Strike Three You're Dead (26 page)

E
ACH PAGE OF THE
notebook contained a detailed box score of a Jewels’ game, beginning with the season opener at home on April 9. All of them had been neatly typed and Xeroxed by Ray Spanner, the team statistician.

Bobby Wagner had pitched the opener, a complete game victory over Toronto, 4-2. Harvey flipped the pages until he found the next game Bobby had pitched, on April 16 in Cleveland. Rudy had relieved him in the eighth, with one out, one man on base, and Providence leading 3-1. Rudy had retired five straight batters to pick up his first save of the year. Final score: Providence 3, Cleveland 1. Winning pitcher: Wagner (2 wins, no losses). Bobby was off to a good start.

Harvey turned pages furiously. Rudy did not pitch again in relief of Bobby until May 6, against the Angels in Anaheim. When Bobby was removed in the seventh with one out and two men on, the Jewels led 6-4. Rudy gave up a double to the first Angel batter, and both baserunners scored. The two runs, of course, were charged to Bobby. With the score 6-6 in the eighth, the Jewels scored twice and went on to win 8-6. Winning pitcher: Furth (1-0).

On May 23, Bobby was losing badly to Minnesota in the fourth, 7-1, when Rudy went in to pitch two innings and gave up one run. Rudy was in turn replaced by Marcus Marlette in the sixth. Final score: Minnesota 11, Providence 4. Losing pitcher: Wagner (4-2).

No, that wasn’t what Harvey was looking for. He leafed through the pages of the notebook. He finally found what he wanted, on June 18 in Boston.

It was the same night that Harvey had found Mickey in his bed at the Sheraton, the night he thought that Rudy slept with her. At Fenway Park, Bobby Wagner had been hanging on to a 3-2 lead over the Red Sox in the eighth. He had two men on base and two outs when Rudy was called in. He gave up a three-run homer to the first batter he faced, Tony Jallardio. Two of the runs were charged to Bobby, hanging him with the eventual 5-3 loss.

Harvey took the folded photocopies out of his pocket and laid them next to the notebook. On June 25, a week after the Boston game, Rudy had made his first deposit in the Industrial National Bank checking account. Harvey found a loose cigarette in one of Felix’s desk drawers and lit it. In another drawer, he found a fifth of Smirnoff vodka and helped himself to a long swallow.

The next time it happened was on July 14, against Kansas City. With the Jewels ahead 2-1 in the seventh, Rudy came in to relieve Bobby with one out and the bases loaded. By the time the inning was over, Rudy had allowed all three baserunners to score. All three runs were charged to Bobby. Final score: Kansas City 4, Providence 3. Losing pitcher: Wagner (7-9).

Harvey checked Rudy’s bank statements. On July 19, five days after the game, he had deposited another three thousand dollars in the account.

All a relief pitcher had to do was get his fastball up a little or hang a curve or telegraph a change-up or take too much off the slider so that it just sat there over the plate like a plump curve that forgot to break. Maybe in the minors a pitcher could get away with a bad pitch, or two, or three. But the majors were filled with ball players who had gotten there precisely because they knew how to make pitchers pay for mistakes. And if the pitches weren’t really mistakes—if you knew, as any major league pitcher had to, the batters’ strengths and weaknesses—then you could almost always manage to make a fatal error.

Harvey kept going. In a game with Texas on July 26, Rudy relieved Bobby in the ninth inning with two men on and nobody out. Providence was clinging to a 2-1 lead. Rudy gave up a run-scoring single to Neal Atlas, then another run-scoring single to Mason Meyer. Final score: Texas 3, Providence 2. Losing pitcher: Wagner (7-11). On August 2, a week later, there was another three thousand dollar deposit in Rudy’s account.

On August 9, Rudy relieved Wagner in the seventh inning with two men on and two outs. Providence led Baltimore 5-4. Rudy gave up a three-run homer to Rob Dorsey. Final score: Baltimore 8, Providence 5. Losing pitcher: Wagner (8-12). Two days later, on August 11, Rudy deposited, for the fourth time, three thousand dollars.

On August 28, Rudy relieved Wagner in the eighth with two men on and nobody out. Providence led Chicago 2-1. Rudy gave up a single to load the bases, then a triple to Mac Bodish that scored all three baserunners. Final score: Chicago 4, Providence 2. Losing pitcher: Wagner (8-15). Rudy didn’t live to deposit that three thousand.

