Strike Three You're Dead (21 page)

The man barely looked at it. “We make about half a million of ’em a year. How come you work here and you don’t know we do about half a million of those a year?”

“I’m new,” Harvey said.

Marshall Levy’s office was decorated with silver Levolor blinds, a charcoal carpet, cushioned teak armchairs, George Kovacs lamps, and a marble-top desk on which you could play half-court basketball. Levy rose from behind it in a chalk-stripe gray suit, a light gray spread-collar shirt, and a red silk tie. There was nothing cheap about him, and he had enough oil in his voice to deep-fry a seafood platter.

“Gosh, Harvey, it’s good to see you,” he said, shaking hands over the desk. “Sit down. Gee, you’ve been playing great baseball for us this season. Frances keeps saying you’re the only offense we’ve got left. I wish your hitting was contagious.” He laughed without moving his lips.

“It’s about Rudy,” Harvey said.

“Gee, that was a terrible, terrible thing.” Levy lowered his eyes solemnly and pressed his palms together in front of his mouth. “You know about the scholarship fund we set up in his name, don’t you? And his pension money is going to his foster parents out in Wisconsin.”

“That’s good.”

“The authorities don’t seem to be getting anywhere with it.” He moved three paper clips from one side of his blotter to the other. “But you know this town, Harvey. You can never tell which side of the law anybody’s on.”

Harvey ran his finger along the edge of Levy’s desk. “Rudy was a good friend of mine.”

“Sure, sure. You two were roommates, after all.”

“I’ve got this vague feeling that Rudy may have been mixed up with some unpleasant types.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a guy who hangs out at the park a lot before games. I’ve even seen him at practice once. Now, the night Rudy was murdered, this guy called me over and wanted to sell me a bunch of costume jewelry. Just like that. This same guy once tried to sell Rudy some color television sets, and I don’t know if you know, but the cops found some IBM typewriters in Rudy’s town house after he was killed.”

“That’s interesting, Harvey. But why’d you come to me with this?”

“As I say, he tried to sell me some of these.” Harvey laid the necklace on Levy’s desk. “It’s one of yours.”

“Now, that’s strange, isn’t it?” Levy said evenly. “But gee, Harvey, there’re hundreds of jewelry manufacturers in this state, and a lot of them—”

“No, it’s one of yours. I checked already.”

“I see.” Levy reached over to pick up the necklace and played with it in his fingers. “Why don’t you describe this man to me?”

“Thin build, sort of a pale guy, wears colorful suits. Smokes cheap cigars.”

Levy rocked back in his chair.

“Maybe his name’ll help you. Ronnie Mateo.”

Levy repeated the name and moved the three paper clips back to the other side of the blotter. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

Harvey drummed his fingers on the desk. “What about that?” he said, pointing at the necklace in Levy’s hands.

“This?” He tossed it across the desk to Harvey. “Gee, I don’t know where he got hold of it.”

“He wanted to sell me a gross, Mr. Levy.”

“Well, I’ll be frank with you, Harvey. We have had a little problem with shrinkage lately. Every once in a while a carton disappears off the loading docks. I’ll look into it, I certainly will. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.” He got up, went to the windows, and closed the blinds by turning a thin Lucite rod. “Too much sun,” he said distractedly. “I understand your concern, Harvey. I wish I could tell you more.”

“You can tell me how much interest Frances owns in the ball club.”

The weather changed slightly in Levy’s face, and he turned toward the blinds briefly, twirling the rod in his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

“I’m just curious,” Harvey said pleasantly.

“I’m curious, too—why you think she owns any.”

“I don’t know. I guess these things get around.”

“Well,” he said, giving up. “As you know, it’s not a matter of public record—”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Harvey said eagerly. “I just wanted to get the facts straight. I hear various figures.”

“You do?”

“Yes. Why don’t you just tell me the correct one?”

“I see. Well, Frances owns twenty percent. Can I ask if this has some significance for you?”

