Hanging Curve (21 page)

I
didn’t call Tater Greene the next day, either. Nor the one after that.

For those two days, Margie and I were almost inseparable, and she was the sole object of my attention. It was almost like when we’d first started dating, back when she was making moving pictures in Brooklyn and I was playing for the New York Giants. I once again felt a giddiness in my stomach and a vacuum in my head.

The two of us met for an early lunch each morning, and went to Sportsman’s Park together each afternoon, where I continued to play and play well. Afterward, it was dinner and dancing and long, aimless walks through downtown St. Louis.

Margie remained firm about not moving back to the apartment yet, but she did invite me to stay with her Thursday night.

Soon after we woke Friday morning, I found myself wishing that I had a regular job, one that allowed me to call in sick. Because I didn’t want to play baseball; I wanted to spend the day in bed with Margie and do some more reconciling.

But a baseball player can’t simply call in sick, especially not a utility player who’s coming off a suspension. So I got dressed and left Margie, to meet her later again at the ballpark. As I departed her hotel, I grumpily thought that if Lee Fohl kept me on the bench, I would be royally pissed.

 

I caught a trolley for home to get a fresh change of clothes before heading to the park. During the ride to my apartment, I scanned the morning newspaper that I’d picked up in the Jefferson lobby. I was halfway home by the time I saw the small headline on page five:

Cubs Park in East St. Louis had burned to the ground the previous night, while a wooden cross blazed in the middle of the diamond.

Damn! I wished I had called Tater Greene when Aubury first told me about Enoch’s kid getting beaten up. Maybe I’d have been able to do something to prevent this.

At least the newspaper report did pin the blame on the KKK; perhaps Karl Landfors’s efforts were paying off. Although, considering the trademark burning cross, it was hardly a journalistic coup to conclude that the Klan was behind the arson.

As soon as I got home, I phoned the Enoch Motor Car Company and learned that Tater Greene had phoned in sick. Lucky bastard, I thought.

I dialed his home number. It took eight rings before he picked up. “What?” he moaned.

“You got what you wished for,” I said. “They burned down Cubs Park last night. Or should I say ‘you’ burned it down?”

“Hey, when I said that about burning the park, I only meant instead of the catcher’s house.” Greene’s speech was slow and slurred. “I didn’t mean they should torch a park just because some snot-nosed kid couldn’t handle himself in a fight.”

“You sick?” I asked.

“Nah, a little hair of the dog, and I’ll be fine.”

“Were you all drunk when you did it?”

Greene didn’t deny being involved. “Stone-cold sober,” he said. “Until I got home anyways.”

“Did Roy Enoch tell you to burn down the park?”

“I’m not saying who gave the order or who was involved.” He made a belching noise. “You think I’m a dope or something?”

“Somebody is,” I said. “If the Klan doesn’t want to be connected to violence, then it’s not real clever to leave a burning cross as a calling card. It’s just as dumb as Enoch’s boy was, telling the other kids that his father’s a Klansman.”

“You know about that?”

“Yup.”

“Well, that’s why we had to leave the cross. Nobody liked Enoch’s kid saying what he did, but it was too late. Once he told them not to mess with the Klan, we had to back him up. And we had to let folks know it was us, so we burned a cross. Matter of pride.”

“Pride?”
I said, my voice and anger rising. “You mean if you’re going to do something stupid, you should be
proud
and stupid?”

He groaned, in what sounded like a hangover pang. “What are you yelling at
me
for? Wasn’t my idea to get mixed up in any of this crap.”

“You were forced?”

“Nah, I just—Hell, you ain’t never gonna understand. I just wish I never got mixed up with these guys. Be better off if I was still picking sweet potatoes down in Georgia.”

No sense beating on Tater Greene, I thought. Part of my anger was at myself, for not calling him before the park was burned. “The Klan got anything else planned?” I asked. “Or will this end it?”

“Ain’t nothing more going on that I know of,” he said. “But it doesn’t ever seem to end, does it?”

That was a point we were able to agree on.

Greene then insisted that he needed to get a shot of rye before his head exploded, and the conversation was over.

I briefly considered phoning Franklin Aubury, but I was too ashamed. I didn’t want to admit to him that I hadn’t followed up on his Tuesday call.

