Strike Three You're Dead (3 page)

By the door to the trainer’s room was a bat rack and next to it stacked cases of soft drinks and beer, which were fed regularly into an ice chest against a pillar in the middle of the room. A long wooden table supported a Cory coffee machine. Elsewhere, a canvas clothes hamper, piles of newspapers, and a portable television set on a folding table gave the locker room a tenement feel that Dunc and his crew of teenage assistants were unable to reform.

To the left as you entered was a door to the runway that connected the clubhouse to the dugout. It was a badly lit corridor with exposed steam pipes, and it was littered with balls of used tape, discarded Red Man foil pouches, and generations of tobacco juice. Halfway down the runway on the left was a metal door leading to a system of dark tunnels that ran under the grandstands to several storage areas and the visitors’ clubhouse. The catacombs, as they were called, were home to a colony of brown rats. Impervious to the poisons used by the occasional exterminator, they had lived in the bowels of Rankle Park for as long as anyone could remember, surviving on unfinished hot dogs, peanuts, popcorn, and old lineup cards. The rats rarely ventured into the seats, at least not during games, and only once since the Jewels had moved in had one of the grayish brown creatures wandered into the clubhouse during working hours. The reserve catcher, Happy Smith, had clubbed it to death.

Harvey saw nothing unusual in the locker room and turned impatiently to Dunc, who was still at the door.

“C’mon, Dunc,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Except for a barely perceptible jerk of his head in the direction of the trainer’s room, Dunc did not move.

The noise was like that made by a motorboat on the other side of a lake.

“Why’s the whirlpool on?” Harvey said, walking in the direction of the noise. Then he stopped.

Over the rim of the stainless steel tub, a man’s hand was draped, palm down, as if waiting to be kissed. Harvey took two steps toward it and reached out to grab a corner of one of the trainer’s tables.

The churning water was the color of rosé wine. Harvey went to the whirlpool and stooped to switch off the motor. As the water settled, it revealed the form crammed into a fetal position at the bottom of the tub. The head was bent over between the knees; its blond hair fanned out and swam along the surface, mingling with flecks of blood and mucus.

Harvey closed his eyes. He did not have to see the face to know who it was. He lurched to one of the sinks and vomited, clutching the faucets with both hands. When he was through, his face wet with tears, he vomited again.

Dunc now stood behind him in the doorway to the trainer’s room. He hid his mouth behind the crook of his upraised elbow.

“It’s Rudy,” Harvey said. “Call the cops.”

Dunc disappeared, and Harvey plunged his hands into the hot red water and hooked them under Rudy’s arms.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he said, and with all his strength hoisted Rudy’s naked body out of the tub and laid him on his back on the floor. His pale knees would not go down.

His half-open eyes seemed to watch Harvey warily. Harvey closed them. Straddling Rudy’s stomach, he began pumping his chest furiously. Thick bloody water bubbled out of Rudy’s mouth and ran in trails down his cheek.

“C’mon, you bastard!” he shouted. He pried Rudy’s jaws apart and breathed into his mouth. “Oh, Jesus,” he said and moved his left hand around to the back of Rudy’s head to steady it.

He immediately jerked his hand away. Above Rudy’s ear, the skull was sticky and soft, not like a skull at all.

“He’s gone, Harvey,” Dunc was saying over him, holding a sheet. He was crying, too.

The next hour passed in a haze. Two uniformed cops arrived first, then two more, then a plainclothes detective in an ill-fitting seersucker suit. He snapped back the sheet as if he meant to surprise the body, examined it with a few efficient movements, and asked Harvey to make an identification. Then he asked Dunc and him to wait outside in the locker room. The cop who ushered them out remained there, thumbs hooked importantly on his belt. Harvey and Dunc slumped in two chairs. A lanky young man with a doctor’s bag passed through the locker room, followed by two more cops with a stretcher, a red-faced man in a brown suit, and after him, two mobile lab technicians with black cases.

Through the open door to the trainer’s room, Harvey saw the man from the medical examiner’s office touching Rudy’s body here and there and conferring with the detective. Flashbulbs went off, and one of the mobile lab men scraped away at the indoor-outdoor carpeting while the other used large tweezers to pick up rolls of adhesive tape and a pair of snub-nose scissors and drop them into manila envelopes. The cop chaperoning Harvey and Dunc went over and closed the door.