“Should it?”

“No, of course not.” Levy walked over and stood behind his desk chair. “After all, she’s not involved in running the team.”

“Not formally, you mean.”

“Not formally? I don’t get you.”

“Well,” Harvey said, smiling, “you know how some people interpret her being in the dugout.”

“Oh, that.” Levy shrugged. “I look at it as her just keeping Felix company. You know, Frances and I go way back. When she was getting her M.B.A. at Columbia, I was there taking a semester of courses; you know, a kind of brush-up for middle-aged executives.” His hand jumped to his tie. “You don’t want to hear about that.” He laughed.

As if on cue, Harvey got to his feet.

“It’s been great seeing you, Harvey.”

“Thanks for your time.”

At the door, Levy put his hand firmly on Harvey’s shoulder, as if he could keep Harvey permanently in his place by doing so. “My pleasure. And I want to tell you how pleased I am with your performance this year. Gosh, we were smart to grab you in the expansion draft.”

Harvey smiled again. “Well, I hope you don’t regret having complimented me like that when it comes time to renegotiate my contract.”

Levy’s left eyelid fluttered. “Here at Pro-Gem, we always aim to please.”

Harvey offered Levy’s secretary his best smile on his way out. When he turned onto the path to the parking lot, he looked over his right shoulder at the window of Levy’s office. The blinds were open again, and Marshall Levy was looking through them.

H
ARVEY PULLED INTO THE
players’ parking lot at Rankle Park that afternoon for the opener of four against Detroit and backed in next to Rodney Salta’s Jaguar. Linderman was seated on the Jaguar’s fender in a glen plaid suit, smoking a cigarette.

“Got a minute?” he said.

John Rapp and Charlie Penzenik passed on their way in.

“Hi, John. Charlie,” Harvey said.

“Professor,” they nodded.

Harvey stood over Linderman and said, “I’ve got a minute, but not here.”

“What’s wrong with here?” With enough force to grind glass, Linderman flattened his cigarette butt under a black Corfam shoe.

“The last time I talked to you at a ball park, someone left me a death threat. Let’s take a walk.”

They turned left onto Roger Williams Avenue, which ran between one looming gray side of Rankle Park and a block-long warehouse with bricked-over windows. At the curb, a man and a woman unloaded cardboard boxes of souvenirs—pennants, batting helmets, Providence Jewels pen and pencil sets—on the back of their station wagon.

“A death threat,” Linderman said. “You don’t tell me anything, do you?”

Harvey was trying to decide whether it merited an answer when Linderman continued: “For chrissakes, Harvey. When you get a death threat, that’s when you’re supposed to go to the cops. Maybe you’re too dumb to be scared. What did it say?”

Harvey worked his wallet out of his pants pocket and handed Linderman the note. “I suppose you’re going to tell me who wrote it.”

Linderman held it in his hands. “It so happens I know a thing or two about graphology, but this is written in block letters by somebody’s off hand. Cursive writing is what tells you something.” He gave Harvey the note. “Now, you could go get writing samples from everyone you think might want to write you a note like that, and we could have our handwriting man spend a few days looking them over and comparing them to those block letters, but the odds are pretty slim, and then you’d probably need a handwritten term paper from all the suspects to even have a shot at it.” He gave a rueful laugh. “I wish I liked you more,” he said.

“It would ruin the symmetry of the relationship.”

“You’re right. Let’s keep it the way it is. Now look, I wanted to tell you something about your friend Rudy.”

They turned the corner and headed up another side of Rankle Park. On their left, the stadium light towers rose freakishly over them. On their right, a shadow passed in the window of a leather supply company.

“After reading the paper this morning,” he said to Linderman, “I figured the trail was cold. Now you’ve got those two strangled kids on the East Side.”

“Don’t worry, there’s still movement on it. But I hit a brick wall today and thought you’d want to know about it.”

“What happened?”

“Let me put it this way. After finding those three typewriters in Rudy’s place, I thought I had a pretty good idea where that money came from. The three thousand bucks.”

