Murder at Wrigley Field (25 page)

I
’d been up all night, sitting alone at my kitchen table, staring dull-eyed at the darkness outside the window next to it. The latest cup of coffee had been in front of me for about two hours. Now and then I took a sip of the cold, bitter brew, but I didn’t need it to stay awake. Thoughts of Edna Chapman mingled with memories of Willie Kaiser and Curly Neeman and Bennett Harrington, were all that were necessary to prevent me from sleeping.

In my heart I felt that Edna was justified in killing Bennett Harrington, and in a way I admired her for it. The admiration was mingled with frustration; Edna’s action had relegated me to a minor role in the matter. After all this time worrying about not doing anything for her, it turned out she didn’t need me at all.

And because she admitted to me what she’d done, I was now in the position of having to make a choice: keep her secret and do nothing more or turn the Luger over to the police and tell them who killed Bennett Harrington. Some choice.

I wanted there to be laws and rules, but I wanted them to be fair and reasonable. I wanted them to be effective, to take care of people like Bennett Harrington so that an eighteen-year-old girl didn’t have to commit—. According to the law, what Edna Chapman had done was murder. The dilemma for me was whether I was willing to be what I think they called an “accessory after the fact”—whether I was going to align myself with the law or with a more pragmatic justice.

I looked out the kitchen window through a porthole of clean glass that I’d produced by rubbing hard on the dingy pane. The moonless night sky was as black as my coffee, with only a few stars twinkling dimly. I estimated that there was still an hour, maybe two, until Sunday dawn. Fall was approaching; the days were getting shorter and sunrise was coming later.

A light went on in Mrs. Tobin’s house. Its glow lit up the narrow space between our homes and cast a yellow sheen on my window. She probably hadn’t been able to sleep much after getting the news about Harold. I remembered what Mrs. Chapman had looked like after Willie’s death and could imagine what Mrs. Tobin was going through.

I couldn’t fathom why I should feel any concern about Bennett Harrington’s death. Harold Tobin was somebody to mourn. So was Willie Kaiser. But Harrington? No.

Not that I really grieved for Bennett Harrington. His death didn’t strike me as any more of a loss than Curly Neeman’s. So what was it exactly that had me so troubled? Perhaps it was disillusionment that the rules I wanted to believe in had proved useless. And if I went along with what Edna had done, I’d be giving up on the way things were supposed to work.

I wasn’t going to bother trying to fall asleep in what was left of the night, so I put on another pot of coffee and pretended that I had just gotten up extra early in the morning.

Sipping on a hot cup of the fresh brew, I sat back down. Perhaps it wouldn’t mean giving up on the system to let Edna Chapman get away with it. Maybe the Harrington case qualified as one of those “extreme situations” that Landfors talked about, like the Civil War when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus or whatever it was.

Mrs. Tobin’s light shut off. My train of thought jumped rails from the Civil War to the present war in Europe and all the lousy things that were being done to promote it. I didn’t like the propaganda, but if I let it keep me from going to fight for the things I did believe in, I was letting it control me the same as it was influencing people like Curly Neeman and the Patriotic Knights of Liberty. I told myself that in all things I needed to focus on the ideals, keep them in view, not be distracted or dissuaded by the imperfect means sometimes used in struggling for them.

Maybe what was really bothering me was the knowledge that after this season I would never again be able to ignore what happened outside the ballpark. There was more to life than baseball, and many new things, most of them complicated and some of them troublesome, would be part of my life.

The sky grew brighter as I pondered, but answers became no clearer.

A loud clanking noise and a rumble of muffled curses echoed from the alley. The sounds shook me loose from my tangled musing. I sprang up from my chair and went to the back door, drawing aside the curtain far enough to peek out.

Two scruffy boys of about fourteen or fifteen were hauling a hot water tank out of a neighbor’s cellar. They must have dropped it and were moving quickly to take it away. Leaving the cellar door open, the boys staggered with their unwieldy load to another house four doors away down the alley. A man’s arm opened the back door for them and they slipped inside with the tank.

I mentally marked the location of the house, then grabbed my coat.

Minutes later, I was knocking on that same door. There was a flurry of movement within the house, then a young voice called, “Who’s there?”

“Me,” I grunted. What the hell, I thought, that’s the answer most people give.

