Murder at Ebbets Field (15 page)

T
he morning papers all carried the story of Larry Harron’s death. Most gave it prominent space on their front pages, eclipsing their coverage of the war in Europe. They all gave the official cause of death as accidental arsenic poisoning. Since he was found in the ballpark’s tool shed, the police concluded that he’d gotten into some of the groundskeeper’s chemicals.

There was variation in the papers’ descriptions of the boy. His reported age ranged from twelve to sixteen. Some papers omitted any mention of his physical disability, while others suggested he was mentally retarded and didn’t know what he was eating. None mentioned any family.

The newspapers were unanimous in describing Larry Harron’s popularity among Dodger fans; most echoed the
Brooklyn Eagle,
which called him “a favorite of the Ebbets Field faithful.”

The
Public Examiner
took its usual hysterical approach to the story. Instead of stopping with a report on Harron’s death, it had a column written by William Murray headlined Does
Death Stalk the Dodgers?
Murray suggested that Florence Hampton, as part-owner, and now the batboy Harron had been killed in some plot to hurt the Brooklyn team. “How long until a Dodger player is murdered?” he wrote. Little did Murray know that it almost was a ballplayer who was killed.

At least I wasn’t mentioned in Murray’s article. He was pursuing a new scenario now. Instead of actresses who knew Mickey Rawlings being potential murder victims, it was people associated with the Dodger team.

I allowed myself a moment of relief that William Murray was off my back. Then I realized he had the right approach—there was some sense behind the sensationalism. Murray was looking for patterns in the tragedies of the last three weeks to see how they connected. I needed to do the same and see where the murder of Larry Harron—or attempted murder of Virgil Ewing—fit into the pattern.

I thought about calling Margie and decided against it. She’d be at the studio, and I didn’t want to cause her any more trouble with Elmer Garvin.

Besides, I didn’t know how much I should share with her. I still hadn’t told her that I wasn’t the one who put the champagne in the picnic basket. At first I held back to avoid scaring her, to keep her from worrying. Then I realized she would probably do a lot more than worry. She’d likely go after whoever tried to poison us and possibly put herself in danger in the process. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything about it now.

I wasn’t sure if I should tell her about Ewing and the batboy, either. Not until I found out more about it.

I called Casey Stengel’s number to ask him about Larry Harron. No answer.

Next I went to the ice box and pulled out a small tissue-wrapped bundle from the bottom shelf. Before Ewing’s friend Billy had left, I’d asked him to leave the tobacco with me, but he wouldn’t. I guess he didn’t trust me completely. He forgot about the wad he’d knocked to the floor, though, so I wrapped it up and saved it. In a case that was mostly conjecture, it was the first hard evidence I had.

I laid the tobacco on the coffee table and sat back in my chair, staring at the leafy shreds of Beechnut. Yes, it was evidence, but it was telling me nothing.

Perhaps there wasn’t much to tell. It could be a mistake to try to draw complex conclusions from simple facts. Like the death of William Daley, the simple solution being that he really died from tainted oysters. The only evidence to the contrary was the material left by Florence Hampton—the notes from the ship’s physician and the description of arsenic that she had written. Maybe she just couldn’t accept his death as being from natural causes.

Aloud I cursed the speculative diversion about William Daley and the baseball tour. Reality was what mattered. Reality was the dead blue body of Florence Hampton, the intense pain I’d suffered a couple of nights ago, a wad of poisoned tobacco, and a dead batboy who had never harmed anyone.

Means, motive, and opportunity. I’d learned a couple of years ago that a murderer would have to meet all three criteria. They ran through my mind yesterday, but I hadn’t yet applied them to each death and each attempt.

I picked up a pencil and the scratch paper with my batting average calculations. Flipping it over, I started to write.

Victim: Florence Hampton. Suspects: Ewing, Sutherland, Kelly. They all met the means, motive, opportunity criteria. They were all with her the night she died, they each had a romantic interest in her, and all were strong enough to drown her.

Next case, an attempted murder. Intended victims: Mickey Rawlings and/or Marguerite Turner. Suspects: I put down a question mark. Motive: another question mark, but I thought maybe somebody didn’t like us asking questions about the night Miss Hampton died. Means: poisoned champagne. I added a question mark there, too. I couldn’t prove that it was poisoned. Opportunity: Tom Kelly was the only one there. No, that’s not true. Opportunity was wide open. The picnic basket had been left in the truck all morning. Anybody could have slipped the bottle in. Even Ewing or Sutherland; they were playing in Ebbets Field that afternoon so could have easily been on Coney Island in the morning.