Between June 18 and August 28, on five occasions Rudy had come into the game to replace Bobby, blown his lead, and hung him with the loss. Only an extreme optimist would attribute the pattern to coincidence—an optimist who did not have photocopies of Rudy’s bank statements in front of him and who did not know how badly Frances Shalhoub wanted to win—and how badly she wanted Bobby Wagner to lose. It all made such horrifying sense that for a moment Harvey regretted having insisted on finding out the truth. He found another cigarette and smoked it with a trembling hand in the greasy fluorescent glare. He took another gulp of Felix’s vodka.

There was a crinkle of nylon in the doorway, and a soft, deliberate voice said, “And he would’ve kept doing it if I hadn’t figured it out. He wasn’t a smart pitcher, Professor, but I knew he could throw better than that.”

Harvey’s back was to the door. He swiveled around with the bottle of vodka in his hand.

Bobby Wagner’s six-foot-four frame filled the doorway. He was wearing jeans, running shoes, and an unzipped navy windbreaker. One hand was in a windbreaker pocket, the other concealed behind him. He was chewing gum with a leisurely, lateral motion, glowering at Harvey from under his single black eyebrow with a kind of dull satisfaction. Behind him, the row of louvered windows high on the clubhouse wall strained the dawn light into the locker room.

“So now you’ve figured it out, too,” Wagner said quietly, as if afraid he might wake somebody up at so early an hour. “Congratulations.”

“You’ve been following me,” Harvey said in a whisper.

“I have,” Wagner agreed, not moving from the doorway.

So the car he had heard starting up in the parking lot of Mickey’s building had been Bobby’s. Harvey ran his eyes over Felix’s office to confirm the obvious: there was only one way out and Wagner was standing in it.

“You didn’t just happen to be at Leo’s the other night, did you?” Harvey felt strangely serene; it was as though they were both on their best behavior. Maybe it was Wagner’s faint drawl, Harvey’s exhaustion, the hour, the inevitability….

“I sure didn’t,” Wagner said. “And I also didn’t just happen to see you go in and pay Linderman a little visit the other day. I’ve watched you do a lot of little things.”

Harvey’s throat tightened. “So why’d—why’d you save my ass at Leo’s?”

Wagner brought his hand out of the windbreaker and picked briefly at his nose with it. He gave the odd impression of simply passing the time of day. “Maybe I was hoping you would turn out to be dumber than I knew you were. Maybe I wanted you all to myself,” he said.

“What do we do now, Wags?”

Wagner brought his other hand from behind his back, and Harvey’s whole body seemed to make a fist.

Wagner was holding a baseball bat, one of Harvey’s. He leaned forward on it, like a vaudevillian resting on his cane. “I’m in kind of a spot, Professor,” he said.

Harvey realized he was still holding the bottle of vodka; overmatched, he put it down carefully on the desk behind him. He pictured himself dead in the whirlpool and Dunc finding him in a few hours. Linderman was standing over him, shaking his head, saying, “You had to be the hero, didn’t you, Harvey?”

“Don’t be a fool, Wags.”

“You know the whole story,” Wagner said.

Harvey closed the statistics book on the desk. It was true—and he was the only one who did. Bobby could only know that someone had put Rudy up to it, but not who it was; and Frances could deduce who it was that waited for Rudy somewhere in the dark tunnels beneath the stands. But only Harvey knew now for sure.

“Maybe I know the whole story, but you don’t,” he told Wagner.

Wagner stepped forward out of the shadows in the doorway. There was a slick of sweat over his handsome face, and he held the bat with both hands on the handle in front of him, low near the floor.

“I don’t care who it was anymore,” he said. “I don’t care if it was Ronnie Mateo or one of those other wops or—”

“It was Frances, Wags.”

“That so?” Wagner said without interest.

“She was the one who worked it out with Rudy.”

“That’s what you figure?”

“It’s what I know. She owns a fifth of the team, Wags. She has a real stake in it. That’s why—”

“I know all I want to know,” Wagner said, but he didn’t come any closer, and Harvey started talking.

“You can do what you want with me, but you ought to know why you’re doing it.” He was facing Wagner in the chair, his hands braced on the arms. “She sold her company in New York because she wanted to make a career out of this club. She wanted a winner, Wags, but unless your team plays in a big city with a baseball tradition and all that media money, there’s only one way, and that’s by being good. And you know, the only way to be good is to buy, beg, or steal the best ball players you can find. And then—then you got to hold on to them.”