Footsteps approached the door. The curtain started to move, and I leaned away to avoid being seen. An unintelligible exchange of words took place inside, then the door cracked open a cautious inch. I immediately gave it a hard shove, forcing my way in.

I was met by no physical resistance, but my nose was struck by a smell nearly as vile as that of the Union Stockyards. It was the sickly sweet odor of something fermenting.

The boy at the door stared at me with his mouth agape. Equally surprised were his two accomplices: the somewhat younger boy who’d helped carry the tank and a gnarled, gray old man. They stood at the far end of the kitchen, next to the stolen water tank. No one spoke for a minute, giving me time to survey the filthy residence. A wall had been crudely torn down between the kitchen and parlor to make one large room. It was an uninhabitable room, cluttered with plumbing fixtures, metal pipes, and several other hot water tanks, one of which, I was sure, was mine. Tin washtubs along one wall were filled with the brown liquid responsible for the noxious fumes.

Slamming the door shut, the boy behind me said in a tone that he tried hard to sound threatening, “What should we do with this guy?” I turned my head and gave him a look that warned he better not try doing anything to me.

The old man wiped his hands on his stained undershirt and growled, “Depends on who he is.”

“Mickey Rawlings,” I piped up. “Believe you have something of mine.” I nodded at one of the tanks and noticed the spiral of copper tubing attached to the top. I’d seen something like it once in Texas. Scattered about the place were boxes of yeast and bags of sugar and cornmeal; many were broken open, with their contents spilled over the dirty floor. They were moonshiners!

It was obviously a bush league operation. The scene looked like the aftermath of a pie-throwing episode in one of Mack Sennett’s slapstick comedies.

The boy next to the old man said, “We better do somethin’ about this guy. Make sure he don’t talk.”

I recalled that amateurs often did very stupid things and momentarily wished that I’d thought to bring the gun I’d acquired in Bennett Harrington’s office. It was hidden next to Edna’s Luger behind my Mark Twain books.

The old guy relieved my worry somewhat when he boxed the kid’s ears. “Goddamn idiots. Shouldn’t have let him follow you.”

Ignoring the boys, I directed myself to the man, hoping that he’d acquired enough wisdom in his years to be a little less stupid than the boys. “Look,” I said. “I don’t care if you want to set up a still and brew a little corn whisky. But don’t go stealing stuff from my house to do it.”

“Well, I didn’t like having to,” he grumbled. “We ain’t thieves.” He smacked the boy in the head again. “If we was, these damn kids would be a helluva lot better at it.” He turned to me. “We’d buy what we needed if we could, but it’s hard to get plumbing supplies these days. There’s a war on, you know.”

Why did people always tell me this as if it was news? “Then buy bootleg booze,” I said. “What do you have to make your own for? This is Chicago, for chrissake. A drink ain’t exactly hard to find.”

He ran a hand over the tank and gave me a sly wink. “It will be,” he said. “When Prohibition passes. And we’re gonna be set up to make a killing selling our home brew!”

I couldn’t keep from laughing. They sure weren’t going to be good businessmen. “Then you’re really stupid to be stealing from your neighbors,” I said.

The grin vanished and his brow furrowed. “Watcha mean?”

“You’re going to need these people as customers. You go stealing from them, word gets around, and you’re out of business.”

“Hmm.” He rubbed his unshaven chin and said thoughtfully, “Man has a point boys.” With a shake of his head, he added, “But ain’t no other way to get the equipment.”

“Got a pencil and paper?”

He punched the kid in the shoulder, and the boy went to another room. He returned a minute later with the writing materials.

I scribbled down a name and phone number. “This is my landlord,” I said. “He’s got vacant buildings and he’ll sell you the tanks and plumbing from them. It’ll cost you, but you’ll be better off doing it that way.” I held out the slip of paper, and the old man walked over and took it from my hand. “You’ll also pay him thirty dollars for the one you stole from me. Tell him to apply it to my rent.”

He shrugged and agreed. “Fair ’nough.”

“And you’ll return the other ones you took,” I added, pointing to the one they’d stolen that morning.

He nodded, and I went to the door, pushing the older boy aside. I said to him, “You’re lucky it was me who saw you and not Mike the Cop.”

