Dead Ball (17 page)

“Well, there’s got to be some relief in knowing you’re not an inexplicable number of deviations above the statistical norm.”

“I want to tell you something, Harvey.” Moss sighed as if he’d been holding his breath for weeks. “I wasn’t having an easy time with this, and I’m not just talking about the lawn jockey. I had the feeling I was losing myself. Losing pieces of myself every day that were going out to make up this public figure I’ve become. Maybe some dudes are good at handling it. It just made me feel like I was living with another Moss Cooley.”

“Well, I’ve got to tell you, big guy, you’ve been referring to yourself in the third person. You know that, don’t you? Been referring to yourself as Moss Cooley.”

“Now, you know I’m going to cut that shit out right now. And you better believe that when Moss Cooley tells you he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it.” He looked at Harvey, and his wheezy laugh started up like a car engine on a January morning.

“Very good, Moss. Very funny.”

“You know what I’ve been feeling like? I’ve been feeling like a cartoon waiting for a caption.”

“And now you’ve got one,” Harvey said. “Owner of the second most goddamn unbelievable hitting streak in major-league history. And you did it without the hitters around you that DiMaggio had.”

“But I had the smaller strike zone on my side.”

“Yeah, sure, but DiMaggio didn’t have to contend with better athletes and those huge gloves. I’ll bet you lost a hit or two during the streak ’cause of the bigger leather.”

“But I sucked against Rusansky.”

“If you’re going to be that way about it, Moss, you’ll just have to start another streak later today. DiMaggio did it, you know—hit in sixteen more straight games.” Harvey thought of DiMaggio and
his
caption, the Yankee Clipper, and how high and thick the myth had been constructed, so that it was really only after his death that biographers could bring DiMaggio’s hidden, limited self to public light: his obtuseness about, and abuse of, women; his endless, shameless use of others; his insatiable appetite for money; his intellectual and emotional poverty; his profitable association with the mob. Really, greatness didn’t care who possessed it, although DiMaggio’s case suggested that the people who make the best icons are often those without much substance in the first place, the better to be filled with our needs and fantasies. Was this what had been troubling Moss Cooley, a man with more substance than the public gave him credit for, not less? For while fame could give an empty man a kind of self, for a man already full of self, fame could only deplete it. Harvey could not imagine Moss tolerating DiMaggio’s fate—spending half a century and more living inside a moated castle of lies.

“I want those pieces back now,” Moss said.

“Even if you’d broken DiMaggio’s record,” Harvey replied, “you’d have found a way to get them back. Anyway,” he added with a rush of good feeling, realizing how much he liked Moss, “I’ll always cherish these few days we could spend together.”

“The Jew and the black man living as one.”

“An interracial, interfaith, intergenerational relationship.”

“With the highest combined major-league lifetime batting average of any couple ever.”

“With the
only
combined major-league lifetime batting average of any couple ever,” Harvey said.

“You got that right.”

“Where you going?” Cooley said as Harvey pulled off 95 on an exit ramp. “This isn’t my goddamn exit. The next one.”

“I’ve got a Toyota pickup two cars behind me that’s been there for a couple of miles,” Harvey said, watching the vehicle in his rearview mirror. “I want to make sure I’m not being tailed.”

“Tailed? Don’t spook me. The streak’s over. Don’t be so goddamn thorough.”

Harvey got off 95, and the pickup stayed on the interstate. “Listen, Moss, whoever sent you the jockey will probably just wither up and die now, but I think you ought to stay away from your routine for a while. Stay away from situations and places where you’re known. Stay away from Teasers.” Harvey eased the car back onto 95.

“I don’t have to go to Teasers anymore to see Cherry Ann in the altogether.”

“I know. I’m just saying. You know, Moss, I never came up with a pet name for you.”

“I already got one. Cool. And you never use it.”

“Everyone calls you that. People who’ve never met you call you that. The goddamn signs in the stands call you that. I’m talking about a name that’s just between us. Like Snake Head.”

“Snake Head?” Cooley laughed. “What kind of dumb-ass name is that? What you going to call me when I get a new do? C’mon, you can do better than that.”

“The Starrett Stallion.”

“That shows no intelligence whatsoever.”

“Yo’ Mama Head,” Harvey said, suddenly laughing uncontrollably.

“You don’t calm down, I’m gonna drive.”

