Strike Three You're Dead (8 page)

A
FTER PRACTICE ON THURSDAY
afternoon, Harvey drove down the redeveloped section of South Main Street in the direction of Rudy’s rented town house. He picked up a
Journal-Bulletin
at the corner drugstore on a block of boutiques and hair salons with names like the Opulent Owl, Nature’s Comfort, and Diego’s. A front-page story about the murder told him the little he already knew and none of the things he wanted to find out. Detective Linderman was quoted as saying that despite the recent city budget cuts that had trimmed back even the homicide division, the Rudy Furth case was of course being accorded top priority. In search of more reassuring news, Harvey turned to the sports pages and found the box containing the American League’s top ten batters. Mark Gaffney of the Texas Rangers had moved ahead of him into eighth place with two hits the night before in Seattle. He checked the standings: Providence was still in sixth place in the eight-team division. If he had a choice in the matter, he would gladly trade in his .309 batting average for the chance to play for a winner again.

He tucked the newspaper under his arm and crossed the street, to Rudy’s place. It was in the middle of a row of new, terraced town houses in alternating gray and mustard clapboard that didn’t quite belong in a neighborhood of old red brick. Like the others, Rudy’s town house was a bald-looking two-story building on a sodded knoll. He knocked on the door, waited, then tried the doorknob. It was locked. He circled around behind the row of houses and found a squat man in a sleeveless undershirt pushing a power mower across the backyard next door.

“You live here?” Harvey asked.

The man cut the motor and said, “In a way. I’m the manager of this complex. I’m just taking care of the yard here while the Beckwiths are away.” He wiped his hands on work pants coated with a fine spray of mown dry grass. “Something I can do you?”

“I was wondering if I could get into Rudy Furth’s place for a minute. I left something there. Number four.”

The man sized him up for a moment while Harvey tapped the folded newspaper against his thigh. Behind the man, Harvey could see the Burnside mansion where he lived, two blocks away and up College Hill beyond a parking lot.

“Guess you didn’t hear the bad news,” the man finally said. “Mr. Furth is dead. Murdered, if you want to know the—it’s right there in your paper.”

“I know,” Harvey said. “He was a teammate of mine.”

The man inspected Harvey’s face. “I thought you looked familiar. You’re that catcher they got, Randy Eppich.”

“My name’s Harvey Blissberg. I play center field.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I recognize you now. You know, I catch a few games on the tube, but I haven’t been out to the park yet. Guess I should, though, new team in town and all.”

“I was wondering if you could let me into Rudy’s place for a minute. He’s got a few things of mine in there I want to collect.”

“I don’t know about that,” the man said, dragging a hand across his furry jaw. “The cops were already here yesterday, you know. Went through the whole place and told me to keep everyone else out of it. Now, maybe I could go in for you and get what you want if they haven’t already taken it, but I just don’t know about letting you walk in there yourself.”

“He was a close friend of mine. I’d appreciate it.”

The man leaned down and brushed some grass off the housing of the mower. “You know how it is,” he said. “I’ve got my orders.”

“A couple of box seat tickets to tomorrow night’s game says you sometimes have trouble following them,” Harvey said, smiling. “The club’s playing good ball right now. I’ll have them hold the tickets for you at the press gate.”

The man thought about it, wiping his hands some more, and said, “Come to think of it, I’ve got a couple of boys at home who wouldn’t mind seeing a major league ball game.”

“Then why don’t we make it four tickets? Just in case you know someone else who wouldn’t mind. All I need is your name.” Harvey took out a pen and scrawled “Joseph Katavolos” in the margin of his newspaper.

“Like I say,” the man said, getting his massive key ring out, “new team in town and all. Just don’t make a mess, hear? I’ve got to rent that place out.” Katavolos showed him into Rudy’s old town house, gestured at the door, said, “She’ll lock behind you when you leave,” and went back to his mowing.

