Strike Three You're Dead (6 page)

N
OW SHE WAS IN
Harvey’s bed and Rudy was dead.

“I never thought we’d get back together after that night,” Harvey said.

“Why not? Everyone’s entitled to act like an idiot once in a while. It comes with the dinner.”

“All I meant was you didn’t have to sleep with him.”

Mickey jolted up on one elbow and stared at him. “I cannot believe you,” she said tightly.

“Believe what?”

She fell back on the bed and pressed the heels of her hands to her eye sockets. After a moment she said, her voice wobbling, “Number one, my dear: Rudy has just been murdered, and all you seem to care about is if I slept with the guy. What’s wrong with you? You were his best friend. At least he thought you were.” Her voice broke.

“You’re right, Mick. I’m sorry.”

“I mean, what is it with you?” She glowered at him. “The guy is dead, and you’re angry at him and—”

“I said I’m sorry, Mick—”

“Let me finish. Number two: there was never anything to be angry about.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I never slept with Rudy.”

Harvey squeezed his eyelids together. “Wait….You mean you got into his bed, and then the two of you just fell asleep? Like a couple of puppies or something?”

“I can’t believe you thought I’d—what’d you take me for anyway? I was just pissed at you. And what’d you take him for?”

Harvey said nothing.

“I see,” she said. “You simply assumed the worst and then never bothered to say anything. Now I know why Rudy felt you weren’t always the friend you could’ve been.” She snorted. “The guy really liked you, Bliss. He looked up to you. So you turned him into a rival. I guess boys will be boys. That’s just great, Bliss.”

“I cared about him. I did. I just—” He felt no emotion at all right now.

“Well, if you’d cared about him a little more, you’d have given him a little credit. He wouldn’t do something like that to you, any more than I would.”

Harvey tried to hang on to what she was saying, but all he could do was lie there looking at the oak dresser in the shadows. He felt her turn away from him and draw into herself at the far edge of the bed. Ten minutes later, she turned halfway toward him.

“He never had a lot of breaks in the first place. At least you could’ve given him this one,” she said. “Look, if you’d cared a little more, maybe you’d know who his enemies were.”

“He didn’t have a lot of friends, but I don’t think he had any real enemies.”

“That seems a bit optimistic.”

“For a guy who talked so much, he didn’t say a lot,” Harvey said. “What do you know about him?”

“I know he was in love.”

“Mick,
all
the players are in love with you. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”

“Bliss, I know this is hard for you to absorb, but not only did I not want to sleep with Rudy, he did not want to sleep with me. He was in love with someone else, for God’s sakes.”

“It’s very difficult to believe Rudy was serious about a woman.”

“So he never told you about her?”

“No. Who was she?” Harvey asked.

“I don’t know. He never told me, either. All I know is that he said he loved her.”

“So when did he tell you all this?”

“Remember our little excursion to Maine?” He thought back to the time in June, before the scene in the hotel, when the team had had an off-day. Rudy called Mickey and Harvey at eight in the morning and told them to be ready in half an hour, without saying why. He came for them in his MG, drove to Green Airport, and put everyone on a twin-engine plane to Bar Harbor, Maine. By two in the afternoon, the three of them were drifting in a rented motorboat, fishing for pollack and squid off Northeast Harbor, and drinking bottles of Grolsch beer from a Styrofoam cooler. By four, they all had their arms around each other in the boat and were singing show tunes. At six, they were eating dinner at the kind of roadside lobster pound where they throw lobsters, steamers, and corn-on-the-cob into a net and lower it into a trash can filled with seaweed and boiling seawater. Rudy talked about his brief marriage, in his early twenties, to a dental hygienist. Mickey did impersonations of the anchorpeople on WRIP-TV’s “Eleven O’Clock Edition.” After dinner, Rudy checked them into the Asticou Inn, and they trooped down to the deserted beach and stripped for a moonlight swim. Rudy slept in one room that night while Mickey and Harvey, too sunburned to make love, slept nine hours in the next. By eleven the next morning, they were back in Providence, in time for an afternoon game against the Detroit Tigers.

