Murder at Wrigley Field (24 page)

“Anyway,” Greene went on, “that all soured me on the Knights. So I didn’t want to go to any more of the meetings.”

Well, at least I now had somebody who could confirm that Harrington had Neeman commit murder for him. Last question: “Would you testify about all this?”

“Not a chance in hell.”

A
t least two people still alive knew that Bennett Harrington was behind the murder of Willie Kaiser: Wicket Greene and Frank Timmons. However, Greene wasn’t going to testify to that, and I was sure Timmons wouldn’t either. There was no way for him to profit from it.

Would Harrington be so sure, though? He couldn’t be entirely confident that he was immune from prosecution; he must have some fear of exposure. What if I played on that fear? Maybe I could bluff him, convince him that too many people knew what had happened for him to keep it covered up. Then again, maybe I couldn’t. “Don’t ever get in a poker game,” he’d told me. I had a sinking feeling that his assessment of my poker skills was as sound as his choice of me instead of Willie as the more expendable ballplayer.

An entirely different approach suggested itself next: forget about the murders and nail Bennett Harrington for something else. He’d allowed Lefty Rariden to smuggle gunpowder out of his munitions plant. That should qualify as treason, and the penalty for treason was the same as that for murder. This idea withered away when I realized that Lefty Rariden wouldn’t go public with what he’d done any more than Greene would. And the government would probably protect Harrington from any such charges anyway, for security reasons, of course.

I thought about it for three days. The most sensible thing for me to do would be to take the advice I’d given Edna Chapman and try to put it all behind me. But nothing else this season was sensible, so why start now?

I finally decided that my only viable option was to goad Bennett Harrington into making a move against me. There were two advantages to this scheme. One was that I knew he’d go for it. Harrington was aware that I knew too much about him, and he’d already tried to have me killed. The other, very important, consideration was that I was sure he would do it personally. Since he’d killed Curly Neeman himself, I figured he wanted to cut down the number of people involved. He wouldn’t get somebody else in on it again.

This was going to be my plan. Either I’d trap Harrington when he came after me or.... well, I wasn’t supposed to have lived beyond the Fourth of July anyway.

It was nine-twenty Monday morning when I rounded the corner from Randolph to State Street. I allowed the extra twenty minutes in case Bennett Harrington’s secretary was late for work. From what I’d seen of her, I didn’t think tardiness was ever a problem, but I wanted to be sure that she was there when I spoke to him. I wasn’t going to repeat Curly Neeman’s mistake. At this point, I only wanted to plant a seed in Harrington’s mind; I didn’t want him shooting me on the spot.

I took the stairs to the third floor and stepped into the outer office. The first thing I saw was that the secretary’s desk was empty. What I noticed next were the two plug-uglies in the room. One, a droopy-faced bear of a man, whose crossed arms barely met across the girth of his belly, was standing outside the open door to Harrington’s office. The other, a pale young man of slight build, moved up on me from the left. I looked from one to the other, then asked innocently, “Where’s the secretary?”

The young fellow said, “Sent ’er home.” He took a step closer to me. “You better get out of here, too,” he warned in a voice too high to sound truly threatening.

I willingly moved to comply when the other man barked, “Hold him! That’s Rawlings.”

I was immediately grabbed by the arms. The skinny thug was stronger than he appeared; he spun me around and slammed my back against the wall. I struggled to get out of his grasp, but he got a sinewy forearm against my throat and started to push.

It suddenly came to me that both of these men were regulars at the Knights’ meetings. Harrington must be employing some of them as personal bodyguards now.

I tried to twist my head to get the pressure off my windpipe. As I turned, struggling for breath, I saw the large man uncross his arms and pull open his jacket. A pistol was tucked in his belt.

Two against one. And one of them with a gun. No fair.

Before my brain could issue the order, my right knee took the initiative to throw out the rule book. It snapped up hard and fast and made full contact.

Gasping out a most amazing screech, the recipient of my well-placed kick buckled, his arm dropping away from my throat. As he doubled over, his coat gaped open to reveal that he was also armed.

