Strike Three You're Dead (23 page)

The man swiveled on his stool to face Harvey. “How would you know, pal? You don’t look like you’ve had any in a while.”

“I don’t want any trouble, but I think the point is that you’re a little out of line.” Harvey’s heart was pounding halfway up his esophagus and, with a long pull on his bottle of ale, he tried to wash it back down where it belonged.

“Or maybe the point is that
you’re
a little out of line, jocko. If I happen to think that Mickey Slavin is the biggest piece of tail in Providence, I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“It so happens it is.”

Nick the bartender had come down the bar and stood in front of them, cleaning an imaginary spill with his towel. “Harvey, what’s the trouble?” He looked at the other man. “C’mon, Ken. Don’t you know who he is?”

“Yeah,” Ken said. “He’s some asshole who—”

“Easy, Ken,” Nick said. “Not in my place. Anyway, you’re talking to—”

“I don’t care who I’m talking to. This asshole was telling me I can’t say what I want about Mickey Slavin.” He turned to Harvey. “What’s it to you?”

“She’s my girlfriend,” Harvey said.

Ken gave a nasal laugh. “Yeah, and I’m married to Barbara Walters.”

“Easy, you guys,” Nick was saying. “Whyn’t you just drink your beer, and we’ll all sit here peacefully and watch Johnny Carson together?”

“Your girlfriend’s probably a boy,” Ken said to Harvey.

Harvey exhaled. “You know, you’re turning out to be even dumber than you look.” He felt as if Mickey was watching.

“Pal, how’d you like me to rearrange your face?” He jabbed a finger in Harvey’s shoulder.

“Not if it’ll look like yours.” Harvey took Ken’s right arm by the wrist and pushed it away. Ken shoved it at his shoulder again. Harvey took a deep breath, rotated his body away from Ken, set his left hand against the edge of the bar, and with his right hit someone in the face for the first time since he was eleven. His punch glanced off Ken’s chin, but knocked him partly off his stool so Ken stood now with his left leg draped over it.

“Damn it, Harvey,” Nick was pleading.

“My turn,” Ken said and came at Harvey with a flurry of hands and elbows, dropping him to the floor. Harvey got up, tasting blood in his mouth, and threw his right fist at Ken’s face as Ken’s right struck his shoulder. Almost immediately, Ken’s left hand found Harvey’s forehead, and Harvey staggered back among the tables, tripped over an empty chair, and skidded to a stop on his back. He wiped two streaks of blood from his nose with his shirtsleeve and clambered to his feet. His right hand felt numb, his forehead unusually large.

Ken was threading his way uncertainly between the tables, as their occupants got up from their seats and backed off. “Let me at that fucker,” Ken was saying over and over. Harvey thought of Carlos Bonesoro decoying him at third in New York two weeks ago, and straightened up with his hands at his sides, looking less than eager to continue. It was not difficult to summon the expression.

Ken stopped a few feet in front of him and dropped his guard long enough to inquire, “Had enough, jocko?”

Harvey suddenly slammed his right fist cleanly into Ken’s nose, feeling something cartilaginous give under the impact of his knuckles. Ken danced backwards in a clumsy cha-cha, his arms swimming pathetically at his sides.

“Jesus, Harvey, this isn’t like you.” It was Nick’s voice at his side. “I’ll get you a towel. Your nose is leaking.”

“Not yet,” Harvey said. Ken was coming at him again. Harvey tried to land the first blow, but Ken blocked it with a forearm, and Harvey turned his head away from Ken’s flying right. It caught him over the ear, and he stumbled back, bouncing off the Space Invaders game near the door. He steadied himself against it. Ken was getting ready to make another run at him from ten feet away. He was dimly aware of Leo’s patrons circled about him. His legs felt thick and heavy. Ken started to rush, but had only taken a step when two arms came up under Harvey’s armpits from behind and wrenched him aside.