While I changed into a clean shirt and one of my favorite summer suits, I tried to think if there was anything else I could do, or anyone else I could talk to. I wasn’t going to get much from any of the Elcars’ players, I was sure, and Roy Enoch was unlikely to tell me anything. Should I go ahead and join the Klan to see what I could learn? No, I couldn’t go that far.

The thought of calling in sick to Lee Fohl flickered through my mind again. Not to frolic with Margie, but to head over to East St. Louis. I again rejected the idea of calling Fohl, but realized there was another manager I
should
contact: Ed Moss, of Enoch’s Elcars.

I recalled Tater Greene telling me that Moss didn’t work at the automobile dealership. He was a cop, a desk sergeant, Greene had said.

With a phone call to police headquarters in East St. Louis, I learned the precinct where Moss was stationed. Another call, to the station house, provided the information that his next shift would be Saturday morning.

A
lthough Ed Moss’s short, round body was now clothed in the blue-serge uniform of the East St. Louis Police Department, his demeanor was exactly the same as when he’d worn the Elcars’ gray flannels in the coach’s box of Cubs Park. He still resembled belligerent John McGraw on one of his bad days.

When I walked into the Bond Avenue station house, Moss was at the front desk, threatening a shabbily dressed old man who was trying to lie down across three chairs. “This ain’t a goddamn flophouse, you old puke! Put yer feet down before I come over there and chop ’em off!”

The emaciated man struggled to obey the order. He appeared to be suffering from the same condition that Tater Greene was in yesterday.

Moss stared at him until he’d complied, then he turned to me, muttering, “All we get is rummies and whores coming through here.” The sergeant’s bloated, red face looked like something that needed to be lanced.

“You ought to see about a transfer,” I said. “I hear they get a better class of criminal in Washington Park.”

“Huh?” He eyed me closely. “Say, I know you. Mickey Welch, right?”

“Rawlings,” I corrected. “But, yeah, I played for you as Welch.”

Moss reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet. “There’s something I owe you.” He offered me a five-dollar bill.

“This is all I got right now, but I’ll get you the other five. Roy Enoch told me you were at his car lot a while ago, and you never let on that I kept your money—that was real white of ya.”

“You can still keep it,” I said. “You managed a helluva lot better than I played.” The way to get on the good side of a man like Moss, I figured, was to flatter him.

He quickly pocketed the money. “Appreciate it.”

“I came by because I heard about Enoch’s kid getting beat up. Is he all right?”

“Just some bruises. He’ll be fine.”

“Good! Glad to hear it.”

“Unless his father gives him another whupping, of course.”

“His father?”

Moss sat down behind his high desk. “Yeah. The beating Roy Junior took from the kids was nothing compared to what his father gave him afterward.”

“Because he told the kids about him being a Klansman?”

“Nah, that ain’t no secret. He beat the kid for losing a fight to a bunch of niggers.”

Jeez. “If he was mad at his son,” I said, “why did he order Cubs Park burned down?”

Moss looked at me sharply. “I don’t know nothing about that.”

“I do. Some of the Elcars were involved—they told me about it.” I gave Moss the story of how they were recruiting me for the local Klan, and I was considering joining. “But I wanted to talk to you first, and get your advice.”

“Me?” The sergeant was clearly puzzled. “You don’t know me from Adam. What do you want
my
advice for?”

“For one thing,” I said, “you’re a cop, so you know what goes on in this town. And more important, you manage these guys; nobody knows a team’s players better than their manager.”

From the way Moss puffed himself up, the flattery was working. “Well, go ahead, shoot. What do you want to know?”

“I don’t mind them burning down the ballpark,” I said. “Nobody got hurt. But that catcher’s house getting torched, and, worse than that, the Slip Crawford lynching—I couldn’t have anything to do with things like that. And from what I hear, Enoch’s boys were behind all of those.”

“You think the
Elcars
were involved in killing Crawford?” he said.

“Or the Klan. That’s why I’m asking you. Could the team have lynched Crawford because he beat ’em in that game?”

Moss shook his head. “I can’t speak for the Klan—I ain’t in it, by the way. But as far as the team goes, they’re a real good bunch. I been around ballplayers all my life—even played a couple years in the minors—and I guarantee you that the boys I have on the Elcars want to beat a man on the field, not kill him.”