Instinctively, my hand reached out and plucked the long-barreled revolver from his shoulder holster.

As my attacker fell to his hands and knees, I went down, too, taking a kneeling position behind him to use his heaving body as a barricade. The strangled, retching noises he was making told me he wasn’t going to be getting up any time soon. I aimed the revolver in the direction of the man outside Harrington’s door.

The fat man started to go for his gun. “Don’t move!” I yelled, keeping the pistol trained on him. Actually, it didn’t stay on him; it swept over him, back and forth and up and down as it wobbled in my hand. I didn’t know a damn thing about using a gun. Do I have to pull the hammer back, or just pull the trigger? I cupped my left hand over the hammer so he wouldn’t know if I was doing it wrong.

He could tell I didn’t know what I was doing, but it worked to my advantage. Instead of pulling his weapon, he hoisted his chubby arms and tried to calm me down, repeating the words “Take it easy” over and over.

I closed my left eye and squinted with my right trying to line him up in the sights of the gun. My hand became steadier, and I ordered, “Put your gun on the floor. Slow.”

He obeyed. The feeling of power invigorated me. “Slide it under the desk,” I commanded next. He gently kicked the pistol until it was under the secretary’s desk.

I stood up. “Move over there,” I said, waving the barrel of my gun at Harrington’s office door. He again did as instructed, stepping into the doorway. “Put your hands back up.” They were promptly raised above his head.

After a glance down to assure myself that his partner was staying on the floor, I followed the fat man to the door.

I cautiously looked inside the office. Frank Timmons was seated behind Bennett Harrington’s white desk, Harrington’s glittering, ivory-handled pistol in his hand. He was aiming at me more steadily than I was aiming at him.

I jumped back half a step and slid partially behind the door jamb. It provided some protection while still allowing me to keep all three men in sight. “Where’s Harrington?” I said.

Timmons answered, “Dead.”

I poked my head a little farther in the door and looked around Harrington’s office. All I saw was a mess of papers scattered on the floor. No body.

“It wasn’t us,” Timmons said, obviously appalled at the implication. “Somebody killed him last night.”

Jeez. “Then what are you guys doing here?”

Timmons said promptly, “Harrington had connections to some of my men. I want to make sure there’s nothing in his files that could, uh, reflect badly on the Patriotic Knights of Liberty.”

Okay. Now what? The stand-off continued without incident or discussion while I considered how to resolve it.

“My suggestion,” I finally said. “Is that none of us were here this morning.” I allowed Timmons a moment to think it over. “Deal?”

He smiled slowly. Then he laid the revolver on the desk. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Mr. Rawlings.”

I backed my way to the staircase, keeping the Knights in sight. I continued to keep my eyes peeled as I went down the stairs and out to the street. I also kept the gun.

I suspended my boycott of the newspapers long enough to check the reports on Harrington’s death. He was killed, shot twice, on LaSalle Street, a block from City Hall, late Sunday night by “an unknown assailant.” No details on the gun.

His death got me to rethinking everything that had happened. I briefly entertained the notion that there was some kind of sabotage against his plant: Willie, Neeman, and Harrington all worked there. And so had I when the attempt was made on me. Then I discarded the idea, deciding that my previous theory made more sense.

Neeman killed Willie. Harrington killed Neeman, either to cut off the connection to himself or, more likely, because Neeman had disobeyed instructions when he’d shot Willie instead of me. So then who killed Bennett Harrington?

Frank Timmons? Maybe he didn’t like his cause and his men being used for Harrington’s purposes. But Timmons didn’t have a cause, he had a business. And, like he’d told me, killing is bad for business. It’s what made me certain that I’d be safe from the Knights.

Agnes O’Doul? She could have killed Curly Neeman when she had the chance but didn’t. And since she knew Bennett Harrington didn’t want Willie killed in the first place, she had no reason to retaliate against him.

