Murder at Wrigley Field (8 page)

Like what? How to dress himself? The kid couldn’t have been wearing long trousers for long. He was going almost directly from wearing short pants on the schoolyard to knickers on the baseball field.

“You two will room together on the road.”

I wasn’t a babysitter. “Your mother know your here?” I said.

The kid—t’d already forgotten his name and didn’t care enough to ask—bobbed his head up and down. “Yup. Sure does. My father, too. Heck, my whole neighborhood knows I’m gonna be playing for the Cubs. I told everybody I know, and my mother told the rest of them.”

This busher doesn’t even know sarcasm when he hears it. The bench jockeys are going to have a field day with him. I chuckled, imagining the first time he’d have to endure the verbal stings of John McGraw.

I gave the kid a closer look. He had fine blond hair and an eager pink face that had never experienced or needed the scrape of a razor. Sixteen years old, probably. Seventeen at the most.

Mitchell sent the kid to find the clubhouse man for a uniform and sat down next to me. “Don’t take it out on him, Mick,” he said softly.

“I’m not. It’s just...”

“Yeah, I know.” Mitchell slapped my thigh. “Look, I got some more bad news for you: you’re playing in your road uniform today. Weeghman’s orders. He didn’t tell me why, but I read the papers so I think I know.” He rose. “Oh, and clean out Kaiser’s locker.”

“Don’t give it to the kid,” I blurted.

“Can’t make a shrine of it.”

“Hell, Fred. We hardly got a full team. There’s plenty of empty lockers. Don’t give him Willie’s.”

Mitchell scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, okay. But clear it out anyway. His family should get his things.”

“Thanks. I’ll bring them his stuff.”

Left alone, I proceeded to clear out Willie’s locker. His uniform, spikes, and cap were already gone, taken away with his body. I took his straw boater and turned it upside down to throw in the few other things from the shelf—a celluloid collar, cuff links, clean socks, and garters. Then his old seersucker suit hanging on a hook. I folded the trousers neatly and put them on a stool. I was folding his jacket when a comb fell out of a pocket. I threw the comb in the hat, then quickly checked the other pockets for anything else that might fall out. I added a handkerchief, a small clasp knife, a few coins, and, from an inside breast pocket, a folded green paper. I had one like it at home—a draft registration card. Why did he carry it around with him? I wondered.

The new kid returned with a Cubs cap perched on his head. He hugged a white home uniform to his chest with his right hand and held a brown road uniform in his left. “The guy with the uniforms told me to bring you this,” he said. I took the road flannels from him. They were solid brown with black pinstripes. The ugliest design since the plaid violet uniforms I’d worn with the Giants in ’sixteen. Those uniforms had done a lot to soften the blow of leaving New York.

I laid the brown flannels on my stool.

The kid proffered his right hand. “I’m real happy to be playing with you, Mr. Rawlings,” he said.

Mister
Rawlings? What am I, an old-timer? I shook his hand firmly. “It’s Mickey, kid.” I got a lot of years to go before being “mister.”

“Okay, Mickey. My friends call me Wally.”

“Uh-huh. And what do your enemies call you?”

“They call me kid.”

The muscles of my mouth relaxed into a smile. It was the first one since Willie had made that right turn last week.

He was going to be a scrapper, this kid. I suddenly found myself looking forward to seeing what he could do on the diamond.

I pointed to Willie’s locker. “I got your locker all cleared out. Stow your gear and suit up.”

The green paper was still in my hand. I unfolded it and gave the paper a glance. It wasn’t a registration card.

Willie Kaiser had been an employee of the Dearborn Fuel Company, the one that Bennett Harrington owned. According to the ID card, Willie worked in the chemical plant.

I
brought a dozen pink carnations for Edna, a box of chocolates for her mother, and four large soup bones for the dogs. In a leather satchel I carried Willie’s clothes, cleaned and pressed, fresh from a Lincoln Avenue laundry.

When Edna let me in, I noticed immediately that the atmosphere was no more inviting than it had been last time. The air was dense, and the rooms seemed to have contracted in size. The Chapman home had all the ambiance of a crypt.

I quietly placed the satchel under a small hallway table and handed her the gifts. She accepted them with a smile that was less than ecstatic. Leaving the chocolates in the parlor to avoid disturbing her mother sleeping upstairs, she took the flowers and bones into the kitchen as I followed. She left the soup bones in their brown butcher paper wrapping on the kitchen table. “For after their walk,” she said, then filled a porcelain vase with water for the flowers.

I’d given particular attention to the choice of blossom. I’d asked the florist for something that wouldn’t have the romantic implications of roses nor the funereal connotations of lilies; she’d suggested carnations as sufficiently neutral.