Harvey got off 95 again at exit 14 and headed toward Cooley’s house in Cranston, winding past ranch houses, salt-boxes, tag sales, and fruit stands. “Moss,” he said, “I’m sorry I never got the chance to show you the documentary about the old days of baseball. You would’ve liked it. Joltin’ Joe’s in it—film of him as a kid at Wrigley Field playing in the ’thirty-eight Series. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the fielders used to leave their gloves on the field.”

“I think I heard that, but why the hell did they do it? Did the other team use ’em?”

“Nope. Everybody just left their gloves there. I don’t know why they did it. Convenience. Tradition. The league didn’t outlaw it until after the ’fifty-three season.”

“I wouldn’t want to be tripping over somebody’s raggedy-ass glove.”

“I don’t think anybody ever did. Least not in an important game. Otherwise it would’ve been outlawed sooner, don’t you think? They say someone once put a dead rat in Phil Rizzuto’s glove. He had a phobia about rats.”

“I got one of those too.”

“I’ve never met anybody who actually had a thing for rats,” Harvey said, pulling into Cooley’s circular driveway. “What’s that?” he asked Moss, his stomach tightening.

“What?”

“Hanging from your porch light.”

“Goddamn motherfuckin’ motherfuckers.”

They got out of the car and walked up to the front stoop. It was a black Ken doll without any clothes on, hanging from the porch light cover latch by a length of twine that had been fashioned into a tiny noose around its plastic neck. Its neck had been wrenched back at an awkward angle. Safety-pinned to the twine was a piece of paper folded into quarters.

Harvey quickly circled the house, .38 in his hand, but saw no other signs of vandalism or forced entry. When he got back to the porch, Moss was still standing on the stoop, looking at the Ken doll.

“Goddamn motherfuckers.”

“Someone didn’t hear the streak’s over,” Harvey said.

But the note, once he’d unpinned and gingerly unfolded it, removed any doubt that its author had heard about Cooley’s hitless game last night. Like the note that accompanied the lawn jockey, it consisted of letters cut from magazines and glued to the page.

ShAmE AboUT the STReAk.

NoW waTcH YOUr aSs OR it wILL bE
an
unSoLVeD rACe Crime.

Harvey cut the Ken doll down with his pocket knife, and they went inside, Harvey holding the doll by the very end of the rope. He put it on the living room coffee table, where it lay on its back as though awaiting a miniature autopsy.

“Somebody’s fucking with me,” Moss said, slumping on the sofa while Harvey paced.

“This is the same guy who sent you the lawn jockey.” He held the note by the edges and studied it as he walked the floor.

“I can see that.”

“Why does he say ‘unsolved race crime’?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s the only thing in the note where there’s any traction.”

“Damn,” Moss said. “He’s got to be talking about GURCC.”

“What’s that?”

“The Georgia Unsolved Race Crimes Clearinghouse. GURCC. Bunch of lawyers and investigators in Atlanta who try to reopen and prosecute old race crime cases.”

“Yeah, I know about them,” Harvey said. “Murder and rape cases. No statute of limitations. What’s it got to do with you?”

“One of my childhood friends from Alabama—Charlie Fathon—he became a lawyer for them last year just out of law school, and he asked me to get involved over the winter.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh, the usual shit. Lending my name to their fund-raising campaigns. I dropped some cash on them. They’ve been talking to me about being their spokesman. Doing some speaking for them. You know, ’cause of my granddaddy and all, I’ve got some credibility. I hate to put it that way, but there it is.”

“Moss, why haven’t you mentioned it to me before?”

“It never occurred to me the threats had anything to do with it.”

“C’mon, Moss, you’re the object of racial threats, and you’re involved in a race organization—”

“Now don’t get in my face about it,” he snapped. “I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. I thought it was the damn streak, just like you.”

“What I don’t get is that this is the first I’ve heard of you and GURCC. The press doesn’t mention it.”

“I keep it low. I don’t like these rich motherfuckers who go around saying, ‘Look at me, I’m giving to this, giving to that.’ ”

“But this asshole knows about you and GURCC.”

“It’s public information. I just don’t blow my horn about it. But my name’s there on the mailings and the ads.” He rubbed his face with both palms, then dropped them. “Let me ask you something: If this is the same guy who wrote the note about the streak, why’s he on a different page now?”

“What if it’s the page he’s always been on? What if the first note was just a smoke screen?”