I expanded the list of possibilities further. Finally, I thought I knew what had happened. The answer I would have least imagined seemed the most likely to be true. And I wished with all my heart that it wasn’t.

K
arl Landfors promised he’d get me the information by eleven o’clock Wednesday morning. He said he’d been in town long enough to have established the necessary contacts and promised me a dinner if he failed to make it on time. I didn’t want dinner. I wanted to know the kind of gun that was used to kill Bennett Harrington.

It was now a quarter past ten. I’d been up for several hours waiting anxiously for his call.

If the bullet was intact, Landfors would find out what type it was. And I was hoping with all my might that it wasn’t from a Model 1892 Colt .38 revolver. At least let the slug be too badly mangled to be identified, and I’d forget about the whole thing.

The call came at ten to eleven. I grabbed the phone on the first ring and clapped the receiver to my ear. “Karl?”

“Got it!” he trumpeted.

“Was it.... Was it a Colt thirty-eight?”

“Close, as far as caliber. But no. A nine-millimeter Parabellum.”

“A what?”

“Bennett Harrington was shot by a nine-millimeter ‘Pistole ought-eight.’ A Luger.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely. Two slugs were left in the body. Both of them were nice and clean, easy to identify.”

“A Luger. That’s German.” Was Harrington killed by Germans?

“German manufacture. But they’re popular souvenirs. A lot of soldiers brought them back here. Actually, Lugers aren’t being used in combat much anymore. They jam in trench warfare. See, they have this toggle mechanism, and when they get muddy...”

Landfors was flaunting his recently acquired expertise again. I wasn’t interested in the effects of mud on German side arms, so I tried to cut the conversation short.

“Wait!” he yelped as I was about to I hang up.

“What?”

“I checked on Terrapin Park in Baltimore, like you asked, which was quite confusing, I’ll have you know. Terrapin Park was built across the street from Orioles Park. When the Federal League folded, the Orioles moved into Terrapin Park but renamed it Orioles Park, so now there are two Orioles Parks right across the street from each other!” Landfors sounded outraged, as if this had been done solely to make things difficult for him. “By the way,” he added, “I was wondering. Are these the same Orioles that were famous twenty years ago?”

Karl Landfors had some serious gaps in his education that I felt obligated to fill. I gave him a concise history lesson: the famous “old Orioles” of the 1890s were a National League team that was jettisoned when the league cut down from twelve teams to eight after the 1899 season. The 1901 formation of the American League included a Baltimore franchise that played under the name “Orioles” until they moved to New York in 1903 and later became known as the Yankees. The current Baltimore Orioles were in the International League, a minor league.

“Oh,” said Landfors, sounding like a less than avid pupil. “Anyway, Bennett Harrington owns a company that owns the land on which the new Orioles Park, formerly Terrapin Park, was built. So you’re right about him. He was involved in the Federal League.”

“Thanks Karl.”

I didn’t care about Bennett Harrington’s business dealings now. I was simply relieved that it wasn’t Edna Chapman who’d killed him. I was sure that if she had, she’d have used Otto Kaiser’s gun, the one Willie was so proud to possess.

I was also puzzled. If it wasn’t Edna, then who?

By early Friday morning, I came to the realization that I might have been only a little bit wrong—right string, wrong yo-yo.

Late Friday morning, I made a visit to the Chapman home.

Edna greeted me with polite indifference and led me into the parlor, where a battered black sewing machine on a chipped oak cabinet was positioned in the middle of the room. I hadn’t seen it before. “That new?” I asked.

“New for us.” She sat down at the machine. “Mind if I keep working? I promised Mrs. Schafer I’d have this dress finished for her tomorrow.”

“Uh, no. No, I don’t mind.” Edna must have started to take in seamstress jobs to make up for the income Willie could no longer provide. I briefly debated offering financial help, but she’d probably be insulted so I said nothing.

She started to rock the treadle with her foot; the machine squeaked and squealed as the needle flew up and down through the hem of a green serge skirt. I grabbed one of the dining chairs and sat across from her.