I picked the time of my visit—mid—morning on Monday—carefully, too, so that I would have an excuse to leave early: the last games, another twin bill, of the series with Cincinnati. Despite Hippo Vaughn being out with a bad shoulder, we’d won both games the day before. To my surprise, and I’m sure Weeghman’s delight, the games were near sellouts. Willie’s death didn’t keep the fans away. I hated to think it, but his murder might have added to the attraction—maybe people came to the park for the same reason they stop to look at a traffic accident.

Edna carefully arranged the flowers in the vase so that they looked full and symmetric. “They’re lovely,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Even about bringing flowers, I felt guilty. I hadn’t had dinner with the Chapman family since Willie died. Edna and I had been to no more movies, and I hadn’t come by to walk Rube. I’d been neglecting them, so I’d brought presents. Not for them, really, but to make myself feel better.

After getting the dogs from their room, Edna and I took them out for their exercise.

We spoke little on Paulina Street, less on Lawrence, and we walked Hermitage and Sunnyside in total silence. When we returned to the house, I suggested we stay outside—for the fresh air, I thought to myself.

Edna and I sat on the steps to the front porch. The dachshunds frolicked around us unaware of the treat that was awaiting them inside. Otherwise, they would have dragged us through the front door.

I held a bent forefinger to Rube. He gnawed on the knuckle with gentle bites, his tail flicking the air.

“I went to that church,” I said. I waited for Edna to prod me with a question but wasn’t rewarded with any word or gesture. “Willie did go there that night,” I went on. “Don’t think there was much to it though.”

Edna nodded and remained silent. She was controlled and tight, even in appearance. Her hair was raked back from her face, kept in place by amber combs. It made her skin seem taut and her cheekbones higher.

I straightened my finger and Rube’s teeth grabbed hold of the tip. We started to play tug-of-war, with my finger as the rope. He emitted a determined, high-pitched sound that was closer to a whine than a growl.

I went on to what I really wanted to ask her. “I brought Willie’s things from his locker. They’re in the bag.” Fishing in my jacket pocket with my free hand, I drew out the green paper I’d found. “This was with his stuff, too. I kept it out so your mother wouldn’t see.” Unfolding the paper with one hand, I held it out so that Edna could read it. She scanned it without comment.

“Did you know he was working there?”

Edna nodded.

“Did your mother know?”

She shook her head.

“Speak,” I said with diminishing patience. I hadn’t meant to sound harsh. In a kinder tone, I tried to persuade her, “Please. I’m trying to find out what happened to Willie. If you know anything that can help, please tell me.”

Edna hesitated. A sheen of water coated her narrowed eyes, and I could see her fighting back tears. She won. “Willie told me,” she said calmly. “He wanted to do something for the war effort. So he worked in the plant at night.”

He’d told her but not me, his teammate. “He told you?” I repeated, not quite believing he’d confide something in her that he wouldn’t tell me.

“It was a secret,” she explained. “You have to share a secret with somebody, can’t keep it to yourself.”

“Your mother still doesn’t know?”

She shook her head, then promptly added, “No. A secret’s a secret.”

“Do you know any other secrets about Willie?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secret anymore.”

I was exasperated to the point where I knew I’d better drop it for now.

Edna stood up. “I better go inside in case Mama calls. She hasn’t been well lately.”

“Anything serious?”

She gave me a look that could have come from Charles Weeghman. Stupid question, it said. “Yes,” said Edna. “Somebody killed her boy.”

I followed her into the house. While Edna took my satchel to Willie’s room, I took the dogs to theirs.

I gave the dogs their bones but found little satisfaction in their gratitude. They were too easy. They didn’t need support. They’d have licked the hand of anyone who gave them a pat or a bit of food. That’s one of the joys of dogs, I suppose: they’re reliable in their affection. But not particularly challenging.

I went to Willie’s room. Edna was laying Willie’s clothes out on his bed, smoothing the folds with her hand. “Mama wants you to have his books,” she said. “You can take them now if you want.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.” I didn’t like the idea of getting something because somebody had died. It was too much like Wicket Greene getting his job. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep them?”

A negative shake of her head.

“I have to go to the park from here. But I could take some of them with me.”

“Okay,” she said, still concentrating on the clothes.

I grabbed four volumes of the Mark Twain books to put in my satchel. Then I put three of them back. “How about if I take one each time I’m here?”

“If you like.”

“I was thinking.... How about we go to the movies Saturday? I think
Tarzan
is still playing.”

Edna bit her lip and nodded.

