Murder at Ebbets Field (22 page)

Arthur Carlyle lifted a golden goblet to his lips and drank. “O, I die, Horatio . . .” He fell to the floor and began writhing overdramatically.

“What the hell is he doing?” I whispered to Margie.

“It’s the death scene,” she answered.

He was dragging it out, talking and talking as his body twitched in exaggerated convulsions. “So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less . . .”

Finally, he stopped talking and lay still.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“Yes,” Margie said. “That’s the end.”

But the camera kept rolling, and another actor bent over Carlyle’s body reciting, “Now cracks a noble . . .”

I turned to Margie. “You said—” I was taken aback by the peculiar smile on her face.

“Goodnight, sweet prince,” boomed from the stage. “And flights of—Hey! He’s not breathing!”

After Arthur V. Carlyle’s body was carried out of the studio, and the police had gotten statements from everyone present, Margie and I ducked out into the parking lot.

I pulled her between a milk truck and a fire engine and whispered, “What did you do?”

“
I
didn’t do anything,” she insisted. “Mr. Carlyle probably decided there was no reason to live. His film was completed and he was facing the electric chair. So he used his death scene for a dramatic exit.”

“I didn’t expect that. I had no idea he would commit suicide. Now he can’t confess.”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“What do you mean ‘does it matter’? We don’t have enough evidence to prove to the police that Carlyle killed anyone.”

“But if he’s dead, what difference does it make? He murdered other people, now he killed himself. Doesn’t that work out even?” There was a logic there, but I wasn’t sure what it was, and I wasn’t sure I agreed with it.

Maybe if Margie and I both testified about what Carlyle had told us, we could still go to the police. “When you talked to him,” I asked her, “what did he say? Did he admit anything to you?”

“Yes. He was very open about it. He seemed proud of what he’d done, almost gloating.”

“What exactly did he say?”

Margie shook her head. “No. First you tell me how you knew about him and why you didn’t tell me before.”

“I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure. And when I was sure, I thought it would be safer for you not to tell you everything. The less you knew, the less incentive Carlyle would have to kill you.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, but I could tell she disagreed with my reasoning. “So, how
did
you know he killed Libby?”

It was embarrassingly simple. “I saw him do it. I just didn’t know it until that pie-throwing movie a couple of weeks ago.”

“When you got kaboshed with the bottle.”

“Yeah. Turned out that really was an accident. Anyway, Arthur Carlyle was dressed as a waiter, and I recognized him. He was the waiter at the Sea Dip Hotel, the one I tried to get some champagne from, he ignored me and brought it to where Florence Hampton and Esther Kelly were sitting. That’s how he poisoned her. Lucky for Esther that she really
wasn’t
drinking.”

“But he came to the party late.”

I remembered the word Carlyle used. “Misdirection. If you remember, he made a big fuss when he arrived. That way nobody would suspect he had been there earlier, in another costume.”

“And he used the same costume two weeks ago?”

I nodded. “Garvin told me that he had standard disguises for each role he played. He probably
couldn’t
change the way he did things. I think he took some precaution though. He put those glasses on me so I could hardly see anything through them. It was his bad luck that I had to lift them up just to find my way around. So I saw him. And I knew.”

“Wow,” was all Margie said.

“Okay, your turn. What happened when you talked to Carlyle?”

“Well, I told him what you said. That we knew he killed Libby and William Daley and that he tried to kill you. But if he turned himself in, we wouldn’t say anything until his movie was finished. He didn’t believe me at first, so I told him to check his makeup box and see if his needle was there. How did you know about the needle?”

“When we were filming at Steeplechase Park and everybody was getting ready with their costumes and everything, Carlyle was at his makeup kit on the back of a truck. But he was
directing
that day, so what did he need makeup for? I didn’t remember that until I woke up in the dressing room after the bottle knocked me out. I knew that a needle had been used to put arsenic in the champagne we took to the beach, so I checked his box and there it was.”

“Oh. Well, that convinced him. Mr. Carlyle admitted to me that he poisoned Libby at the party. He said he followed her when she left. She was terribly sick but still alive he said. He stripped off her clothes and dropped her off the pier to drown. He thought people would assume she’d gone swimming with Virgil Ewing.”