“I take it you guys found him in the whirlpool, huh?” the cop said. When neither of them acknowledged the question, the cop smacked his lips, said, “Rudy Furth—my kid brother played against him in the minors,” and resumed his post near the bat rack.

By the time the two ambulance men brought Rudy out on a stretcher in a green zippered body bag and carried him out to the players’ parking lot, the locker room had filled up with members of the team. They stood around in their street clothes with shocked faces, like worshipers discovering the desecration of their shrine. The clubhouse no longer belonged to them. The place was silent except for the crackling of walkie-talkies.

Felix Shalhoub came in with his wife, Frances. She tried to force her way past the cops into the trainer’s room, where the detective was holed up with the M.E.’s man and the technicians.

“Officer, would you mind explaining—” she began.

A cop interrupted her in a voice louder than necessary, “Lady, I don’t know what you’re doing here in the first place, but you’ll have to wait with the others.”

The door opened at last, and the man in the seersucker suit lumbered out to introduce himself in a bored, gravelly voice as Detective Sergeant Linderman of the Providence Police. He had a graying crew cut and a heavily stubbled face. Under his jacket, he wore a yellow and maroon paisley shirt. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief and stuffed it in a pants pocket, from which he pulled out a small notebook.

At this gesture, several voices erupted. The detective held up both hands in front of his face, as though protecting himself from flying objects.

“The way I understand it,” he began, “Rudy Furth’s body was found in the whirlpool by”—he consulted the notebook—“Duncan Frye and Harvey Blissbaum.” Those latecomers to whom it was news gasped in unison, then produced a trickle of Oh-Jesus’s.

“Blissberg,” Harvey heard himself say. “Harvey Blissberg.” They were the first words he had spoken in an hour.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blissberg,” the detective said. “You found him in the whirlpool?”

“Dunc found him first.”

“Please, Detective,” Frances Shalhoub blurted, “will you just tell us what you know?”

“Patience,” Linderman said. “Where’s Duncan?”

Dunc rose, the front of his white duck shirt splotched with pink stains from the whirlpool water. He steadied himself against the ice chest. “I saw somebody in the whirlpool when I opened up the clubhouse at nine. That’s what happened. Then Harvey came.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, so who took him out of the whirlpool?”

“I did,” Harvey said.

“Why?” Linderman said.

“I thought he might be alive, I guess.”

“My guess,” said Linderman, “is that he’d been soaking in there since last night. Who saw him last, alive?”

Apparently Dunc had been the last—or next-to-last—person to see Rudy alive the night before. After the rest of the team had cleared out, Dunc explained to Linderman, Rudy remained in the whirlpool. He liked to soak for a long time after he’d pitched; he had a bad back, and Felix had authorized him to have his own key to the clubhouse. At eleven-thirty, Dunc had turned off the lights in the locker room, poked his head in the trainer’s room to remind Rudy to lock up, and fetched him a beer from the ice chest. Dunc remembered nothing strange. He locked the clubhouse door behind him and told Jack Fera, the uniformed guard in the players’ parking lot, to knock off; Rudy would let himself out. The only cars left in the lot were Dunc’s, Rudy’s, and right fielder Steve Wilton’s, which had been there for days with a dead battery.

“Who’s in charge here?” Linderman finally asked.

“Me,” Felix said, running his hand through his strands of silver hair.

Linderman was pacing a little, biting on his pen. “You let all the players have their own keys to the clubhouse?”

“Maybe two or three,” Felix said. “I’d have to think about it. It’s not a common policy, but—”

“That’s all right; it can wait.” Linderman closed his notebook. “You gentlemen have a game today?”

When Felix nodded, Linderman added, “You plan on playing it?”

Felix looked around at the faces in the locker room. “That would probably be a bad idea,” he said.

The M.E.’s man came out of the trainer’s room, spoke briefly in the detective’s ear, and left. “Then maybe you should put in a call to the commissioner’s office, or whatever you’re supposed to do, and explain that there’s been an accident,” Linderman said.

“You think this was an accident?” Felix said.

“Not unless the man just happened to club himself over the head with a blunt object, knocking himself unconscious, and then drowned.” He stroked the plane of his crew cut. “What about his next of kin? Does he have a wife?”

“He’s single,” Felix said. “But he’s got foster parents somewhere in Wisconsin, I think.”

