Strike Three You're Dead (18 page)

“What do you make of it, Dunc?”

“Damnedest thing.”

“You hear anybody talking?”

“More like the guys are making a point out of not talking.”

Harvey wanted to show him the death threat, but didn’t. “Rudy never gave you a clue?”

“Uh-uh.”

“And the night you left him in the whirlpool, he didn’t say anything unusual?”

“Nope.”

“Did it seem like he might be waiting for someone?”

“Nope. He was just like I’d seen him on other nights when he stayed late to soak.”

“And you’re sure he was the only one left in the clubhouse?”

“Far as I know, Professor. ’Course I didn’t look every—I guess there’re a few places you could hide. Sometimes I get this thought about Rudy’s killer waiting down in the catacombs, just waiting for everybody to clear out. Seems to me whoever killed him would’ve had to know he was already in the whirlpool and was fixing to be there awhile.”

“So you’re thinking what I’m thinking?” Harvey asked.

“That it was one of the guys?”

“Or somebody who knew one of the guys who knew that Rudy liked to soak. But I guess that doesn’t get us too far.”

“Here you go,” Dunc said and poured more brandy into Harvey’s cup. They listened to the game, which the Yankees now led 6-5 in the fifth. In the sixth, Dunc got up to putter around the clubhouse and lay out fresh towels. They had worked their way down through most of the pint, and Harvey’s ankle felt pretty good. He undressed, showered, and eased into his street clothes—a pair of lightweight gray slacks, a white shirt, and an old pair of penny loafers. Dunc helped him wrap his ankle up again with more ice, and by the time Harvey made it down the runway to the dugout, it was the bottom of the eighth and the Jewels were down 8-6. The noise of the Yankee Stadium crowd, an endless liquid tittering, surprised him after the silence of the clubhouse.

In the top of the ninth, Chuck Manomaitis walked to lead off, but was erased when Rick Stiles hit into a tailor-made 6-4-3 double play, and the Jewels were one out away from their ninth straight loss. Cleavon blooped a single to left, but when Randy bounced one down to Rumpling at short, the dugout began to pack up. However, the ball hit the lip where the infield grass meets the dirt and skidded under Rumpling’s glove and out into short left center. Two men on and Steve Wilton was up.

Steve soaked a 3-2 count for all it was worth, fouling off five straight fastballs from reliever Jerry Flacke. Some of the players stood in the dugout and told Steve to have an eye and be a hitter and bear down up there. The next Flacke fastball was in Wilton’s wheelhouse, and Flacke turned away in disgust. The ball swam up into the night and reached the apex of its arc tiny and white against the sky. Hazelwood huddled in a crouch against the left field wall, waiting to leap, but as the ball descended, his body relaxed and straightened, and he turned back toward the infield, slapping his glove against his leg. The ball fell in the fifth row, and the Jewels were leading 9-8.

When Steve crossed the plate in his high-waisted, self-satisfied trot, a few of the players went out to greet him and clap him on the back and rub his head. In the dugout, Felix got up and tousled Wilton’s hair. “How to be, big kid, way to hack it,” Campy hollered, “you’re the stick up there.” To show there were no hard feelings, Harvey yelled, “Nice job, Steve.” It would have been just like the old days, if there had been any old days for the Providence Jewels.

Marcus Marlette mopped up in the bottom of the ninth, and the Jewels had broken the string. They were 64 and 74, still five games ahead of Toronto, and Harvey, with his l-for-2 showing, was batting .302.

Back at the Warwick Hotel, just before eleven, Harvey asked at the front desk if there were any messages for him.

“Sir, may I inquire how you fared tonight?” the desk clerk said. The British inflection covered his Queens accent about as thoroughly as
The New York Times
covered professional wrestling.

“Sir”—Harvey winked—“the awesome Yankee juggernaut was repelled by the lowly Providence armada by a tally of nine to eight.”

“My felicitations,” the clerk said and gave him a note scrawled on hotel paper in a large looping hand. It said, “You’ll find me in the bar. Sharon Meadows.”

S
HARON MEADOWS WAVED ENERGETICALLY
to Harvey from a table in the middle of the bar, and he hobbled over. She was a small woman in her late thirties with short black hair cut to look like a helmet. She had on a peach-colored blouse and over it a magenta Chinese tunic with embroidered parrots and pagodas and over that some kind of fuzzy shawl. She was wearing too many clothes, too much makeup, and too much jewelry. Her smile revealed a lot of gum, and she spoke with the adjectival incontinence of a press release.

“Please don’t apologize,” she said after Harvey excused himself for being late. “Apologies are so useless most of the time, don’t you think? I mean, they’re
squandered
on such small occasions when we really ought to save them up for those
larger
moments when we really need them. I’m so
happy
you won tonight. The Yankees deserve a periodic lesson in humility. Winning must be such an
exhilarating
experience.”

Harvey asked her to move to a more obscure table at the back of the bar, in case Frances Shalhoub made a practice of drinking in hotel lounges. As they threaded their way among the tables, he said, “Well, you sound like a baseball fan.”

“Oh, I
am.
It’s such a tranquil, yet somehow passionate game. It’s somehow larger than life. I knew who you were the moment you came in because you have that marvelous, sturdy, athletic,
tall
look about you.”

“I’m only five-one. It must be the lighting.”

“You know—here, let me get the waitress—you know, it was Frances who first exposed me to baseball. We were doing some public relations for the Mets—special events and such—and I went to some of the games and met some of the players. I mean, they were such
driven
individuals, yet so relaxed at the same time. I don’t suppose that football players are quite like that. Their sport isn’t so… so what—so leisurely, so pastoral. Baseball absolutely fascinates me, it really does. I must confess”—she blushed into her drink—“I must confess that I’m somewhat awed just meeting you. I mean, baseball is something of a religion in this country, isn’t it, and that makes you what—that makes you, it gives you an aura, a kind of
glow.
I’m so pleased to meet you.”