All three of the aspiring bootleggers laughed. The old man snorted, “Hell, we woulda got off easier with him. He wouldn’t’a done nothing!”

I stepped into the alley thinking he was probably right.

By mid-morning, the lack of sleep caught up with me. It seemed slothful to go to bed at this time of day, so I stretched out on the parlor sofa. A Sunday nap was entirely permissible.

I’d enjoyed just enough sleep to be wanting more of it when shouts from the street put an end to my dozing. Half awake, I listened. It was otherwise quiet, another Gasless Sunday with no automobiles to disturb the morning peace.

“Go on! Beat it!” yelled Mike the Cop. In his efforts to keep the neighborhood quiet, Mike generally made more noise than the children he was trying to silence.

I turned on my side so at least one ear wouldn’t have to hear him. Then I twisted and sat upright. I had it! A way out of my quandary. Those inept moonshiners were right about one thing: Mike wouldn’t do anything.

Quickly slipping on my clothes, I ran outside in time to catch him. Mike was standing at the curb, his arms akimbo, observing the children as they disappeared around the corner. I drew up next to him. He gave me a glance, then resumed watching his tormentors. “Damn kids,” he puffed.

Confident that Mike wouldn’t want to hear anything about Harrington even if I offered to tell him, I put on my most innocent face. “Don’t suppose you’d want to hear my theory about who killed Bennett Harrington,” I said.

He turned and directed his eyes fully at me.

No, no. Ignore me. Tell me to get lost. Worry about the kids.

Eagerly, he answered, “Sure I would.”

Damn. Mike has to pick today to get conscientious in his duty.

I wasn’t going to get off the hook easy; I had to make a decision. Nothing was coming easy for me this year. After a deep breath, I said, “I think it was Charlie Comiskey. See, I figure he was mad about the Cubs doing so much better than the Sox this year and—”

Mike cracked a smile that had no amusement in it. He tapped me on the shoulder, hard, with his billy club. “You better lay off the hooch, boy. It’s illegal you know.”

With that warning, he walked away, trying to whistle. He sounded like a straw sucking at an empty ice cream soda.

I stood and watched him and slowly began to smile, then grin.

An exhilarating sense of relief washed through me. It felt so good, so reassuring, that I knew I’d made the right decision not to tell him about Edna.

Maybe it wasn’t in the rule book to let her get away with what she’d done, but it was fair.

F
rom his perch atop the pitcher’s mound, Burleigh Grimes tried to stare me down. I ignored his glare; my eyes were fixed on the blue
B
insignia sewn on the front of his jersey, “B” for Brooklyn. Although I was no longer a Giant, the sight of a Dodger uniform could still raise my body temperature several degrees.

I scraped my spikes in the batter’s box like a bull pawing the ground, eager to charge. It was bottom of the first, one out, nobody on base. In my grip was Mabel, brought out of retirement for this one game. I gave her hickory shaft a twisting squeeze, knowing she would understand it as a caress.

C’mon, give me the high hard one, I silently challenged Grimes.

He loaded the ball with saliva, wound up, and let it fly. The pitch came high and hard and straight.

I unleashed Mabel and was wishing the ball a pleasant journey before she even made contact. When she did meet the horsehide—oh, what a feeling. A powerful sensation surged through my arms, the magic tingle that only comes when the sweet spot of the bat contacts the ball dead on.

Grimes’s futile spitter was on a rising path to straight-ahead centerfield, the deepest part of Cubs Park, as I reluctantly dropped Mabel and began my race around the bases. The ball headed to the wall, not quite high enough to go over it. As I rounded second, I saw it carom off the scoreboard and bounce into the tricky corner near the right field bleachers. Heading to third, Fred Mitchell waved me on, screaming, “Go! Go!” Seconds later, I slid safely into home with an inside-the-park home run that put us up 1–0. Before the Cubs batboy could pick up Mabel, I retrieved her myself and carried her into the dugout.

I faced Grimes again in the third. Two effective spitballs put me behind oh-and-two in the count, then he tried to jam me with a fastball. I swung. Mabel took the pitch on the handle but was strong enough to drop a loop single over the third baseman’s head.