“See, Ewing asked her to go swimming before Carlyle made his grand entrance. He had to be there earlier. Maybe we do have enough to go to the police after all. Did he say anything else?”

“No. I did mention something else to
him,
though. I told him about a rat I’d seen in the ladies’ dressing room once.”

“
What?
”

“It was a big gray rat, and he must have eaten some poison. He was rolling and twitching. I told Mr. Carlyle it was the most spectacular death you could imagine, much more dramatic than any actor I’d ever seen. And I told him I thought they used strychnine in rat poison.” She smiled innocently. “Do you think the police would be interested in any of that?”

Probably, I thought. What I said was, “You’re right. Carlyle’s dead. What difference does it make?”

I
knocked gently on the door of Karl Landfors’s Greenwich Village apartment. In all the time I knew him, I’d never been here before.

“Come in, it’s all ready,” he yelled through the door.

What was ready? I hadn’t told him I was coming. I swung my equipment bag onto my shoulder and pushed through the unlocked door.

Landfors’s cramped apartment looked just like his office, with bookcases and file cabinets the principal furnishings. Books, papers, and maps overflowed the shelves and drawers; they were strewn about the rest of the furniture and spilled over onto the floor. Two spindly logs smoldered in a small brick fireplace to ward off the chill of the cool autumn morning. Landfors was seated at a desk next to it, with his back to the door.

“Karl, it’s me,” I said, stepping around a steamer trunk just inside the door.

He swiveled around in his chair to face me. “Mickey! I thought you were the porter.”

“What porter?”

“For the trunk.”

“Oh. No. I came to—I brought you something.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a round metal can. I placed it on his desk. “It’s Arthur Carlyle’s last scene . . . where he dies. This is the only print.” I pulled out another can. “And this is the negative.”

Landfors looked bewildered. “How did you get these?” he asked.

“A friend got them for me.”

“Who?”

“Oh, somebody who knows the layout of the Vitagraph studio and is agile enough to get in through a window at night.”

“Ah. Well, that was nice of her,” Landfors said.

“Anyway, I thought you might want to see it. Carlyle’s death is probably the closest thing to justice that’s ever going to come out of all this.”

He stared down at the cans, expressionless.

“The way the police figure,” I went on, “is Carlyle took the strychnine to make the scene look more dramatic. They don’t know he also did it to avoid being arrested.”

Landfors abruptly asked, “Didn’t you wonder why Vitagraph suddenly decided to film
Hamlet
?”

“No, not really. They filmed all kinds of things.”

“They have two studios at Vitagraph: one for dramas and one for comedies. Didn’t it strike you as strange that Studio B, the
comedy
studio, was filming
Hamlet
?”

Until yesterday, I didn’t know that
Hamlet wasn’t
a comedy. “No.”

“I arranged it.”

“You did?”

With a grunt of exertion, Landfors lifted a massive red scrapbook from a shelf above his desk. “Like most show people, Libby kept a record of everything she did in her career. And it’s all here—playbills, photographs, newspaper clippings ...” He laid the leather-bound book open on the desk and slowly started turning the pages. “I couldn’t bring myself to look through it until a couple of weeks ago.” Stopping at a spot where two pages were sealed together, he slipped a forefinger between them. “In here I found a playbill and a news article. The interesting thing is that they weren’t about her. They were about Arthur Carlyle. The program was from the play he was in during the world baseball tour, and the clipping was about him leaving the show early. Libby must have had some suspicions about Carlyle—”

“And if Carlyle caught on that she suspected him, that was his motive to kill her,” I finished.

Landfors nodded. “Exactly.”

“But why would you arrange to have his
Hamlet
movie made? What would that accomplish . . . except giving him what he wanted all along?”

“It was going to be released as a
comedy.
I was to write comic title cards for the picture. Carlyle would have been humiliated.”

“All you wanted to do was
embarrass
him? What the hell kind of revenge is that?”

“Well, this isn’t
proof
of anything. See, I thought I could get Carlyle to break down. That movie was his dream, his shot at immortality; it’s what he lived for . . . and what he killed for. I thought that if he saw his dream shattered, that it was all over for him, perhaps he would give it up, tell us what happened to William Daley and how he did it.”

