Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City (20 page)

As for the club’s losing ways, that was attributed in part to injuries and unfortunate circumstances
. S
everal players vital to the club’s good fortunes also had been lost in recent weeks. Two pitchers had landed on the disabled list due to arm injuries, and Vaughn, the second baseman with the Pat Robertson leanings, had been sent home for “undisclosed personal reasons.” That I found interesting. In fact, Diggen had squeezed a lot of provocative stuff into the piece.

I figured a call to this Diggen guy was worth my time. Some funny things were coming down, and maybe Diggen was just the guy to clear up some of them. Or maybe he was just some local hack looking to stir up controversy.

The
Progress
was housed in a wreck of a building over on Broadway, a three-block
walk from my apartment, not far at all from the corner where drug pushers had set up shop. The only time I’d ever been inside the place was as a kid to fill out an application for a newspaper delivery job. I didn’t get the job. Like the rest of the city, it was a place that had only changed with respect to the mounting crime of recent years. It was a faded, crumbling brick building that took up a good half-block of the street. A half-dozen steps leading up to the double doors served as the main entrance. Chisled in stone above the main entrance was Atlas struggling with Earth, or what was supposed to be our planet. The stone
was cracked and chipped
beyond repair.

I found Diggen hunched over a keyboard in a corner of the newsroom, an old skinny guy, probably about sixty-five or better. He was running a bony hand through the few strands of hair on his oily head while staring hard into a computer screen through a pair of the thickest glasses I’d ever seen.

“Help ya?” he said. He gave me a quick once over before turning back to the screen. He had quick bird-like movements.

“Interesting column you had this morning,” I said.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He pecked hard at the keyboard with his index fingers. It reminded me of my cop days when I’d poke at typewriter keys to finish my damn police reports. He looked up, his frog-like eyes behind those coke bottle glasses jumping about. He was a nervous little kind of a guy. That was for damn sure. He couldn’t sit still in his swivel chair, and a huge blue vein in his chicken neck pulsated like it was about to burst.

“You liked that?” he said.

“It raised some questions.”

He turned back to his computer. “Yeah…well…I don’t like to serve up a lot of negativity. That’s all you get anymore. But hey. You can’t hide from the truth either.”

He talked fast.

“That’s what newspapers are for,” I said.

“Mmmm
…” More mad pecking at the keyboard.

“The damn team’s gone to hell,” he continued. “The sad part is, nobody cares. Especially those damn owners. Make a profit and get out of town. That’s their motive.”

“Owners? I thought Miller controlled the team?”

The froggy eyes considered me again. It struck me that possibly I was no more than a fuzzy figure to the old coot.

“Don’t bet on that. Word has it that that fitness center owner. What’s his name
…
Mick Slaughter
…
is majority owner nowadays.”

“That wasn’t in your column.”

“He suddenly swiveled in this chair to face me. “I can’t write about stuff I can’t prove now can I?”

My remark he’d taken as a challenge. He was a nervy little guy. I had to give him that. He just sat there staring up at me with those big ugly peepers, his scrawny arms folded.

“Look. I just assumed
…”

“Yeah. I know. That Miller controlled the team. That’s what everyone thinks. Hey. The fact is, he’s been losing his shirt with the ball club since day one. The guy had no business being in baseball in the first place. He doesn’t know a thing about the sport, and every nickel he makes he pours into that other losing venture he’s got downtown.”

“His department store you mean?”

He nodded and stared off into the newsroom.

“What did you say your name was?” he said.

“I didn’t. But it’s Crager.”

“What’s your business Crager?”

“I’m a private detective. Just checking out some leads on the Lance Miller murder.”

“Yeah. Lance Miller. A real tragedy. I did a few pieces on him through the years.
Hometown boy makes good. That sort of thing. Hey. He could have been a star. If he hadn’t waited till he was long in the tooth to take the game seriously.”

“Did you know him very well?”

Diggen made a face.

“Hey. I can’t get to know any of these ballplayers these days. They all wanna be treated like prima donnas. Hey. Give me the old time ballplayers any ol’ day. These kids today have agents before they even play in their first game. And God help you when you write something negative about any of them.”

“Even Babe Ruth had an agent.” I said.

“Hey. I haven’t seen one kid in more than fifty years of sports writing who could hold Babe Ruth’s jock. That’s another thing. The scouting is horrendous. They think just because a kid can run a fast forty-yard dash they can make a ballplayer out of him. Then they wonder why he ends up hitting a buck seventy against Class A pitching. These kids don’t even know the fundamentals of the game. Hey. But they got agents. You can bet on that.”

Diggen ran his bony hand through his hair and gazed across the newsroom. “Hey. Don’t get me started. Okay.”

“Hey. I wouldn’t think of it,” I said.

Chapter 12

With the team back in town for the Labor Day Weekend - the final weekend of the season - I figured it was time to get out to the ball
park and do some more probing. I hadn’t talked to many of the players and figured now was as good a chance as any.

I was starting to feel pretty good about things. Maybe it had something to do with the weather. Sunny days with the kind of blue skies that would bring joy to a heart-broken drunk arrived Saturday. It was like the Southwest all over again. But it was more than the weather that had me feeling good. Except for just a few beers, I’d stayed off the booze for a number of days now. Sobriety, for once, had felt nice for a change. Real nice. But it was lunatic thinking to believe I was off the booze for good. I had to face the fact that money had as much to do with my sudden sobriety as did a sudden conviction to just stop drinking. With the rent due and the other bills breathing down my neck
,
there was simply little left over for drinking money. The final installment of my severance pay had arrived the
last
week of August, and I was doing my damnedest to stretch my funds. Still, my sobriety, along with the decent weather and a gut feeling that things were about to break in the case
,
had given me a case of the jollies.