“When we were skinny-dipping,” Mickey was saying now, “you stayed out in the water longer than we did, and Rudy and I wrapped ourselves in towels and sat talking on the rocks. I asked him if he had a girlfriend, and I remember he said, ‘Thousands,’ and I told him to be serious, and then he said, ‘Yeah,’ and he got all wistful. Then he said, ‘It’s not working out.’ I asked him if the problem was that he didn’t really love her, and he said, ‘I love her, all right. It’s just that I’m not the only one who does.’”

“He could’ve been talking about you, Mick.”

“That’s what Ms. Modesty here thought, too. I said to him, ‘You’re not trying to tell me something, are you, Rudy?’ And he said, ‘Slavin, if I thought I had half a chance in the world, but I don’t, so I’m afraid you’re not the lucky girl. Besides,’ he said, ‘the Professor’ll take better care of you than I ever could.’”

“Maybe it was someone in the Providence chapter of the Rudy Furth Fan Club,” Harvey said.

“You’re going to make me cry again,” Mickey said. She glanced at the alarm clock over Harvey’s shoulder. “Oh, Jesus, I’ve got to go.” She rose to her knees on the bed. “I’m doing the eleven o’clock. Let me take your car, will you?”

She dressed in the living room, where they had discarded their clothes, and came back in, plowing a brush through her thick hair. “I know when things are sinking in and when they’re not,” she said, kissing him too maternally on the forehead. “And this isn’t sinking in yet.”

At eleven, Harvey sat naked in the living room watching the news. The first story was Rudy. They ran some videotape of him in action during a recent game, some shots of the clubhouse and the whirlpool, and a pro forma interview with Detective Linderman. Harvey’s attention wandered during the reports of the tax cuts, the debate over a forthcoming vote on the sale of arms to a tribal Middle Eastern nation, the local run on air conditioners, and five minutes of a man in a red sports jacket standing in front of a map that had a picture of a thermometer with a face. Finally, Mickey appeared in her lavender blouse, her hands folded neatly in front of her. A slide of a smiling Rudy Furth was chroma-keyed on the screen behind her shoulder.

“When they talk about violence in professional sports,” she began reading off the TelePrompTer at a somber, easy tempo, “they almost never talk about the game of baseball, and they almost never talk about murder. But today witnessed a violent tragedy in baseball that will be remembered and mourned long after all the football injuries and ice hockey brawls have been forgotten. Providence Jewel relief pitcher Rudy Furth was found murdered this morning in the team’s clubhouse at Rankle Park.”

Harvey cringed at the memory of the whirlpool, of how unfair he had been to Rudy. “Sadly,” Mickey continued, “other athletes throughout the years have died as a result of the sports they played, and a few have even been murdered. But the death of Rudy Furth is different: it was brutal, and so far it appears to have been meaningless. I knew Rudy Furth, and I grieve at the untimely death of a fine man and a fine athlete. Let us all hope there is a swift solution to this ghastly crime.”

Harvey had to hand it to her. She must have composed the commentary in her head on her way to the studio. Now she turned to camera two.

“In light of today’s event, other sports news seems insignificant, but here are the scores in major league baseball action.” And then Mickey Slavin, not looking in the least like she had left the bed of the Providence Jewels’ center fielder little more than an hour before, spoke of Reds and Cubs and Dodgers and Phillies, Twins and Royals and Yankees and A’s.

“P
UT FELIX ON, WILL
you?” Harvey said when Dunc answered the clubhouse phone the next morning. It was an off-day on the schedule, and Harvey didn’t know if Felix expected the team for practice.