That matched what everyone else had told me. Perhaps the Crawford lynching—the event that started all the attacks and counterattacks—really was committed by people who had nothing to do with the ball game.

Moss suddenly grabbed his nightstick, and roared, “What the hell did I tell you?”

I looked behind me and saw that the derelict was listing and about to curl up on the chairs.

Waving the club, Moss warned, “Don’t make me come over there!”

I was relieved when the man pulled himself upright on his own.

“Ought to throw his ass in a cell,” Moss said.

I tried to recapture his attention. “Whoever started this latest trouble,” I said, “if it keeps going the way it is, there could be a repeat of 1917.”

Moss sat back in his chair, and let out a long breath. “Nothing could ever get as bad as that was.”

“Where you here then?”

“I was walking a beat.”

“The night of the riot? I heard that all cops hid in their station houses when it broke out.”

“ ‘Hid’?” repeated Moss, with obvious distaste for my choice of words.

“That’s the way I heard it,” I quickly explained.

“I’m guessin’ you only heard one side of the story.”

I looked around the waiting area. Other than the one old man, it wasn’t bustling with business. “If you got the time,” I said, “can you tell me the other side?”

“Sure. I only wish more people would want to hear it.” He snorted. “All they seem to ‘know’ is that the white folks of this city set out to slaughter the coloreds. It wasn’t that simple.”

“What did happen?”

“A lot of things, all building on each other.” Moss paused to gulp some coffee. “It started as a labor dispute. Months before the riot, the workers at Aluminum Ore went on strike. The company decided to break the union and brought up Negroes from the South as replacements. Wasn’t the first time white men were put out of work around here—the year before, the same thing happened when Armour and Swift brought in coloreds during a meatpacking strike.”

Something rang a bell. “J. D. Whalen used to play ball for Aluminum Ore, didn’t he?” So did his partner Clint, if I remembered right.

“Until he lost his job,” Moss said. “After the strike, he wasn’t playing for quite a while—or working, or hardly eating. Lucky for him, Enoch hired him to do body repair in his garage; if Whalen had been out of work any longer, he’d have been lookin’ like this fellow here.” The sergeant lifted his coffee mug toward the old man, who was pulling a tattered overcoat tighter around his gaunt body.

“If the
companies
put these men out of work,” I said, “why did they blame the Negroes? They were just looking to feed their families, too.”

“Because it’s easier to blame a man than a factory, I suppose.” He took another sip of coffee. “I ain’t saying it was right, but the fact is, a lot of white men believed that they lost their jobs because of Negroes moving into town. So they wanted to drive them out. Didn’t do much about it for a while though—just beat a bunch of ’em up and maybe shot a couple.”

It sounded like Moss considered those actions more entertaining than criminal.

He went on. “Now here’s what you probably ain’t heard: The night before the riot, two cops were killed—by Negroes.”

He was right; I hadn’t known about that.

Moss could tell from my reaction. “See? I didn’t think you heard the whole story,” he said smugly.

“What happened?”

“There were some white men driving around a colored neighborhood shooting up houses. They were probably just trying to scare the people into moving away, but we sent out a couple of cops to put a stop to it.” Moss’s voice dropped. “Problem was, their car looked like the one that was doing the shooting. When the cops got to the area, the coloreds thought they were under attack again and decided to open fire themselves.” The sergeant choked for a moment, then concluded, “We found their car on the corner of Market and Seventeenth, riddled with bullets, and both men dead.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“The riot started the next day,” Moss said. “When it did, we were still mourning. And we were angry. We sure weren’t about to put our asses on the line again to protect people who were only going to shoot them off. So a lot of cops did stay in their station houses—but they weren’t ‘hiding.’ ”

“It sounds like the Negroes didn’t know they were shooting at cops,” I said. “They were just trying to defend their homes.”

“I know that. But at the time, all we could think about was that two of our own had been killed in cold blood. You got to understand what people think, not just what they do. Same with the fellows who work for Enoch; if they got a grudge against coloreds, you got to understand the why.”

I was starting to think I didn’t understand much at all. “Because of losing the game?”

“Nah. Because one of their own got killed in the riot, too. You probably only heard about coloreds getting killed by whites.”