This was a
plan?
Landfors had better never again make fun of any of my ideas.

“I know how he did it,” I said. It was while waiting for the train in Chicago that I realized the world baseball tour wasn’t a continuous trip. They’d left on
The Empress of China
and returned on the
Lusitania.
A couple of phone calls to Boston gave me the schedules of the shipping lines. I explained to Landfors, “Carlyle left the play in Somerville just in time to catch a ship to Liverpool. When he got there, he turned right around and came back on the
Lusitania
as a crew member. And he served Daley a poisoned dinner.”

Landfors began tapping one of the cans of film. “So he thought this was going to make him immortal, huh?” He stood and twisted open the cannister. “No, I don’t think I need to see it.” With that, he dumped the roll of celluloid into the fire. As the film burned, shriveling and melting in the heat, he added the negative to the blaze.

“I found something else my sister saved,” Landfors said as the fire died down. “Letters from William Murray. He wrote them back when he was a theater critic. Appears he was quite infatuated with Libby, and he offered to give her favorable reviews if she returned his affection. She must have declined because his later reviews of her were vicious.” He handed me a bundle of letters tied together with a ribbon. “I thought I would pass these on to one of the
Public Examiner
’s rival scandal sheets. The only thing they enjoy more than smearing public figures is attacking their competition. It should get Murray off your back.”

I couldn’t see any reason to have Florence Hampton’s name appear in yet another scandal sheet. She’d gone through enough. I tossed the bundle in the fire and the flames burned brightly for a few more minutes.

Karl and I stood and watched until the embers no longer glowed.

A month later, the World Series was over; the Miracle Boston Braves swept the Philadelphia Athletics in four games. Another season gone, another Fall Classic that I could follow only from the newspaper accounts.

Karl Landfors was in France. Just after I’d left his apartment, a porter picked up his steamer trunk, and Landfors took off for Europe to cover the war. He told me he thought it would take longer than most people were saying, years maybe. And he predicted the United States would eventually get involved in the conflict.

Marguerite Turner was gone, too. Gone from Vitagraph and from New York, on a train to California to make pictures with D. W. Griffith. She left with the promise to come back when the moving picture craze was over. Deep down, I didn’t expect to see her again.

Before Margie left, she talked to Esther Kelly, to explain about the Century Theatre and reassure her about the memory lapses. I talked to her husband Tom and gave him Peter Kurtz’s business card in case he wanted to give baseball another try.

With Landfors in Europe, Margie in California, and no baseball to play, I was at a loss to find something to occupy me. I thought of asking Casey Stengel to tell me a story—I figured one of his yarns could go on for months—but he was on an exhibition trip to Cuba with the rest of the Dodgers team.

I was facing a long winter alone.

In November, the Federal League announced that Sloppy Sutherland and Virgil Ewing had signed with the Brooklyn Tip-Tops for 1915. Billy Claypool, true to his word, sent me the contract I’d signed for me to destroy. The next month, I read that Tom Kelly had signed with the Feds to manage and play for their Buffalo franchise.

As the weeks went on, I followed Karl Landfors’s battle reports in the
New York Press
and hoped he would come back soon and in one piece. I read in the movie magazines about Margie Turner’s upcoming films with D. W. Griffith and wished she would return in any condition at all.

It seemed all I was doing was reading about people I could no longer see in person. Reading wasn’t the thing for me. What I needed was the feel of the horsehide in my hand, not the smudge of news ink on my fingers.

My spirits didn’t pick up until I received a contract from John McGraw to play with the New York Giants for the 1915 season. I realized I did have things to look forward to. After winter would come spring—spring training.

Then opening day in April. New grass on the infield soft and green, bunting-draped bleachers filled with cheering fans, the crack of the bat, and the feel of a leather mitt on my hand . . .

There would be the rebirth that comes with spring. All teams would be even in the standings, each with an equal shot at the pennant. All players would start the season with the same batting average. Never mind .250, I could end up hitting .400!

And at the end of season, maybe I’d be in the World Series.

I would just have to wait till next year.