I watched her work for a few minutes. “Your mother upstairs?”

She nodded. “Sleeping.”

I pulled my chair a little closer. In a low voice I asked, “You remember when Willie and I moved your things upstairs? When you gave the dogs your bedroom down here?”

Edna nodded while keeping her eyes on her task. With deft hands, she smoothed the cloth and guided it through the machine, producing a perfectly uniform stitch pattern.

“You have a strongbox—I remember carrying it up there—like the one Willie had in his dresser, where he kept his father’s things.”

The rise and fall of the needle slowed. A warm flush rose in her high cheeks. “Yes, what about it?”

“Could you bring it down and show me what’s in it?”

She sat for a long minute staring at the mass of cloth. Then, without uttering a word, she went upstairs.

The box was already unlocked when Edna brought it down. She handed it to me, then took her seat at the sewing machine and methodically resumed work on the dress.

I creaked open the lid. “It’s in there,” Edna said softly.

The contents of the iron box were similar to those of Willie’s: mostly papers and photographs. There was also a medal attached to a striped silk ribbon of blue, yellow, and green; the bronze disk was stamped “Mexican Service, 1911– 1917” and featured the image of some kind of plant—a cactus, I assumed. Lying on top of everything was a dark tarnished pistol with a skinny little barrel and a raked-back handle. A Luger.

I carefully removed the weapon and began to examine it. Karl Landfors had mentioned that Germany had supplied weapons to the Mexican army. I realized that Edna’s father might have sent home a captured souvenir from Mexico the same way doughboys were now sending them back from Europe.

Attempting to check if it was loaded, I fumbled with the latch that would release the clip. Edna Chapman put a quick halt to my efforts. “There are two missing,” she said. The sewing machine slowed to a stop, and Edna folded her hands in her lap. After a deep breath, she added, “I shot Mr. Harrington.”

It was what I’d suspected, but as soon as I heard her utter the words, I wished she hadn’t told me.

“How did you know where to find him?” I asked, placing the Luger back in the strongbox.

“Some people were watching him for me. They told me Mr. Harrington had a regular poker game at the La Salle Hotel. I met him after the game. And...” Her voice trailed off; she concluded with a shrug.

“Who were the people watching him?” I assumed it was some of Hans Fohl’s acquaintances.

She gave me a baleful look that said I should know better than to ask her such a question.

I tried a different one. “You just walked up to him and shot him?”

“I had the gun hidden in a muff. He didn’t see it until it was too late.”

“And you just shot him?”

“I introduced myself first. ‘I’m Willie Kaiser’s sister,’ I said. Then I pulled out the gun and shot him. Twice.”

I didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to ask—didn’t want to hear—anything more. I recalled her telling me once that you had to share a secret with somebody. Why the hell did she have to share this one with me?

“Are you angry?” she asked.

“No.” Confused, surprised, sad. But not angry. “I think...” I picked up the weapon again. It was an ugly thing. The only pretty gun I’d ever seen was Bennett Harrington’s revolver. “I think I’d like to take this with me. That okay?”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.” I really didn’t know. But no matter what, she shouldn’t be keeping it.

“If you like,” she agreed.

I put the Luger in my jacket pocket; it made an unsightly bulge and felt heavy against my hip.

The good-byes were brief. Edna resumed her sewing, and I showed myself to the door. I felt uncertain about everything, somewhat dubious that I could even find my way home.

Stepping down from the Chapman’s front porch, I met a big blond fellow coming the other way. We looked at each other for a few seconds, trying to recall where we’d seen each other before. I remembered first. “Uh, hi Gus,” I said.

He stared a little longer before guessing, “Rawlings?”

“Yeah.” This was the man from Hans Fohl’s church, the one who’d said I didn’t belong there. We exchanged awkward nods and moved on.

When I reached the sidewalk, I looked back, suddenly aware of what he’d been carrying: red roses wrapped in white paper. I was sure they weren’t for Edna’s mother.