“Weren’t there one or two white victims, too?” I asked.

“There were at least half a dozen white men killed by Negroes. One of them worked for Enoch. Tim Lowrey, his name was. In fact, Lowrey didn’t just work for Enoch; he was engaged to marry his daughter Jessalyn.”

Was that what motivated Enoch to join the Klan, I wondered. Did he blame all Negroes for his future son-in-law getting killed?

Moss was distracted by hacking noises from the old man. “If you don’t shut up that goddamn coughing,” he warned him, “I’ll shove my club down your damn throat.”

When Moss had calmed down, I said, “Five years later, Enoch and his guys are still mad?”

“Hard feelings die slow,” he answered. “But most people are being pretty sensible now, I think. See, you got to look at all sides of what happened. Now me, I can understand the coloreds wanting to move up here for better jobs. But I can also see the whites resenting them for it. And I can see coloreds defending their homes when somebody’s shooting at them. But I can understand cops being angry when two of their own get killed as a result of it.”

“It seems to me,” I said, “that what’s happening now is a lot like what you say happened in 1917—one thing leads to another, and it just keeps building. You really don’t think there can be another riot?”

“Nah. Most people involved in the ‘seventeen riot were decent people, and they’ve been ashamed of what they did ever since. They’d never let it happen again.”

“Not even the hotheads?”

“The Klan will keep them in line. And if they don’t, we will. Law and order will be preserved.”

So even a police officer had bought the notion that the Klan was a force for peace. “Are you keeping order now?” I asked. “Has anyone been arrested for killing Crawford or for burning Denver Jones’s home or Cubs Park?”

“That’s for the detectives,” Moss snapped. “It ain’t my problem.” The answer was clearly no.

It was also clear that Moss didn’t like the tone of my last questions. He informed me that he had some official duties to attend to and that I would have to go.

As I left, he went back to yelling at the old man. The East St. Louis Police Department might not be interested in solving a lynching or arson, but they would do their utmost to ensure that derelicts didn’t cough in the station house.

 

I stood in line at the batting cage, waiting my turn at the plate, while Ken Williams rattled the outfield fences with a succession of line drives. It was an awesome display, but it failed to hold my interest.

I was still mulling over my morning conversation with Ed Moss. It hadn’t left me with much cause for hope. If Moss was representative of official law enforcement, and the Ku Klux Klan was considered the leading civilian instrument for preserving law and order, then East St. Louis was no safer from violence today than it was in 1917. Hope wasn’t the only thing I lacked; I was also without any idea what my next step should be.

Williams capped his batting practice show with a towering shot that left Sportsman’s Park over the centerfield wall. As he headed back to the dugout, a sportswriter for the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
stopped the slugger and asked for a baseball for his son. Williams happily obliged, picking up a stray practice ball and tossing it to the writer.

That gave me an idea. I might not get much further in finding out who killed Slip Crawford, and I was sure I’d never understand the racial hatred that had led to so many deaths like his, but I now had a plan for what to do next.

I began implementing it during the game. Lee Fohl had put Marty McManus back in at second base, so I sat on the bench and calculated what the East St. Louis Cubs would need to replace what they’d lost in the fire. Between innings, I cornered some of the Browns’ staff and coaxed donations out of them. Our equipment manager agreed to give me some bats and balls, the clubhouse man offered some old uniforms he had stored away, and the groundskeeper said I could have three old bases.

I became increasingly excited, delighted that I finally had a way to make a tangible contribution. I’d had enough of asking questions and sorting through stories for a while; I wanted to do something I
knew
would help.

By game’s end, I had enough material piled up that I would need to get a car to transport it. It still wasn’t enough to equip an entire ballclub, though, so I also stopped in at the Cardinals’ office to ask if they could contribute. Branch Rickey was on the road with his team, but his secretary promised to give him my request.

Before leaving the park to meet Margie for dinner, I called Franklin Aubury. It was a nice change to have something positive to report.

“I got a bunch of equipment,” I told the lawyer. “And I might have some more coming. I wanted to give it to the Cubs to replace what they lost in the fire. Is there anything else I can do to help?”

He answered, “All they need now, then, is a ballpark.”

“Isn’t there another park they can use?”