Felix’s wife, dressed in a skirt and blue blazer, hopped off the ice chest. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

“Okay, then,” Linderman resumed. “Now, as long as I’ve got most of the team here, I’d like to ask you to bear with me and stay here until me and Detective Bragalone’ve had a chance to talk to each of you. Briefly. Just routine.” He ran his hand over the butt ends of a few bats in the rack. “That is”—he threw a thumb over his shoulder—“unless someone already knows what went on in there and is just keeping us all in suspense.”

Linderman clapped his hands and disappeared with Felix into Shalhoub’s office off the locker room. Harvey sat in front of his cubicle and watched one of the mobile lab men clear everything out of Rudy’s locker, a few down from his. The man gingerly placed the garments, Rudy’s glove, a bottle of Selsun Blue, and a package of sugarless bubble gum in bags and envelopes. When he was through, the only thing left was a strip of adhesive tape on the metal frame above the locker that read, “F
URTH
#29.”

Before long, Tim Bayman, the Jewels’ pitching coach, came out of Felix’s office, where Linderman was conducting his interviews. The detective stood in the doorway looking at the team roster in one of the official programs. “Blissberg,” he called out and showed Harvey in. Linderman perched on the edge of Felix’s desk and waited until Harvey settled into a chair.

“I’ve got a shirt like that,” Linderman said, pointing at the dark green Chemise Lacoste from which Harvey had painstakingly removed the alligator. “Mine’s red.”

Harvey surveyed the detective. One of his legs was hooked over the desk corner, baring a pale patch of hairless shin above a thin white sock. He wore a big Timex. An extensive collection of Bic pens was jammed in the breast pocket of the seersucker jacket. Harvey was blearily staring at the pens when Linderman spoke again.

“I know this is tough,” he said. “You feel like talking?”

Harvey wondered what it was like to be a guy who was about to spend an afternoon telling thirty people how tough it was.

“So,” Linderman said. “You got any ideas about Rudy Furth?”

“Okay,” Harvey said in a daze.

“Okay? Yeah, I like that. But it’s not much of an answer.”

“We were roommates.”

“You were?”

“Yeah, I guess I knew him pretty well.”

“Do you know anybody who would want to kill him?”

Harvey shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

“Was he in any trouble?”

Harvey just looked at him.

“Let’s see,” Linderman said. “There’s gambling, for starters. How’s that? Or maybe he ran around with the wrong people. Woman trouble? Maybe he was sleeping with somebody’s wife. Am I making any sense to you? Did he ever tell you somebody was after him?”

“No. I can’t see any of that.”

Linderman waited for Harvey to continue, which he didn’t. “I mean, your roommate’s been murdered. You must know something about him.”

“I know he was one of the few guys on the team I really got along with.”

Linderman pushed himself off Felix’s desk and began circling it. “What’s wrong with the rest of the guys that you didn’t get along with them?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How’d you mean it, then?” The detective stopped behind the desk to thumb through Felix’s desk calendar. He was working his mouth as if he had something lodged under his gum.

“I just meant that Rudy and I—you know, roommates grow on each other. Can I have a cigarette?”

“Take this one,” Linderman said, tossing him the unlit Marlboro he had been holding since the beginning of the interview between his thumb and middle finger. “It’s not doing me any good.” He fumbled another cigarette out of his pocket and began playing with it.

“He was a funny guy,” Harvey said. “Like a big kid.”

“Rest of the team get along with him?”

“As far as I know.” Harvey glanced around the tiny office, trying to recall that he was at the ball park.

“But not like you got along with him?” Linderman craned his neck to look at Harvey.

“Maybe not. One thing about Rudy, he had a mouth on him. Some players don’t like that.”

“You mean he talked too much?”

“More like at the wrong times. He could get on a guy.”

“Look,” Linderman said, walking again, “I know there’re about seven or nine things you’d rather be doing, but bear with me, will you? What do you mean, he could get on a guy?”

Harvey struggled for an anecdote. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. The questions themselves fogged his memory. “Well, one thing he’d always do was if some guy complained about something, Rudy liked to say, ‘B.F.D.’ It didn’t matter what you were complaining about; it was just his way of getting attention, I guess. He was an orphan; he wanted people to like him, but he could rub them wrong. Rudy didn’t always wear real well.”