Felix’s voice had the consistency of hot cereal. “I thought we’d take some B.P. at noon. Just a light workout. It might do everyone some good, but if you’re not in the mood, Professor, take the day off and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you at noon. How’re you holding up, Felix?” With him, it was never an idle question. After nine consecutive losing seasons managing five different major league teams, Felix Shalhoub was not a well man. In May he had disappeared from the club for three weeks. Buzzy Stanfill, the Jewels’ public relations director, had informed the press that Felix was home with a severe pulmonary infection, but anyone who had played under him had the right to speculate that Felix’s ailments were located not in his lungs, but in his head and his liver.

Marshall Levy had handed the reins over to Campy Strulowitz in the interim, but Campy was soon joined in the dugout by Frances Shalhoub. Levy liked her—and her master’s degree in business administration from Columbia—and apparently, as a courtesy to Felix, he had agreed to let her be closer than usual to the team in Felix’s absence. The press reacted with amusement, then indignation, and for a couple of weeks stories on the order of “First Woman Manager in Major Leagues?” enlivened the sports pages in the cities where Providence played. But since Frances had been in the public relations business for many years, the prevailing rumor was that her presence in the dugout was nothing more than a badly needed publicity stunt. She denied, to all who asked, that she was even remotely connected with any managerial decisions.

After Felix returned to the team, looking gaunter than usual and complaining pointedly of a lingering cough, Frances remained in the dugout during the games, charting pitches on a clipboard. The commissioner, who fancied himself something of a feminist, was unbothered by this breach of protocol, and only a few of the players were indiscreet enough to kick about it, and none of them to the press. There was no reason to believe Felix found in his wife’s presence in the dugout anything but consolation.

Felix’s spinelessness, an object of concealed scorn among the ball players, was the quality that had kept him in the majors so long, despite his penchant for losing; front offices liked a man they could push around. Harvey enjoyed a closer relationship with Felix than most of the players did, and he was afraid that Rudy’s murder would unhinge him.

“I’m in a distressed posture, Professor,” Felix was saying. “How could anyone do such a thing? I’ve seen some sick things in my years in baseball, but this is the sickest. I can’t take it, Professor. I haven’t had an easy time of it in the majors. Nine seasons, I won five hundred six games and lost nine-fifty-two. It’s a miracle I’m still here. For that I can thank a lot of people. But that’s beside the point. The point, Professor, is that in those nine seasons, I’ve never known anything like this. Someone murdered my goddamn relief pitcher. It’s sick. I ask myself, why did it have to be me? Why me? I’m fifty-three years old. I’m too old to have my goddamn relief pitcher murdered in my clubhouse.” He caught his breath. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m sick about it, Felix.”

“I can’t sleep, Professor. I’ve been in a baseball posture my whole life. Why couldn’t it have happened to a manager with a winning record?” He was shouting, and Harvey held the receiver away from his ear. “This team doesn’t get along too good as it is. Until they find who murdered Rudy, everybody’s going to be running around looking at everybody else sideways.”

“Felix, take it easy. Don’t take it personal. You’re talking like you were to blame.”

“You think I had something to do with it? Is that what—”

“Felix! I said it’s got nothing to do with—”

“That’s all I need, Professor. My mind can’t take anymore.”

“Listen to me, Felix. It had nothing to do with you. The cops’ll take care of it. Life’ll go on. Get a grip on yourself.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice subsiding. “All right. I’m getting a grip on myself. Let’s reach down and play them one at a time. All right, let’s bear down.”

When Harvey arrived at the clubhouse half an hour later, Dunc was sitting at the long table in the middle of the locker room where the players sat before games to play cards or autograph balls for disadvantaged children and men at the V.A. hospital. He was ironing strips of black tape on the left sleeves of the Jewels’ uniforms. While Harvey slipped into his practice uni, three teammates were talking behind him. The conversation smelled of agents and lawyers.

“I was talking to a friend of mine on the White Sox, who shall remain nameless,” Happy Smith, the Jewels’ backup catcher, was saying, “and he was telling me that his agent got him a clause in his contract that every time he gets an extra base hit in the last three innings, it’s a cool five grand. That’s what I need, an agent like that, so I can get a little gravy when I re-sign.”