“What if it’s just some crazed motherfucker toying with me? What if next time I get a note telling me to lay off the goddamn stuffies at Hemenway’s?”

“Right now, we got this.” Harvey finally sat opposite Moss. “Why would he want you to cut your ties with GURCC?”

“I have no goddamn idea!”

“You got any literature from GURCC I can look at?”

“He’s not interested in GURCC! He’s just some goddamn motherfuckin’ stalker!”

“I’d like to look at it anyway,” Harvey said softly.

“All right. Hold on. Maybe I got some upstairs.” Cooley stalked off toward the stairs. At the foot of them he turned and said, “I want those pieces back.”

“We’ll get them back,” Harvey replied.

While Cooley was upstairs, Harvey took out his pen and notebook and wrote down on a fresh leaf: “DiMaggio evades apprehension. Do nothing in greatest game. Escape retribution.” What was going on? It
had
to be the same person, but the language was different. The first note was stilted, telegraphic, the second conversational. Where the first was an all-purpose warning to lay off DiMaggio’s record, the second pointed to a specific association of Moss’s. Harvey felt the man meant business with this new note. Now, in retrospect, the first time around he just seemed to be playing a game. A game, Harvey thought, studying the first note again, breaking it down. …

He reached for his cell phone and called Marshall Levy.

“Where are you?” Harvey said.

“I’m at home. Where are you?”

“I’m at Moss’s house, and we’ve got a problem.”

“I thought our problem was over.”

“I’m afraid it might just be starting.”

“I’m not happy hearing this, Harvey.”

“I didn’t write the script, Marshall.”

“What’s going on?”

Harvey told him about the Ken doll lynching and the note.

“I didn’t know about this GURCC,” Marshall said.

“Neither did I. We need to meet. You, Felix, Moss, and me.”

“When?”

“Before the game.”

“All right. Come to the skybox at eleven-thirty. Cool okay?”

“Pissed. You’d be pissed too.”

Harvey went to Cooley’s kitchen and found a Ziploc bag. He dropped the Ken doll into it, and when he came back to the living room, Moss was there looking at the doll in Harvey’s hand with an expression suggesting that what Moss saw in the bag was not just the most recent token of some stranger’s hate, but a relic of generations of hate leading back to his granddaddy and before.

“All I could find was this,” Moss said in a flat voice, holding some papers folded into thirds. “Here.” He thrust it at Harvey.

It was a slickly produced four-page direct-mail fund-raising solicitation from GURCC. He skimmed it: “So we need your help if we are to continue our efforts to reopen these cases, arrest and convict these criminals, still at large… . Even in a democracy, justice has a price tag. … We accept no public funds, no fees from monetary jury awards. … some of the most experienced investigators and lawyers in America. … Last year saw us bring two men to justice thirty-two years after they bombed a black-owned motel in Jackson, Mississippi, killing a housekeeper.”

There, on the third page, was a photo of Moss Cooley’s face with an adjacent bold-face quote from him: “ ‘My own family has known what it is to lose someone to racial hatred and never even learn the murderers’ names. The Georgia Unsolved Race Crimes Clearinghouse is the best shot we have at ensuring that those who kill out of racial hatred will not go scot-free.’ —Moss Cooley of the Providence Jewels.”

Harvey glanced at a block of text highlighting some of the race crimes the group was in the process of gathering evidence to reopen: “the rape and murder of sixteen-year-old Joella Barnes… the execution-style shooting death of Ephraim Woodson… the lynching of Edward Gomez and Allen James Spellman…” The atrocities raced by on the page. He folded the letter and put it in his jacket pocket.

“Let’s go. We’re meeting with Marshall and Felix at eleven-thirty.”

“I don’t know about any meeting.”

“I just set it up, Moss. We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing. I’m out of this drama. I just want to play baseball.”

A
SMATTERING OF CLEVELAND INDIANS
and Providence Jewels dotted the field below Marshall’s skybox office, running wind sprints and stretching beneath a hard blue sky. The office contained the same cast of characters as three nights ago, but instead of a headless lawn jockey on the desk between them, now it was Ken in the plastic bag, the note that came with it, and the fund-raising letter open to the page with Moss Cooley’s picture on it. Robert, Marshall’s skybox steward, had already brought the four of them fresh orange juice, coffee, croissants, Danish, and a selection of gourmet half sandwiches arranged in perfect concentric circles on a plastic tray.