Walsh, by the way—”

“I hit a homer off Walsh once,” I cut in. “In Fenway. Nineteen-twelve.” Right, Mickey. Like you’re going to impress Joe Jackson with your hitting feats. I pulled the receiver from my ear just long enough to shake my head at myself.

Jackson chuckled. He graciously avoided pointing out that Fenway had a short left field. “Anyway,” he went on, “Bennett Harrington paid me a visit at our hotel that night—the Sherman House, I think we were staying in.”

He paused longer than I could take. “And...” I prodded.

Jackson rapidly said the words, “He wanted me to jump to the Feds.”

“You’re kidding!”

Having spit out the big secret, the pace of his speech slowed again. “Nope. For real. He told me he had a big share of the Federal League team in Baltimore. A ‘silent partner’ he called it. Said if I joined them, they could be as good as the old Orioles. He was a nut on the old Orioles.”

“Talked about seeing McGraw and Keeler and all them play?”

“Sure did. Anyway, I said I ain’t interested. So he offered me cash. And he had it with him, in a big envelope. A cash bonus—five thousand dollars—to sign with them. On top of what my salary would be.”

“You still turned it down?”

“Damn right. I wasn’t keen to jump to the Feds anyway. And there was no way I was gonna do it like this. Smelled fishy to me. You don’t offer somebody cash in his hotel room if it’s an honest deal.”

“But why so mad at Harrington? He made you an offer, you turned it down, end of story. What’s the problem?”

“The son of a bitch didn’t leave it there. After I told him no dice, he said he was gonna tell people that I took the money anyway and get me in trouble.”

Blackmail. Or “negotiating,” as Harrington liked to think of it.

Jackson added sadly, “He told me nobody would take the word of an illiterate over his. Caused me a lot of worry. Was months before I realized it was just a bluff.”

No, Harrington would have had to go public with his own Federal League involvement to accuse Jackson. “Thanks Joe. Sorry to bring all this up.”

“You’re not gonna tell anybody about it, right?”

“Nope. You got my word.”

I had another piece of the puzzle. Or I had the first piece of a new puzzle, I wasn’t sure. Harrington wasn’t punishing Weeghman on behalf of the National League for having helped start the Federal League. Harrington wanted revenge on Charles Weeghman for betraying the Feds.