By the time I came to bat in the sixth inning, Burleigh Grimes was out of the game on the losing end of a 5–1 score. Rube Marquard, my one-time teammate with New York who had to suffer the indignity of going from the Giants to the Dodgers, replaced him on the mound. I greeted him with a hard grounder up the middle that went through for another single.

My final at bat was in the eighth. Marquard threw a couple of fastballs for called balls, then hung a slow curve knee-high on the outside corner. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer going-away present. Mabel got all of it, driving a solid shot up the right field foul line, and I pulled into second base with a stand-up double.

Four-for-four on the day. Perfect. The first time I’d ever gotten four hits in a major-league game.

After our 8–2 win, still in uniform and carrying Mabel and my mitt, I stopped in Fred Mitchell’s small office adjacent to the locker room.

“Good game,” the manager said with a grin.

“Thanks. It’s my last one.”

“Huh?”

“I went to a recruiting office this morning. I enlisted.”

“Damn.” Mitchell seemed uncertain how to react to the news. “But the World Series. All you have to do is stick around a few more weeks and you’ll be playing in the Series.”

I was well aware of that. We’d already clinched the pennant, and the Cubs’ management had already arranged to play the Chicago home games in Comiskey Park because of its larger seating capacity. “I know, Fred. But I don’t want to wait.”

“Well, if it’s what you want to do, I won’t try to talk you out of it. Sure gonna miss you, though.”

“Thanks. You know, Wicket Greene would probably do okay at second. I’d leave Rube Dillard at shortstop.”

I nodded. It turned out the kid liked my most recent suggestion. A dachshund, a teammate.... If I had a daughter, I’d probably end up naming her Rube.

“They’ll make a decent double play combination,” I said. Dillard and I had turned a couple of them in today’s game. It wasn’t the same as with Willie Kaiser, but they’d clicked well enough.

Mitchell accepted my advice with good humor and wished me luck in my new vocation; he also said he hoped I’d be returning to baseball soon.

I showered and changed before making my next stop: Charles Weeghman’s office upstairs.

Weeghman was in a visibly chipper mood. It was disconcerting to see him smiling and content.

He became less happy when I informed him, “I haven’t been able to find out who’s trying to put you out of business, and I’m gonna have to drop it.” As the scowl that I’d come to know so well crawled over Weeghman’s face, I explained that I was going into the Army.

Weeghman sat motionless for a minute. Then he did something totally unexpected: he opened the cedar cigar box on his desk and asked, “Have one?”

“Thanks,” I accepted. I took one of the long slim cigars and put it in my breast pocket. “I’ll smoke it later.” I had no intention of smoking it later, but it seemed impolite to refuse.

Weeghman took one for himself and bit off the end. “It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it looks like when you get back you’ll be playing in Wrigley Park after all.” He struck a match and rolled the end of the cigar in the flame. “This ain’t public yet, so don’t tell anybody, but I’m selling out to William Wrigley at the end of the season.”

I wasn’t sure if I should congratulate him or express regret. So I said, “Oh.”

After enjoying a few puffs of the aromatic cigar, Weeghman asked, “Why don’t you stick around for the World Series? Hell, we got the pennant sewed up. Why leave now?”

That was a question I’d thought about long and hard. Part of the answer was that I didn’t intend to let my desire to play in a World Series determine the decisions I made in life. “I can’t explain it,” I answered. “It’s just something I got to do now.”

Besides, not even playing in the World Series could salvage this season.

Edna Chapman and I took the dachshunds on one last walk through Ravenswood. As soon as we left her home, she became the next person of the day to receive the news of my enlistment. Edna quietly suggested that I “be careful,” and we completed the rest of the journey without exchanging another word.

On our return to the house, we remained outside, sitting on the top step of the front porch, three of the dogs curled up at our feet. Rube sat down next to me, his brown eyes squinting in the evening sun. I scratched him under his chin; he hopped up and flicked his tongue out, licking the tip of my nose.

“There’s something else I have to tell you,” I said to Edna.

She reached down and stroked the head of the dog nearest her. “Yes?”

“That, uh, family heirloom you lent me.... I’m afraid I lost it.”

Her head spun to face me. “Lost it?”

“Yes. It’s gone.” I’d disposed of the Luger in the same place that Curly Neeman’s body had been dumped. Unlike Neeman, though, the gun was never going to float to the surface. I added emphatically, “Nobody’s ever going to find it.”