It was a windy day in Cubs Park last year, I remembered, the end of August, when Fred Mitchell had brought a skinny kid to me after a game with the Dodgers. “This boy thinks he’s a shortstop,” the manager said. “Find out if he is. Name’s Willie Kaiser. Oh, and we’re taking him on the road with us next week. You’re gonna be his roomie. Take care of ’im.”

The Willie Kaiser of 1918 was a different fellow from the eager rookie I’d first met in the summer of ’17. He’d become a better player with time, but less fun, more secretive, more burdened.

When Willie had first joined the Cubs, he’d been eager to see the world, his definition of the world being any city east of Pittsburgh. On our first train ride to New York, Willie had climbed into the upper berth of the Pullman sleeper, leaving me the coveted lower berth. Willie’s arrival in the big leagues coincided with my becoming established as a veteran.

In the city, I kept him under my wing, away from saloons and brothels. Nothing stronger than beer to drink, and no female temptations other than the burlesque houses of Union Square and the dance halls of Coney Island. The kid threw himself into these pleasures with the same passion he had for baseball. He grew so fond of the girlie shows that I often let him go alone while I went to the movies, my own preferred form of entertainment.

The signs of change started to appear in him last fall, as war fever gripped the country; but they were slight, manifested mostly in brief periods of brooding. Then, when the season was over, Willie went back to his job in the Union Stockyards and I went to play winter ball in California.

By the time Willie and the rest of the Cubs came to Los Angeles for spring training in February, the change in him was visible and complete. I couldn’t drag him to a burlesque show, and I could hardly drag a word out of him.

The problem I faced now was that there were two Willie Kaisers: the enthusiastic kid of 1917 and the new somber model of 1918. Actually, there were more than two. There were two this year alone: the one who played baseball and the one who worked nights in a munitions plant. I barely knew the one who played ball this year and didn’t know the secret life of Willie Kaiser at all.

He’d been keeping secrets from me, and I was only starting to discover what some of them were. Mostly what I was discovering were questions: Why did he go to Fohl’s church? What, if anything, did he know about what the Patriotic Knights of Liberty were planning? What was going on at Harrington’s plant? And why would a war make him lose interest in burlesque shows?

I decided the only way I could figure out what was going on with him was for me to
be
Willie Kaiser for a while. The secret Willie.

Wednesday morning, the earliest that I could get an appointment, I was in Bennett Harrington’s third-floor corner office on State Street. The furnishings of the airy, sun-washed room were modest and spare, with white wicker chairs and several healthy green potted plants situated about the parquet floor. The office had the feel of a verandah; all that was missing was a porch swing.

Harrington sat in a high-backed chair behind a gleaming, uncluttered white desk. A black candlestick telephone, a brass tray with two glasses, and a pitcher of water were the desk’s only accessories. Through the windows behind him, I could see the Masonic Temple across the street and Marshall Field’s on the corner of Randolph, confirming that I was still in Chicago, not Mississippi. The cross-breeze that blew through the open windows provided further evidence—a plantation would smell more like magnolias and less like the Chicago River.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Harrington,” I began. I was seated in one of two small chairs placed a good ten feet from his desk. It made him seem more imposing to have to view him from a distance. And with the empty chair next to me, it felt like he had me outnumbered.

Harrington nodded as though fully aware of his generosity in granting me some of his valuable time. Dressed in his white linen suit, he looked like he belonged on a verandah, too, sipping a mint julep. All he needed was a white goatee and a matching mane of hair to make the image complete. With his Panama hat off, I could see his hair was dark and trim, though graying at the temples, and he was clean shaven. He had a gentle face and a sleepy left eye that appeared to be perpetually in mid-wink. I narrowed my estimate of his age to late forties, early fifties.

“The reason I came,” I went on, “was to ask about Willie Kaiser. I just found out that he worked for you.”

“Did he?” The question was noncommittal.

I plucked Willie’s identification paper from my jacket pocket, stepped up to the desk, and handed Harrington the evidence of Willie’s employment with the Dearborn Fuel Company.

He gave the paper a cursory glance. “So he did.” His thin lips showed a hint of a smile.

I sat back down. “Why was it a secret?”

Harrington paused to take a sip from his water glass. “Well, I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you,” he drawled softly. “Young Kaiser preferred it that way.” The winking left eye made it seem he was sharing a confidence. He leaned back in his chair. “See, I’ve given jobs to quite a few ballplayers. That way they can contribute to the war effort and still play baseball. I let them work whatever hours will fit in with the baseball schedule.” He smiled fully. “Truth is, I love baseball—”

Please, I hoped, don’t say “this great game of ours.”