Finally, Larry Harron. Motive: somebody wanted to kill Virgil Ewing. Means: poisoned chewing tobacco. Opportunity: Sloppy Sutherland. Tom Kelly would have been at the studio. No, he wasn’t! Margie said they all had Friday off. He could have gone to Ebbets Field and got into the locker room somehow.

Okay, I’ll go back to William Daley. Motive: question mark. Opportunity: Ewing, Sutherland, and Kelly were all on the cruise. Means: poisoned oysters.

Jeez, poison again.

Daley dead, officially of food poisoning but with symptoms that match arsenic. Florence Hampton dead by drowning. Me nearly poisoned, probably, and with symptoms matching those in Florence Hampton’s arsenic notes. The Dodger batboy poisoned by arsenic. There was almost a pattern here: Arsenic, drowning, arsenic, arsenic.

Why the change-up? A pitcher will vary his pitches, but would a murderer? Wouldn’t he stick to the method that worked? Damned if I knew.

Looking over everything I’d just scribbled, I realized that I didn’t
know
very much at all.

I called Karl Landfors and filled him in on everything.

“That’s curious,” he said. “There could be several reasons why somebody would change methods. One would be to confuse the trail, to keep a pattern from becoming obvious. Or it could be desperation. If he thought he was about to get caught, he might try anything. Or perhaps convenience. Something presented itself and he took advantage of it.”

“Couldn’t the answer be that there’s more than one killer?” I suggested. “Say Virgil Ewing drowned Florence Hampton and then Sloppy Sutherland tried to poison Ewing to get revenge.”

“Hmm. It’s possible, of course. Let me give it some thought.”

“Okay.” I didn’t say so, but I felt better having Landfors think about it.

L
andfors did more than think about it.

Three days later he called back. The first words out of his mouth were, “Florence Hampton was poisoned.”

“She was drowned,” I argued. “You showed me the autopsy report. There was water in her lungs.”

“That’s true, there was.” In a flat, tired voice he explained, “The poison wasn’t enough to kill her. She was probably weakened by the poison, thrown in the water, and then she drowned.”

“Huh. How do you know about the poison?”

“I had her exhumed.”

“You dug her up?”

There was silence, then he said wearily, “Yes, that’s what exhumed means. I had Libby dug up and reautopsied.”

Libby. Sometimes I forgot this was his sister we were talking about. “Do the police know?” I asked.

“No, there was no need for that. I simply went to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn; she was buried in the Daley family plot. I told the cemetery administrator that our family wanted her body moved back to Ohio, and he had her disinterred. I hired a private coroner to do the examination, then I told the administrator that we changed our minds and decided to let her rest next to her husband. So he had her buried again.” Landfors wasn’t gloating at the success of the ruse; he sounded exhausted, as tired as if he’d done the digging himself. “Only you and I know she was poisoned ... and the coroner, of course.” He paused, then added, “It was arsenic.”

“Is this autopsy right?” I asked. “If she had arsenic in her, why wasn’t it found the first time?”

“Nobody expected to find it. The assumption was that she drowned, and when her lungs were found to be full of water nobody bothered to do a chemical analysis. The second autopsy is correct. Arsenic is easy to detect if you look for it.”

“It is?”

“Yes, certainly. Arsenic is an element—it doesn’t break down, it stays in the body. Even a tiny amount can be detected.”

I had an idea. “Are you in your office?”

“Yes, why?”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

I put the champagne cork on Landfors’s desk; it had still been in the pocket of the jacket I’d worn to Steeplechase Park. Then I took the wrapped wad of chewing tobacco from my pocket and placed it next to the cork.

“Can you get these tested?” I asked.

“For poison?”

I nodded. “The tobacco is from Virgil Ewing’s locker. It’s the stuff Larry Harron, the Dodger batboy, got hold of.”

“My understanding,” Landfors said, “is that you don’t ingest the tobacco though. You chew it and spit, right?”

“Doesn’t always work that way.” Grimacing at the memory of my own early experience with the odious substance, I explained, “When you first try it, you usually end up swallowing some.”