“Ronnie Mateo,” Harvey said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re making the same mistake I did. Only natural. When you’ve got a bunch of typewriters lying around where they shouldn’t be, some big bills, a guy who’s been soaking in the bottom of a whirlpool overnight, and Ronnie Mateo, it’s easy to jump to conclusions. I mean, the mob’s just not that interested in typewriters, but a guy like Ronnie might be. And the way Rudy was put away was not a professional job, and Ronnie is not a professional-type guy. But when we finally traced the serial numbers on the machines, we ended up with a much different picture.”

They walked around a stickball game three kids were playing against the back of Rankle Park’s left field stands.

“Get this, Harvey. There’s an orphanage in Woonsocket. Rudy went there to give talks a couple of times this summer, and he got pretty fond of the kids there and the nuns who run it. Makes sense, right? So one day he tells the mother superior that he wants to buy something for the kids. She tells him the kids have everything they need, but the orphanage staff is banging away on Royal manuals from about 1915 and they’re working on a shoestring, and you guessed it. We traced the machines to an office supply outfit in Cranston, where Rudy went and paid cash for three new IBMs three days before he was murdered. He was just holding them in his apartment until he could get out to the orphanage. Our luck that Rudy told the guy who sold him the machines that he was buying them for an orphanage and he wanted the best they had. Cost about eleven hundred bucks a pop. So we tracked down the orphanage, and it all checked out.” Linderman brought both hands up to his crew cut and massaged it. “I thought being nice to orphans died with Babe Ruth. Now who the hell would want to kill a guy like that?”

Harvey didn’t say anything for twenty yards. Then: “Where does that leave Ronnie? There’s still that money.”

“He says he’s clean, and maybe now I believe him.”

“Okay, then, why’d I get a visit from him?”

“I didn’t say he had nothing to hide.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’ll tell you, but I don’t want this thrown around, I don’t want it in the papers, I don’t even want you to repeat it back to me. Because this city needs this ball club, and this is the kind of thing that could get the team in hot water with the league. All right?”

“All right.”

Linderman lit another Marlboro. “All right, it’s pretty simple. When Rankle Park was a minor league park all those years, a company called Vendorama ran the concessions. Everything, from the beer to the paper napkins, came from Vendorama. When Levy brought you guys to town this season, Vendorama went to him and said they expected to keep running the concessions at the park, everything as usual. Now Levy may’ve had his own ideas, but when he asked around and found out what kind of muscle Vendorama had, he’s a smart businessman, so he said, ‘Sure, why not?’ And Vendorama dictated terms. So Levy doesn’t see a penny from the concessions.”

“Bunny Mateo,” Harvey said.

“You catch on fast. When you do business with that crowd, the deal has nothing to do with the price of doing business with them. It only has to do with the price of
not
doing business with them.”

“And Ronnie?”

“A
putz
who happens to be related to a guy who definitely isn’t. So he gets to roam around the ball park and try to sell some crap he picks up off the back of a truck somewhere. So he came to see you because he didn’t want to see his name in the papers and lose his special status and get his brother angry and also because he likes to think he’s a leg-breaker. There’s more inside a cannoli than there is in his head.”

“There’s still that money.”

“I thought
you
might have some bright ideas,” Linderman said.

“What about Frances? Doesn’t she have any?”

Linderman shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Frances Shalhoub and I are keeping in touch.”

They had walked all the way around the park. Linderman went one way, and Harvey went into the clubhouse. Most of the team had already suited up and gone out to the field. He could forget Ronnie Mateo and the typewriters. He could forget Ronnie Mateo and the necklaces. Maybe he could forget Ronnie Mateo, period. He could forget Valerie Carty. He couldn’t forget Frances and the three thousand dollars and a lot of bits and pieces, but the only way he could still get Frances and the money into the same thought was if Frances had been paying Rudy to keep his mouth shut about their affair.