Ken stopped in his tracks. “Let him go,” he yelled. “I want at him.”

“No, that’s it,” a voice said easily in Harvey’s ear. “Party’s over.” The hands slipped out from Harvey’s armpits and slowly spun him around.

“You’re a little tougher than I thought you were, Professor.”

Harvey tried to focus on the face. “I didn’t know you drank here,” he said, each word costing him a breath.

“I didn’t know you boxed here,” said Bobby Wagner.

B
OBBY HELPED HARVEY OVER
to the bar, Nick wrung out a wet towel, and Bobby cleaned up his face for him. In the background, people were putting the furniture back in order. At one of the tables, Ken was pressing a paper napkin to his nose.

“Did I look like I had anything left,” Harvey asked Bobby, “or were you just rescuing me?”

“You didn’t need to be rescued,” Bobby said. “You were doing all right. Just get lower down when you want to hit somebody. That way you come up and put your whole body into the punch. You can’t fight with just your arms.”

Harvey tested his jaw. “You won’t tell Felix about this?”

“Naw. What started it, anyway?”

“We were watching Mickey on the news, and he had a few too many opinions about her.”

Bobby asked Nick for some ice to put in the towel. “She’s a sweet kid,” Bobby said.

While they were at the bar, several of the customers came up, most of them to talk to Bobby. They called him Bobby, as though he was part of the old gang. That was the difference between being a pretty good outfielder and being a great right-hander who almost won the Cy Young and sold deodorant on national television.

Ken approached the bar with his right hand extended. “I apologize,” he said to Harvey. “Friends?” Ken glanced at Bobby, as if he needed permission.

“No. Not friends,” Harvey said.

“Go on, Professor,” Bobby said. “Shake the man’s hand.” Harvey shook it sullenly.

“Those guys told me who you were,” Ken said. “Hey, I’m real sorry. I feel like a jerk.”

“You are a jerk,” Harvey said.

“Hey, look, I said I’m sorry. I deserved to get punched.”

“I didn’t.”

“You’re not hurt bad, are you?”

Harvey didn’t say anything, and Ken stood there with a contrite, expectant look. Harvey was afraid that he was suddenly going to ask for his autograph.

“Whyn’t you leave now, buddy,” Bobby said. “The Professor forgives you.” Ken shrank from the bar in small steps.

“Just another asshole,” Bobby said to Harvey.

Nick placed a brandy in front of Harvey and he drank it. It took the edge off the pain in his right hand, his shoulder, his forehead, his left ear.

“So long, Wags,” he said, finally sliding off the stool.

“Take care, Professor,” Bobby said.

The next morning, Wednesday, Harvey spread Rudy’s June, July, and August statements from the Industrial National Bank on his kitchen table.

The only transaction on the June statement was a deposit on the twenty-fifth for $3,000. In July, there was the $3,000 deposit on the nineteenth, which he already knew about, and $4,843 in withdrawals. Harvey put his head in his hand as he read over the August statement. On both the second and the eleventh, Rudy had deposited $3,000.

From June through August, Rudy had deposited the sum of $3,000 four times in this separate checking account. The crumpled thousand dollar bill in the whirlpool and the two just like it found in his sports jacket made five. Fifteen thousand dollars: for someone who made more than that for a month of bull pen work, it was not the kind of money to risk your life over, but there it was.

Linderman was sitting behind a gray metal desk at Homicide at police headquarters wearing his red Chemise Lacoste and brown pants. In one hand, he held half of a diagonally sliced tuna salad sandwich and with the other he was fingering Rudy’s checking account statements. He took a sip of chocolate milk from a half-pint carton and with a mouthful of tuna salad and milk said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is very interesting, Harvey. Very interesting.” He sounded like a wash cycle.

It had crossed Harvey’s mind not to show Linderman the statements at all, but he was more interested in finding out who murdered Rudy than in mistrusting Linderman. Anyway, he had kept a set of photocopies. “Does that change your mind about Ronnie Mateo?” Harvey said.