She blushed and smiled with understanding. “Oh.”

“Hope you’re not angry.”

Smiling more fully, Edna shook her head no. In a whisper, she added, “Thank you.”

I took a break from my packing when Karl Landfors came over later that night. I didn’t really know what to pack anyway. I’d never been on a road trip all the way to France before.

After we sat down in the parlor with a couple of cold soda pops, I gave him the news that I’d enlisted. Landfors became the first person to express pride in my decision. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said approvingly.

He then became the third person to point out, “But if you go now, you’ll miss playing in the World Series.” People were telling me that I’d be missing the Series the same way they kept informing me that “there’s a war on, you know.”

I laughed it off. “Well, they say this is the war to end all wars. That means it’s my only chance to get in one. I’ll have plenty more chances to get in a World Series. They have them every year.”

Landfors smiled weakly. He seemed to catch on that I didn’t want to go into the reason for my enlistment. It wasn’t something I completely understood myself; I knew only that it felt right and that it had something to do with keeping ideals foremost in mind.

He switched to a subject I was equally reluctant to discuss. “Inconvenient about Bennett Harrington getting killed,” Landfors said.

That was a curious way to describe it. “Inconvenient? How so?”

“It makes it difficult for you to determine who was ultimately responsible for your friend Kaiser getting killed. Harrington was clearly involved to some extent, but there had to be others, right?” His eyebrows rose above the rims of his spectacles. “You said it didn’t make sense for one of the Cubs’ owners to be behind whatever was going on. Doesn’t that mean somebody other than Harrington had to be orchestrating things? And who killed Harrington? You don’t believe it was a holdup, do you?”

I decided to satisfy his curiosity on everything except the circumstances of Harrington’s death. “You’re right,” I said. “I guess it is kind of inconvenient that he’s dead. Probably means there’s some things we’re never going to know for sure. One thing I am sure of, though: Bennett Harrington was the one behind the sabotage at Cubs Park, including Willie’s murder.”

“Why? What could he gain by it?”

“That’s the question I had the toughest time with. Why would one of the team owners do anything to frighten away fans and decrease revenues? He might be able to buy the club cheaper that way, if he wanted to, but it wouldn’t be worth much once he got it.” I paused for emphasis, then added, “Not if the team was staying in Chicago, that is.”

“I don’t follow,” said Landfors.

I explained, “I’d bet that Bennett Harrington’s plan was to buy the Chicago Cubs and move the team to Baltimore. You told me he still owns Terrapin Park, Orioles Park now.”

Landfors nodded. “I see. And the sabotage was to drive down the buying price?”

“Well, he’s a businessman, so I expect that was part of it. I don’t think it was the main factor though. Harrington’s munitions factories are doing great, so he probably had plenty of money. No, the most important reasons were to put pressure on Weeghman to sell and to drive down attendance.

“See, once Harrington became owner, he’d have to get permission from the league to move the franchise to Baltimore. The best way for him to do that was to prove that fans weren’t coming to Cubs Park, that Chicago wouldn’t support two major league teams anymore.”

“No National League team in Chicago? You think the other owners would have gone along with him?”

“Until this year, I would have said not a chance. But this season’s been so strange, the owners have been making so many crazy decisions, I really don’t know. Harrington might have been able to make a case for it. Attendance has been way down in every city in the league. Harrington could have pointed out that the Feds’ Baltimore franchise always drew great crowds. And, of course, Charlie Comiskey would love for his White Sox to be the only show in town, so you can be sure he’d have done whatever he could behind the scenes to help Harrington move the Cubs to another city.

“If Harrington pulled it off,” I went on, “he would have been a hometown hero for bringing major league baseball back to Baltimore.”

Landfors protested, “But he did own part of the Federal League team in Baltimore, and he kept that a secret.”

“That’s different. The Feds were an outlaw league, not part of Organized Baseball. If they didn’t succeed, anyone mixed up with them could end up in Dutch with the established leagues. So Harrington kept his role with them secret, and when the Feds folded there was no taint on him. Of course, if the new league had succeeded, I’m sure he would have eventually gone public with his involvement.”

I concluded, “Moving the Cubs to Baltimore would have been a real coup for Harrington. They’re a National League team, same as the old Orioles.”