Landfors’s face developed the same sour expression that it had when he’d tasted my coffee.

“And the cork,” I said, “is from the champagne Margie and I had on the beach. I thought maybe some of it could have soaked into the cork.”

“Could be.... I’ll have it tested if you want. But it sounded to me like you just had a stomach ache. If it was poison, why didn’t Miss Turner have the same symptoms?”

“She didn’t drink. She had stunts to do in the afternoon.”

Landfors’s eyebrows rose and fell. “You drank it and she didn’t?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you better tell me the whole story again. What you ate, where you were . . . everything.”

I filled him in on every detail I could remember of our picnic lunch and concluded with the opinion, “I’m sure somebody tried to kill me. Or us.”

“Damn,” he exhaled. “I’m sorry, Mickey. I didn’t mean for you to get this involved. I don’t want anything happening to you. Libby was
my
sister; it’s
my
responsibility to find out who killed her.” He peered at me through the thick lenses of his spectacles and said stiffly, “I am hereby withdrawing my request for your help. I think you should forget about investigating my sister’s death and concentrate on baseball.” It sounded like something John McGraw would say, but it was more polite than McGraw would word it.

“Hell no,” was my answer. “I’ve been in worse scrapes. Besides, now I have a personal reason to stick it out.”

Landfors paused then nodded. “Very well. Thank you.” He started to toy with the cork, trying to stand it upright on the big head. He muttered, almost to himself, “Arsenic . . . poison . . .” The cork kept falling down and he kept trying to stand it up. I didn’t think it was such a good idea for him to be playing with it, and I wondered if poison could work its way through human skin.

“Something’s bothering me,” he finally said.

Yeah, I could tell. “What?” I prompted.

His eyes stayed down, staring at the cork. “Poison. Why poison? That’s a woman’s murder weapon.”

A
woman’s
murder weapon? They had their own murder weapon?

“The business with Virgil Ewing bothers me, too,” he continued. “That’s awfully convenient, the batboy getting killed instead of him. How about this: what if Ewing put the poisoned tobacco in the locker himself, and then left it for somebody else to take. Everybody assumes it was meant for him, and he’s eliminated as a suspect. Very convenient.”

Landfors drummed his fingers on the desktop. There was more on his mind, but it didn’t pass his lips.

I had one more idea. “We’re still guessing about William Daley,” I said. “Can you have him dug up—exhumed—too? And checked for poison?”

“Well, it’s possible, of course. But I couldn’t make the request on my own. I’m just his brother-in-law, not immediate family. There would have to be a court order. That would mean getting the police involved and publicity.” He thought for a moment. “Later, maybe, if we have to. Let’s see how things work out.”

“Okay. Hey, I got to get to the ballpark.”

“All right, I’ll let you know as soon as I have the test results on these things.” As I stood to go, he stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Take care of yourself, Mickey. Be careful ... really careful.”

I had nine innings on the bench, while Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Phillies beat Jeff Tesreau 3—2 for a split of the four-game series. Nine innings, an hour and a half, to mull over my conversation with Karl Landfors.

Watching big husky guys like Alexander and Gavvy Cravath of Philadelphia, and our own Tesreau and Fred Merkle, I became skeptical about a ballplayer using poison. Fists maybe, or a bat—something straightforward, where you can feel the impact on your target. Not poison.

I thought of the game’s craftiest players—Ty Cobb and Johnny Evers—and of the most crooked—Hal Chase and Heinie Zimmerman, who were known to throw games for gamblers. Not even these men would resort to such a cowardly weapon as poison.

Nor would somebody who had once been a player—Tom Kelly.

A woman’s murder weapon. I never thought of a woman as a killer.

But by the time the game was over, there were some questions I wanted to ask Margie Turner.

At eight o’clock, that’s what I was doing, in her parlor, in her apartment in Red Hook. She’d settled herself on the sofa in a way that suggested I was to sit next to her. Instead, I’d taken an armchair across from her, so as to keep her in full view, to see her reactions to my questions.

“When we were at the Sea Dip Hotel,” I said, “I asked you who Florence Hampton was with, and you didn’t want to say. It’s time to tell me now. I can’t find out how she died if I don’t know what she was doing when she was alive.”

Margie’s eyes dropped. “What did you want to know?” she asked quietly. It didn’t sound like she was eager to tell me anything.