The town house had a modern, open interior with an atrium in the living area that rose all the way to a skylight in the sloping roof. There were a lot of oak floors and heavy beams and unfinished pine surfaces, and there was a wood-burning stove with a pipe that ran right up the middle of the atrium. It was perfect for a single relief pitcher whose idea of a night in was drinking Asti spumante with an airline stewardess.

There was a butcher-block sofa upholstered in oatmeal Haitian cotton, where Harvey and Rudy had gotten smashed drinking Grolsch beer only a week before, a Scandinavian leather chair and ottoman, a teak coffee table on a small blue shag rug, and lots of track lighting. He walked over to the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator, where he found some beer, three cartons of orange juice, a can of high-protein powder, a few plastic containers of coleslaw and macaroni salad, and some knockwurst. There were also a couple of steaks, as though Rudy had been expecting someone for dinner. On the floor by the stove was a plastic bowl filled with crusty cat food. The cops had probably taken Wanda, Rudy’s Siamese cat.

He went upstairs, where he had never been before, and found a room with a television set and more butcher-block furniture, an elaborate wicker chair suspended from the ceiling, and a few hanging plants. It looked like a double spread in
Apartment Life.
In the bedroom, Harvey found a water bed covered with a bamboo-patterned comforter, a dresser, and a couple of canvas director’s chairs. He opened the sliding closet door to find a multicolored row of slacks and sports jackets. On the shelf above, Rudy’s sweaters were arranged neatly in color groups, like swatches of fabric. On the floor below, two dozen pairs of shoes stood in strict formation, facing the wall. No one would have guessed that the town house’s tenant had spent even a single day—much less his boyhood—on a farm.

Harvey ran his hand across the sports jackets hanging on the closet rod. A thin cream-colored garment fell from between two jackets. He picked it up and studied it, a lacy thing with a snap at the crotch. Harvey knew there was a name for it, but couldn’t remember what it was. The label said it was all silk, and it also said, “The Bare Essentials, White Plains, New York.” He threw it on top of the sweaters.

There was a faint sound, a rustling, in the far corner of the closet, behind Rudy’s suits. Harvey waited a cold moment for the sound to come again. It did, and was quickly followed by the appearance of Wanda, picking her way through the shoes. She raised her dark brown face toward Harvey and emitted a reproachful meow. Harvey picked her up and draped her over his shoulder, where she remained while he looked through Rudy’s dresser drawers; they contained neat piles of professionally laundered shirts and Gold Cup socks. On the glass on top of the dresser was a jewelry box with some cuff links and rings in it. Next to it sat a bowl of coins, a bottle of Aramis cologne, and a stack of back issues of
Sporting News.
Rudy had a place for everything, and Detective Linderman and his men had managed to leave everything in its place.

With one hand on Wanda’s back, Harvey riffled through an issue of
Sporting News.
As he did, he noticed a photograph under the glass on top of the dresser. He pushed aside the stack of newspapers to get a better look.

It wasn’t a photograph. It was Harvey’s baseball card. The photo on the front, from a few seasons past, showed Harvey in a Boston Red Sox uniform. He had a bat slung over his shoulder, and the face looking roguishly at the camera was more youthful, less angular. Harvey remembered how the photographer from the bubble gum company had coaxed him. “Don’t look so grim,” he had said. “You don’t want to frighten all those millions of kids, do you?” Harvey knew that on the back of the card, along with his statistics, was a simple cartoon of a man wearing a mortarboard, with the caption: “Harvey has a degree in history from the University of Massachusetts.”

He put Wanda down and lifted the edge of the glass and slid the card out. The thought of Rudy with his baseball card sent a tremor of grief and pity through him. He slipped the card into his shirt pocket, then noticed something else under the glass—a piece of stationery folded into eighths. He worked it out and opened it. It was a sheet of personalized stationery with a Pawtucket address, and it read, in a careful turquoise hand:

Dear Rudy,

Well, I feel like an idiot writing you, but I had to tell you how much I adore you. Every time I see you, it makes me want to jump up and dance, which is really saying something. As it is, I just sit and daydream about the future we’ll never have. It’s not that I want everything, it’s just that I wish I could have you. Oh, well….