Harvey ordered a bourbon on the rocks and tried to grab a piece of the conversation. “Well, I’m pleased to meet you, too. I always wondered what Frances’s former associate was like.”

“Oh, Frances, of course. You know, I almost forgot why we—you know, it’s a mystifyingly funny thing how the mind works, how it—of course, you wanted to ask me something about Frances. The Wicked Witch of the East herself.”

“Wicked Witch? Why’s that?”

She nibbled from a bowl of dry-roasted cashews. “Oh, I guess I felt like poor Dorothy compared to her, I really did. The PR business, you know, has its share of kooks and crazies. It’s such an
intense
way to make a living. And there’s so much hype, so much exaggeration of what people really are. PR people tend to start believing all those marvelous things and simply lose their perspective.”

“I can well imagine.”

“And so, to make a long story short, it’s so highly competitive, and so many people will do just
anything
to get ahead, but, what I mean is—”

“But what, Sharon?”

“What I mean is that Frances was, well, at least as far as
my
moral ethics and value systems were concerned, Frances did get—get what? Out of bounds, you might say. Well, I suppose that’s why she got ahead. I mean, other people I know in this business actually used to envy my working for a successful firm like Frances’s. If only they knew. Well, she did one thing, I remember—well, but usually she would just treat clients in a kibbitzing but underneath, I guess the word for it is
mean
way.”

“For instance?”

“Well, for instance, we represented several restaurants in New York, and there was one very fancy, very
visible
restaurant whose account we were trying to get—I mean, it’s like you couldn’t check your coat for less than ten dollars—and, well, I remember Frances on the phone with the owner, and she was simply
merciless
with him, but I guess in a funny sort of way.”

“A funny sort of way.”

“You know, Frances has got what—a certain patina of charm, and so she’d say things like, ‘Alan, if you don’t give me your business, I swear to God I’ll never talk to you again, I mean it, you know what a great job we did with that French place on Fifty-third, and they’re absolutely in your league, Alan.’ Stuff like that. Oh, and, ‘Not only that, Alan, if you don’t come with me, I’ll make sure that no one I know—and I do know a lot of people in this city—ever sets foot in your place again. Alan’—this is just how she sounded—‘Alan, you know I have a way with restaurants, and I’ll hate you for the rest of my life if you don’t come with me. But worst of all, Alan, believe me, you’ll hate yourself. You wouldn’t want all that hanging over your head, would you?’ Honestly, it was so
New York.
She would say, ‘Alan, it just so happens that a couple of big clients of mine are looking for a place to hold their Christmas parties, and I don’t mean finger sandwiches and crudités, either, Alan. We’re talking sixty, seventy dollars a head, and it would be a shame if you weren’t in a position to get that business, because I know you would do a perfectly splendid job.’”

“You mean she’d threaten them?”

“Well, exactly. You know, she’d plead and threaten and just keep at it to the point where I would be sitting there at my desk listening to her on the phone with this look of
utter
disbelief on my face, to the point where—well, but she did treat the people who worked for her extremely well, you understand. I’m not complaining; it’s just that she would do
anything
to get clients.”

“Anything to get clients” was the phrase Resnick of ABC had used to describe Frances on Monday night in Boston.

“I mean, she wouldn’t resort to kidnapping,” Sharon Meadows went on. “She wouldn’t lie down on Fifth Avenue and threaten to take her own
life
just to get an account, I mean, but she would cheat and she would lie. Well, of course, I don’t have to tell you that she didn’t have any clients who were interested in having Christmas parties at this restaurant.” She finally touched her Pernod and Perrier. “That wasn’t the worst of it, of course.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Oh, no. You know, there was this computer dating service a couple of years ago that was trying to decide between us and another PR firm. Frances got wind of which other firm it was, and she wanted this account in the worst possible way, so she called the head of the dating service and told him to come to the office so we could really sell him on what we could offer them. So this macho type—I mean, the guy looked like he was wearing a pair of rolled-up sweat socks in his crotch—this macho man comes by and Frances and I take him into the conference room and we lay out our wares and Frances is pounding the table, telling him absolutely
everything
we’d do to give them the
deepest
possible market penetration, the
highest
recognition factor. And then suddenly—and I mean I was not prepared for this one—suddenly she tells him she knows that they’re talking with another firm—which happens to be run by two
wonderful
gals I know personally—and Frances suddenly tells this macho man, ‘You can’t possibly go with this other firm, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because the women who run it are lesbians, and the last thing a dating service needs is to be represented by two goddamn
lesbians.’
And, of course, they’re
not
lesbians. They’re not lesbians at
all.
But Frances got the account.”

Harvey drained his bourbon.

“And you know what I can’t figure out?”

“What’s that, Sharon?”

“I can’t fathom for an instant how a sweet man like Felix ended up with a woman like Frances.”

“That utterly
fascinates
me, too,” Harvey said. He swiveled and scanned the bar to make sure that neither of the Shalhoubs had sneaked in for a nightcap. “On the basis of what you know about her, what do you think her interest in baseball really is?”

“Oh, I think it’s
intense,
which is the way she does everything. I read somewhere, I think, that she sits in the dugout with Felix. Just like her, you know, close to the action.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Well, if you owned a piece of something, wouldn’t you
absolutely
want to have a say in how it’s run?”

Harvey blanched. “Frances doesn’t own a piece of the Jewels.”

Sharon shook some bracelets down her forearm. “Of course, I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’m almost positive that’s why Frances sold the firm. She bought into the team. I mean, she wasn’t going to sell an
immensely
successful business and move to that dumpy city just to be with poor Felix.”