Linderman gazed at the August statement. “I don’t know what it does. So Rudy had himself a separate little account. How’d you get hold of these?”

Harvey told him.

“That’s not kosher, Harvey.” He sucked the rest of his chocolate milk through a straw and dropped the carton into a gray metal wastebasket.

“It’s okay. I come from a reform Jewish family,” Harvey said. “Are you going to thank me for those?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks.”

“So I guess I’ll be going.” Harvey got up.

“By the way, where’d you get the Technicolor on your forehead and the funny knuckles? You in a scrape?”

“It’s nothing.” Harvey waved it away.

“You don’t seem like the type of guy who gets into fights.”

“No, it was just some guy and me throwing hands last night in a bar.”

“My, my, you live dangerously.” The detective smirked and lit a Marlboro.

Harvey felt like someone who had won the lottery and was still waiting for his check to come in the mail. Not only had the documented bank deposits not immediately produced a solution to Rudy’s murder, as Harvey in his frustrated, exhausted state imagined they should, but in fact he did not hear from Linderman at all.

While the Detroit Tigers crushed the Jewels and Dan Van Auken 10-0 on Wednesday night and beat Andy Potter-Lawn 4-1 on Thursday night, Harvey sat anxiously in the dugout. Arky Bentz had checked out Harvey’s right hand before Wednesday’s game and told him nothing was broken, but it hurt too much to hold a bat. The bench was quiet except for Campy’s exhortations and Felix’s sad clapping. Everyone wanted the season to end as soon as possible, and the Jewels seemed to be doing everything in their power to shorten the games. They flapped their bats at bad pitches. They dogged it down the line. On Thursday night, Randy ran through Tony’s signal at third and was thrown out at the plate by twenty feet.

Harvey spent a lot of time at the water cooler at the end of the dugout, just to have something to do. While he was drinking from it late in the game on Thursday night, a voice said over his shoulder, “How’s your investigation coming?” It was Frances, in a white turtleneck sweater, sitting in the corner of the bench with a clipboard on her lap.

Harvey straightened up from the water cooler. “What investigation?”

Frances made a notation on her clipboard as Potter-Lawn threw a curve in the dirt to Davis. She looked up, simple gold loop earrings sparkling in her streaked hair, and smiled thinly. “I must have made some mistake. I thought you were conducting an investigation.”

“You thought wrong,” Harvey said, slipping his hands into the pockets of his warm-up jacket and smiling back. “Chilly night,” he added.

“Ice cold team,” Frances said.

“Yeah,” he said, “this is one ball club I’d hate to own any part of.” He felt her penetrating gaze all the way back to his spot on the far end of the bench.

T
HE SEASON TICKED AWAY
to its last seven games, and the clock was running out on Harvey. His friendship with Rudy had been bounded by baseball, and so his search for the murderer was somehow bounded by it, too. In a little over a week, Harvey would crate the few things in General Burnside’s mansion, and he and everyone else on the club would withdraw to unfamiliar lives and wait for spring training.

On Friday, September 21, the Red Sox came to town on a roll. They were closing fast on the first-place Yankees and were only two games out at the start of the three-game weekend series. During their infield practice before the opener, Boston had a lot of chatter and good hop on their throws, and Harvey watched his former team from the dugout with the regret of someone viewing home movies of more prosperous times. It was a cool evening, and the setting sun seeped through the arches in the concrete wall of the grandstands and glinted off the vinyl-covered padding on the outfield fences. For Boston, it was a pennant race; for the Providence Jewels, baseball only seemed to be intruding on weather meant for other things. The Jewels had lost seven of eight, and eighteen of the twenty-two games they had played since Rudy’s death. The Rankle Park crowds had been dwindling, and on Friday night the chill quieted those few who came out, so that only the vendors’ lonely cries rose from the stands.