“Keep talking, Professor. This is good.”

“You were the one she wanted to hold on to most of all, the one bona fide star we’ve got, the cover boy. You’re the guy who can put people in the seats, even in Providence. Only one problem, Wags: you were going to be a free agent after this season.” Harvey thought of Frances’s “nucleus”: Bobby Wagner was the only one in it she was going to lose. “To the Jewels,” he went on, wondering for how long Bobby planned to let him talk, “you could be the franchise, but you were at the end of your old Baltimore contract, and then your price was going up. If you had a good year this year, and even if you had just a fair year, you were going to be good for more money than this club could afford to pay you. See, Wags, the team’s done badly at the gate, and on top of that, Levy’s paying through the nose to the mob on the concession money. They might stretch their budget some to keep you, but no way were they going to be able to outbid Morrissey and the other high-rollers in the free agent market.”

Bobby stood ten feet away, grinding the bat handle in his hands. “Go on, Professor,” he said, as if extending a final courtesy. “We got a little more time.”

“So Frances needed you to build a winner, Wags. She always got her way before, and she was going to get it this time, too. She had to hold on to you, and to do that she had to make sure you had a bad year. She realized it was her only real chance. You’ve got to understand the way Frances looks at things, Wags. She believed that if you looked as if you were losing it, maybe the other owners would begin to smell a loser. Your value would go down, Wags, and the team would have a shot at you. She didn’t care about this season; we weren’t really going anywhere anyway. It was next year, and the years after that, she was building for. She just had to make sure that Bobby Wagner would be around to build with.”

Harvey’s own voice calmed him. As long as he talked, he could look Bobby in the eye. “So the first thing she did—those stories wherever we played this season, the ones about how your arm was hanging by a shred? Your arm’s fine. Your old manager didn’t trade you because of calcium deposits; he got rid of you because, number one, he never liked you much in the first place and, number two, he was going to lose you anyway to free agency, and this way at least he could trade you and get something for it. Ten-to-one, Frances was behind most of those stories in the papers. As an old public relation’s pro, she had the contacts and the know-how. It was just a way to get you some bad advertising. But the real bad advertising was that you were going to lose a lot more games than you should’ve. And Rudy was going to help you do it.”

“What’d she have on him?” Bobby said, his jaw working on the gum.

“Nothing, except they were sleeping together. He’d fallen in love, and Rudy wasn’t the smartest guy in the world to begin with.”

“I thought his taste ran to stewardesses.”

“Which is why he’d do anything for someone with Frances’s class,” Harvey said. “And she cared little enough about him to ask him to do anything. She threw in the cash, just to keep it business, which is how she likes to work. And she found a way into the dugout, where she could make sure the plan worked, where she could make absolutely sure Felix kept bringing Rudy in to relieve you.

“And she’s smart, Wags. She knows you’re a streak pitcher. Most of those streaks have been winning ones, but she knew that—when was it, Wags, three years ago?—she knew that even when you went something like twenty and thirteen that season, eight of those losses were in a row. She realized that you only knew how to win, not how to lose. She knew that if she got Rudy to throw a few games, you might do the rest of the damage yourself. That was one of the reasons your old manager didn’t like you, wasn’t it? You didn’t bounce back when you lost.

“And Rudy was only a decent relief pitcher, so he could come in and throw a few pitches just fast enough to cost you the game, and no one would ever think he was in the tank. But Frances didn’t know when to stop. She gave you a chance to prove you were a little smarter than she gave you credit for. She threw Rudy in the tank once too often, and you smelled it.”

Harvey watched the minute hand on the clock over Bobby’s shoulder twitch from 5:29 to 5:30.

“What do you care about any of it?” Bobby said evenly. “He was a punk, Professor. He was trash. Why didn’t you leave it alone? What did it matter to you?”

“It mattered.”

“I never did anything to him.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“He screwed with my career. He screwed with the biggest thing I’ve got.”

“Frances did, not Rudy. Frances did it to you.”

“And you were about to screw me even more, Professor.” Bobby came two steps closer and stopped, six feet away.

Harvey pushed away from the desk in his chair. “I didn’t know what I was going to find. I was just looking.”