Before heading out to the ball
park, I gave Pat a ring. It was only eight o’clock, and I figured to catch her before she headed off to her hair dresser job over at the Ocyl Mall, but there was no answer. Apparently, she’d gotten her three brats off to her sister’s early and taken the first bus to the mall. I left the apartment and made my usual morning coffee stop. It was beginning to be a habit with me. My coffee,
The
Progress
and the riff raff of the coffee shop as company, although until recently, I was liable to grab some java at any one of the more than half-dozen joints that passed as coffee shops in the downtown.

Myrna was her usual miserable self, a stub of a cigarette hanging from her mouth as she silently filled the cups of her sorry lot of counter customers. I took a seat at a booth in the corner and looked out at the window at what passed for street action. I was barely into my first cup of the morning when Erma of all people walked in.

I’d been into Red’s on a few recent nights, nursing beers as a way of convincing myself that my taste for alcohol could be tapered off, and on each occasion I’d noted the absence of Erma. And now here she was. She was muttering to herself as she shuffled past the tables. She bumped into a chair or two along the way before wedging herself into a chair at a table no more than a few feet from my booth. She wore the same baggy dress that she always had on when she was at Red’s.

“How ya’ doin’ Erma?” Myrna said, appearing at her table with some coffee.

Without looking up, Erma grunted, her face set in her patented scowl. Nobody scowled like Erma. Myrna shuffled off.

“Erma,” I said.

She didn’t answer which didn’t surprise me. Erma seldom acknowledged anyone.

Finally, she slowly turned.

“I know you?” she said.

“Sure. You know me. I’m Crager. From Red’s.”

“From Red’s?”

She scratched her head and looked at the floor. “Don’t go in there no more. Too many shady characters.”

That nearly floored me.

“This place ain’t exactly a refuge for the croquet and cricket crowd,” I said.

Erma shook her head.

“Too many shady characters in Red’s. And that’s a fact.”

It was usually useless to converse at any length with Erma. Thoughts stuck in her crazy head like wet crap to wool, and once she got something in her brain, the best thing was to leave the woman to her little world.

“Too many shady characters there. Too many,” she parroted.

For the next several minutes, this went on: Erma, her eyes staring at the floor and every so often blurting out another sentence about the shady characters at Red’s.
E
veryone in the place ignored her, of course. Disheveled old ladies mumbling inanities were par for the course at Myrna’s. But I was sitting too close to her, and it was getting to me.

“Give it a rest Erma,” I said.

“Too many shady characters,” she shot back. “Too many shady characters.”

She rocked back and forth in the chair now. Apparently, her crazy brain had fallen into some type of rhythm.

That was enough for me. I tossed a buck on the table and started for the door.

“Too many shady characters,” she said. “Mick Slaughter’s a shady character.”

I turned. Erma was rocking furiously in her seat now. She continued staring at the floor.

I slid into the seat across from her. “Did you say Mick Slaughter?”

Her head went up and down. “He’s a bad one. Had ballplayer knocked off. That’s what he said.”

I moved closer to Erma. She continued rocking in that damn seat like she was trying to pump a Harley. It was driving me nuts. Finally, I grabbed her arm. “Erma. What else did he say? And now her eyes met mine for the first time.

“Who?” she said without looking at me.

“Mick Slaughter. You said he had the ballplayer knocked off. You mean killed? He had the ballplayer, Lance Miller, killed?”

“That’s it. Lance Miller. His brother got him killed.”

“Ron Miller?”

“That’s it Ron Miller. He and Mick Slaughter they was in cahoots. In cahoots, he and Mick Slaughter.”

Erma rocked even more furiously in her seat. “In cahoots, he and Mick Slaughter. In cahoots, he and Mick Slaughter. In cahoots…”

“Erma. What else?” I was shaking her arm now. But it was no use. She kept repeating that same line over and over and rocking away in her seat like she was willing it to take her away from there and to some strange faraway world of her making. Finally, I got up and left her there.

I had another stop before the game that afternoon. The public library hadn’t been much help for me in scanning old copies of the
Progress
. But I knew it had to have recent issues on hand. I had a hunch there was something I had completely missed from before.

The mousy woman was at the circular reference desk. She spotted me the minute I came through the door but pretended she didn’t.

“Hey gorgeous,” I said.

Ohhh
…
Mister Crager,” she cooed, acting surprised. “And what brings you back here.”

I gave her one of those oh-so-subtle seductive glances. “What do you think doll? I didn’t come in here to check out what’s on the shelves.”

Her eyes batted. “Now stop that,” she said.

She gave a pat to her beehive hairdo, adjusted her glasses and blushed. I leaned on the counter separating us. It caused the poor woman to take a step back and pull tightly against her chest the three or four books she’d been holding.

“Put down the books girlie. Unless you wanna take them with us.”

“Take them with us?” she said.

“Sure. On our little trip. Just you and me, the sun and the sand. How about it babe?”

“Now you’re making fun of me Mister Crager.”

“Who me? Not a chance. It’s that perfume. It makes me
…”

“Uninhibited.”

“I couldn’t have said it better.”

She lowered the volumes and gave me one of those looks to let me know that she was in on the joke now.