Love,

Valerie (Carty)

Even if her prose left something to be desired, Harvey admired her taste in lingerie. He folded the letter and put it in his pocket with his baseball card. Wanda meowed angrily at him from the floor. “Yeah, I know how it is,” he said, and fed her a can of Friskies Buffet Mixed Grill from the kitchen before taking her back to his own apartment.

H
ARVEY HADN’T FALLEN ASLEEP
until three in the morning. At five he had been jolted awake by a nightmare in which he had pulled a corpse out of a whirlpool, to discover that it was Mickey. She had opened her eyes and said, “I’m only kidding.” He sat up in bed. Rudy was gone, Mickey might be going, and he didn’t know how much longer he wanted to play the game of baseball.

He did not remember the point at which anxiety deferred to sleep, but at ten Friday morning the phone rang inside his brain. Wanda, who had been sleeping on his head, leaped to the windowsill. Harvey’s hand sampled several objects on the nightstand before finding the pertinent one.

“It’s Linderman,” the voice barked.

“’Scuse me?” Harvey mumbled.

“Wake up. I’m down at the ball park, but I’ll be through soon and I thought you might meet me for a drink in half an hour.”

Harvey located his tongue. “At ten in the morning?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So have a cup of coffee with me. Plan to be there.”

“I was planning to spend the morning trying to figure out who killed Rudy.”

“Good. That’s exactly how I plan to spend mine.”

Harvey suggested Mandy’s, a bar on the Brown University campus with plastic Tiffany lamps.

“Nice place,” Linderman said. “We pinched a couple hookers there last month. Imagine that, taking advantage of young college boys.”

“Imagine,” Harvey said.

Harvey had been at Mandy’s for twenty minutes, seeing how many sips there were in a Bloody Mary, before Linderman lowered himself into the booth, beer in hand. The butt of a police Magnum rode up under his armpit, beneath a red and green plaid sports jacket. An archipelago of grease stains ran down the front of his white polo shirt.

“Something keep you at the park?” Harvey asked.

“I was over there,” Linderman said, indicating a booth in the far corner of the lounge. “Watching you.”

“That’s just great.”

“It’s interesting what you can tell about a guy, watching him like that.”

“So what’d you learn?”

“That you don’t like Bloody Marys very much and that the service in this place is lousy. Your waitress never came over to see how you were doing.”

“What’d you really want to know?”

“Some guys get nervous,” Linderman said.

“About?”

“About knowing something about who killed Rudy Furth and not saying.”

“You’ve been watching too many old movies, Linderman.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you seem a little nervous now, Harvey.”

“Some guys get nervous about being told they know something about who killed Rudy Furth and are not saying. I expected you to have all the goods at this point.”

“I’ve got some.” Linderman pulled daintily at his beer.

Harvey waited, then said, “Maybe you’ll tell me someday.”

“It’s your move, Harvey.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I was hoping something might’ve come to mind since we talked the last time.”

Harvey spread his hands.

“All right,” Linderman said, bringing both palms down on the table. “Maybe this’ll jog your memory. The preliminary report from the coroner says that Rudy was killed by a combination of asphyxiation by drowning and Cleavon Battle’s bat.”

Harvey’s head jerked at the name of the Providence Jewels’ first baseman. “Cleavon Battle?”

“Cleavon Battle’s
bat,”
Linderman corrected him. “We don’t know who was holding it.”

“How do you know it was Cleavon’s bat?”

“That one was easy. The soft spot in Rudy’s skull was perfectly consistent with the sweet part of a Louisville Slugger. It could’ve been someone else’s bat, but Battle used it in the game that night, and it was gone by the morning, and no one can find it.”