Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City (21 page)

“Oh Mister Crager. No girl should have to endure such teasing.”

I gave her my best hurt puppy look. “You’re the one teasing doll.”

August issues of the
Progress
were piled on a shelf in the reference room. I was looking for the Aug. 3 edition, it being the day following Lance Miller’s murder. I wasn’t interested in gleaning from the news account any information about the homicide. What I wanted to find was anything written about the banquet at the Spinelli the night of the murder. I wanted to get a clear idea of who might have attended the affair. I was still playing with little bits of information, but it’s often the small pieces of the puzzle which go a long way toward fitting it all together.

Sure enough, I found what I was looking for in the local section on a page largely given over to entertainment. The article, just as I had hoped, listed some of the people who had attended the affair. Ron Miller and his wife Reba were mentioned as was the name of Giles Hampton. Interestingly enough, there was no mention of Jeannette. Then I remembered. That night at the ball
park, when I’d spotted the four of them, Jeannette had been dressed casually while the others clearly had been in attire more suited for such a gala event. Had she even attended? Most of the names I didn’t recognize. But two other names were familiar - Jack Walters and Billy Hanson, the two ballplayers who’d been at Mick’s gym. Apparently, they were the only two ballplayers from the team in attendance.

There was also a picture to go with the story. This I gave some scrutiny. A great sea of faces were in the picture - people in formal attire sitting at tables. The photograph had obviously been taken from some podium in the room without the benefit of a zoom lens. Only the people sitting nearest the camera were in any sort of clear focus. Still, I could make out some familiar faces
,
and if I wasn’t mistaken the dumpy guy next to the wall holding a drink was Emerson. With his white shock of hair and wide girth, he stuck out in the photo like a loud drunk at a Baptist picnic. Among all the suits he was the lone male in the picture not wearing one.

I called a cab from outside the library. No more than a minute went by before one pulled up to the curb with my old buddy behind the wheel.

“You don’t look drunk or beaten up this time,” he said. “What gives?”

“My therapist tells me that’s self-destructive behavior,” I said.

“In therapy now huh? So that’s where all your money goes.”

“That and toward cab fare,” I said.

“Where to?”

“The ball
park.”

He shook his head and smiled.

“You’re in luck this time. Today there actually is a game.”

We headed through town, the sunshine lending a happier tone to the empty storefronts, crumby bars and the lousy street life that reeled past. At the corner I noticed Mick’s place was dark inside. Apparently, he was still out of town, and no one had been left in charge to open the place. The question was: Why? Hadn’t he left someone to run it on other Saturdays? At least, that’s what he told me before.

I noticed the cabbie glancing at me in his rearview mirror.

“I’ll bet I make a good 50 percent of my income on fares back and forth from this ball
park in the summer.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure as shit.”

“Get many ballplayers?”

He grinned back at me.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yeah.”

He continued grinning at me.

“You got something to say cabbie say it.”

“It’ll cost ya.”

We were just pulling up to the ball
park. A little kid wearing a Mets ball
cap and waving a Mets pennant was being led by his father past the car toward the stadium. “How much?” I said.

“What’s it worth to ya?” he said.

“What is this? A game?”

He was turned around in the seat now looking real smug. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty.

“Okay,” he said. “Now that we’ve taken care of cab fare. Match that sucker.”

“Your ass,” I said.

I crumpled up the twenty and pushed it through the screen. Then I pulled a ten out of my pocket, held it up for him to see, and pushed that through the screen as well.

“There. That covers me for the other night too.”

He looked down at it and grinned. “I’ll guess that’ll do.”

“Okay. Sing your song.”

“That one ballplayer. The one the team sent home a few weeks ago
…
supposedly for personal reasons. What’s his name
?
Billy Vaughn
?
I picked him up after the game the night Lance Miller was killed.”

“Yeah. So.”

“So, I took him to the Spinelli Hotel.”

The team had just gotten done with batting practice and was now settling into its
pre-game clubhouse routine. At the players gate entrance at the top of a ramp leading into the back door of the Mets’ clubhouse, I was met by Ray Wallace, the Mets’ one-man public relations office. I’d had several conversations with Wallace in recent weeks about the possibility of my speaking to Dutch Reuther, the Mets crusty veteran manager. Word had it that Lance and Dutch had carried on a feud of some kind during Lance’s time with the team, and I thought it would be worth checking out. It wasn’t my style to go through public relations flunkies in order to talk with people, but Dutch had proven to be a particularly hard person to contact in recent weeks, and with the team mostly on the road during that time, I had been forced to use the telephone in vain attempts to reach the manager. For weeks, Wallace had been putting me off like I had the
worst case
of leprosy. Finally, he had given in.