“Tom Kelly. I want to know about Kelly. He was chasing Florence Hampton at the party, and she didn’t like him at all. I saw that. What was going on? His wife was there watching, and he didn’t even care.”

Margie said softly, “No, he doesn’t care much about Esther at all.” She looked away, seeming to scan the photos that populated her wall.

“Did he care about Florence Hampton?”

“Not really, no. I don’t think he cares about anybody but Tom Kelly.”

“If he didn’t care for her and she didn’t like him, why was he trying to romance her? And why was he so jealous—angry—when she danced with Sloppy Sutherland and Virgil Ewing?”

“Well . . . no offense, but he thought baseball players were beneath Libby. He thought it looked bad for an actress, especially his own leading lady, to be associating with athletes. See, being a movie actor went to Tom Kelly’s head. He believed every word the fan magazines wrote about him. And he believed that all women adored him. He made passes at a lot of them . . . even me once. As far as I could tell, he usually got turned down, including by me.”

“Did he think Florence Hampton adored him?”

“No, I don’t think he had that strong an imagination. But he thought a leading lady should have a romantic interest in her leading man. The fan magazines and the studios always try to pair actors and actresses romantically.”

“How did his wife feel about that?”

“Esther Kelly is a sweet lady. She never complained, never seemed bitter. She did get upset sometimes though.”

“Like she did at the party.”

Margie nodded. Then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “I would leave a man who ever treated me the way Tom Kelly treats Esther. I’d slap him silly, then I’d leave him.”

I thought she would probably use her knee on him, too. “Why doesn’t Esther leave Kelly? Doesn’t she have an acting career of her own?”

“I don’t know why she doesn’t leave. But she hasn’t acted for a few years. Not until the other day at Coney Island. She said she liked doing the picture because there weren’t any lines to memorize.” Margie suddenly waved a finger in the air and blurted, “She gave up her career for that man! She gave up her own career and devoted herself to getting him started in the business. And this is how he repays her. The son of a—” Then she collected herself.

If Margie could get this agitated about it, I could imagine how his wife might have felt.

I said, “Do you think—I’m just wondering if it’s possible—could a woman kill another woman if she thought her husband was interested in the other woman?”

“Esther Kelly?”
Margie said incredulously. “No, she’s too ... too sweet, I suppose. Harmless.” Margie sounded sure, but I wasn’t. Esther Kelly had been sitting alone with Florence Hampton at a table in the Sea Dip dining room. Opportunity.

“No, not necessarily Esther Kelly,” I said. “Just in general. Could a woman do that?”

“I
couldn’t,” Margie said. “Or
wouldn’t
anyway. Not over a man. Besides, if anybody should be killed, it’s the man.”

I was starting to feel uneasy.

Margie started to talk on about the battle of the sexes, not very coherently. She mingled complaints about women not being allowed to vote with assertions that women could be just as good killers as men if they wanted to.

Now and then I nodded, as if in agreement with her points. I was only half listening, though, as another scenario took form in my mind.

If a man is chasing other women, his wife would have cause to kill him . . .

William Daley ran around. “Quite a man with the ladies,” Otis Haines had said. “A bit of a rogue,” Arthur Carlyle had said. Could
his
wife have killed him? Could Florence Hampton have had Daley murdered while he was on the world tour? And then somebody found out and killed her to get revenge?

I said nothing about this possibility to Margie. I didn’t know how to suggest that her friend might have been a murderess. And with the way she had just been talking, Margie might have said she approved of Florence Hampton killing her philandering husband. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear that.

There was too much going unsaid lately, and it started to gnaw at me. Karl Landfors and Margie Turner were both keeping things from me, and I was keeping my thoughts from them.

I made an excuse to leave early. Margie looked troubled by my departure, but I felt that I had to get away from her and think things out on my own. I wasn’t in the mood for togetherness.

I went back to Manhattan thinking maybe part of the solution was falling into place. Florence Hampton falls in love with a man, they marry, he cheats on her, so she has somebody kill him while he’s out of the country. A friend of William Daley finds out about it and kills her to avenge Daley’s death.

Then the pieces stopped fitting. Why kill the batboy? And why try to kill Margie and me?

That question was coming up a lot lately: Why me?

Then another bothersome question came to mind: What did Margie mean,
Not over a man?