The clubhouse was a cramped, dark and dismal little hovel of a room that stank of rank feet and body odor. Rusted pipes running across the ceiling dripped of mildew. Rows of lockers ran the length of three walls
with
long wooden benches for the players to sit. There was virtually no room for twenty-five players to move around, let alone have any privacy. Making the whole atmosphere unbearable was the crashing sound of rap music. An insane asylum was a better environment. All around the room, players were milled about in groups or alone, joking, jiving, strutting. Four were playing cards at a metal table shoved into a corner. A hulking black kid was in his batting stance, taking practice swings
before
a mirror. Everyone gave the kid wide berth. I figured he had to be Tate, the kid from the streets of Chicago, the team’s single home run threat. Every few moments, he’d uncurl his big body and launch into an imaginary pitch. Three Hispanic players were jabbering away in Spanish near the clubhouse entrance. Another player in front of his locker in nothing but a jock strap demonstrated his Kung Fu moves for the benefit of two other players. Then I caught sight of Hans
o
n, the kid from the gym. He sat by himself
before
his locker, a bat propped up between his legs. Sitting there in just his uniform pants, I could see now he had one hell of a muscular build. In fact, he looked damn near as impressive as some of the muscle heads down at Mick’s gym. But the happy kid I recalled from the gym appeared listless and withdrawn. He seemed upset about something, or maybe he didn’t feel well. I couldn’t decide which. Another player was stretched facedown out on a table in another corner of the room. He was tall and lanky and wearing only his uniform pants as he rested very still on the table. I thought he might be sleeping until he began to stir. “Hey where in the fuck is Emerson anyway?” he said. It was Jack Walter, the other kid I’d met at Mick’s Gym. The one with the attitude.

Just then, Emerson came busting through a door from across the room toward the
table. He was loaded down with towels, each of his pudgy hands gripping bottles. He set the towels in a pile on the edge of the table and the bottles next to the towels, then immediately got to work rubbing the shoulders of Walter.

“I don’t have all fuckin’ day you know,” Walter said. “I gotta warm up yet.”

I moved across the room
, leaned down
and
got right into Walter’s face
. “Didn’t know it was a big game.”
I straightened up while maintaining this kind of wise-guy sneer.

He didn’t seem to recognize me at first. His eyebrows furrowed. Then it hit him.

“Oh. It’s the detective. Or should I say DICK-TEK-tive.”

Emerson shook his head at me. “This isn’t a good time.”

“Yeah,” sneered Walter. “Why don’t you take your business elsewhere.”

So help me God I could have smashed his face right there. I was aware of some of the other players looking our way. Tate had paused from taking his practice swings.

I looked at Emerson. “I wanted to speak with Reuther. Later, I’d like to have a talk with you.”

Emerson continued kneading the shoulders of Walter. “Sure, he said.
“Have Ray
Wallace bring you back down here after the game starts.”

I backed away. Walter gave me a smirk.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

Dutch Reuther was getting his picture snapped at home plate by a
Progress
photographer.

This was Dutch’s farewell, the final weekend of his baseball life after nearly fifty years in the game as a player, coach and manager, and the
Progress
was preparing a big feature story on Dutch. A photographer was snapping one last shot of the manager shaking hands with some local dignitaries whom I didn’t recognize. He appeared, if anything, weary of the entire affair.

When he finally managed to break away from the photographer and a few other people who wanted a few minutes of his time, he ambled slowly to the dugout where I was waiting for him.

“I don’t know what help I can give you,” he said as he spat a stream of tobacco juice at the dugout steps in front of us. “These kids come, and they go so fast. You don’t hardly get to know any of ‘em.”

“What about Lance Miller?”

“Yeah. I figured that’s who ya wanted to talk about. Well what about him? We didn’t get along. I guess that’s no secret. As far as I’m concerned he pissed away what chance he ever had at being any type of real ballplayer.”

“But he put out for you here.”

Dutch nodded. “He did. I have to say he helped some of these youngsters on the team too.”

“So he did some good then?”

Dutch looked at me. He had a weathered, leathery old face, the kind of mug you’d see on washed up rodeo performers.

“Son,” he said. “I been in this game for so long I can’t remember half the guys I played against let alone managed. But Lance and me go back a long ways. A long ways. I had him back in Rookie League ball years ago. Couldn’t teach him a blessed thing. Hell. The kid didn’t want to be taught nothin’.”

He gazed out at the ball field and spat another stream of tobacco juice at the steps. The brown liquid formed in a gob at the edge of one step. We watched it stretch like gum from the concrete before dripping in a neat little circle to the step below.

“Ah hell. Like all the rest of ‘em nowadays,” he continued. “They know it all. Got their own agents and personal trainers and everything else.”

“Okay,” I said.

And I figured that’s the way it was. Guys like Diggen and this old baseball hand
. T
hey were relics from the days when ballplayers ate dirt for breakfast, sharpened their spikes with nail files as if preparing for combat, and lived and breathed baseball all their waking hours. Modern players failed to fit the mold.

But Reuther was hardly through.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “There are some hard-working young ballplayers on this club. Take Vaughn. Kid lives for baseball. Little on the religious side and a bit high-strung
,
but I’ll take nine Vaughns on my team any day.”

Reuther shook his head. “But even that kid has an agent, and a personal trainer to boot.”

“Personal trainer?” I said.

“You don’t know? Sure. Emerson’s his personal trainer. He’s got a deal worked out with Vaughn that gives him a percentage of the kid’s earnings. Ya ever heard of such a thing? Can’t say I’m too happy about that. But what can ya do?”

“Vaughn got sent home,” I said. “Why was that?”

Reuther’s eyes narrowed in on me. “Got himself too worked up about things. That’s just the way he is. The kid’s no natural hitter. Just an old slap hitter who can get the bat on the ball. Got himself into a slump. A real doozy. Got to the point where he couldn’t do nothing. Even his fielding was shot to hell. Figured sending him home the last few weeks of the season was best.”

“Isn’t that a bit radical?”

“Nah. The kid needed to get his mind off the game. It was eatin’ him up. He’ll go to instructional ball this winter and get straightened out.”

Reuther smiled.

“What’s funny?”

“You know what we did during a hitting slump when I was playing?”