Murder at Ebbets Field (4 page)

The courting of Florence Hampton provided plenty of distraction, almost to the point of becoming a floor show. Virgil Ewing and Sloppy Sutherland continually cut in on each other to dance with her; each time the shoulder taps were harder and the relinquishment less willing. Tom Kelly appeared to have given up pursuing her; he sat at his table, his eyes fixed on Ewing and Sutherland, visibly seething.

“See? You dance wonderfully,” said Marguerite.

“I do? I mean, thank you. So do you.” Not that I was any judge.

When the band took a break, I led Marguerite back to our table. My legs wobbled a little. Not until I sat down did I realize how overheated and thirsty I was. Our champagne glasses had been refilled and we quickly emptied them. I then toyed with my empty glass, silently cursing its small size and wishing for a stein of beer.

Marguerite and I didn’t say much; we sat quietly, just looking at each other. With the music stopped, it was easy to hear what was being said at Florence Hampton’s table.

Virgil Ewing loudly suggested that Miss Hampton join him for a swim—no bathing dress needed, he added. He sounded desperate, as if he knew he was coming in second to Sloppy Sutherland and making one last bid to win her favors.

She glared her answer at him, her face flushing. Conversations hushed and people stared at them.

Florence Hampton then politely excused herself and went to sit with Esther Kelly. Mrs. Kelly looked happy to have some company, and Miss Hampton looked relieved to be away from her suitors.

Through the windows, I could hear waves lapping at the shore. Ewing’s manners were awful, but his idea of a dip in the ocean had a lot of appeal. I could feel sweat running down my back, and my severe thirst was nagging me for relief.

A waiter carrying a champagne bottle on a tray passed our table. I leapt up and tried to hail him. I was sure he noticed me, but he turned away with a toss of his mustaches and headed toward Florence Hampton’s new table instead. Great—just when I was starting to feel at home with this crowd, a waiter decides to remind me that Giants aren’t welcome in Brooklyn.

I spotted another waiter and almost tackled him to secure a full bottle of bubbly for Marguerite and me. I filled her glass first, then my own. I kept refilling and emptying it, and my thirst was finally relieved. Just in time for me to be tugged back onto the dance floor.

We danced slower now, oblivious to the beat of the music. I didn’t notice anything or anyone else in the room. All I was aware of was how very close Marguerite Turner and I were dancing. With my right hand on the small of her back, I could feel her body heat through her thin summer dress. And I could tell there wasn’t much in the way of petticoats underneath. I also found that when I angled my head just right, her hair would brush softly against my cheek.

Actually, I don’t think it was really dancing at all that we were doing—we simply propped ourselves against each other and swayed. But I did it successfully and without instruction.

“Tell me,” Marguerite said. “Who’s your favorite movie actress?”

My favorites were well-established and I answered like a schoolboy showing off that he knows the answer to the teacher’s question, “Mary Pickford. And for comedy, Mabel Normand.”

Marguerite giggled softly. “Not Florence Hampton?”

Was she worried that I was infatuated with Miss Hampton? “No,” I said. “She’s a nice lady, but she’s not on my list of favorites.”

Marguerite Turner was making a place for herself, though, and it had nothing to do with acting ability. Maybe it won’t be her brother taking her out for her birthday this year. A brother... how protective? I wondered.

When the music stopped between dances, a waiter near the door called for attention, “Ladies and gentlemen!” After a pause, he announced, “Mr. Arthur V. Carlyle.” No one else had been introduced that way.

Carlyle stepped through the door and stood still, surveying the room as if checking to see that it met his standards. He seemed to be doing an impression of theater impresario David Belasco and was dressed—overdressed—for the role in a crimson-lined opera cape and silk top hat. A black silver-headed walking stick was in his gloved hands. With all eyes on him, he methodically removed his cape, tugged off his gloves and put them in his topper, then handed it all to the waiter.

“Somebody order a ham?” Marguerite whispered, with a roll of her eyes.

I laughed, maybe a little too loudly.

Carlyle put a coin in the waiter’s hand and walked onto the dance floor. The waiter looked down at his open palm with a scowl, then dropped Carlyle’s clothes in a pile next to the door.

As the band struck up the next tune, I grabbed Marguerite. “Another dance?”

We’d barely started to move when I felt a hand clapped on my shoulder. “Mr. Rawlings!” Carlyle bellowed cheerfully, as if I was his dearest friend. “How is our newest thespian?”

I wasn’t sure what that was, so I smiled and tried to shrug off his heavy hand.

“I see you’ve decided to forgive Miss Turner for her bad manners this afternoon,” he said in his strange stilted voice.

“There wasn’t anything to forgive,” I answered.

“Very chivalrous of you, my boy. Well, you two have a good time. Hope to see you again, Mr. Rawlings.” He made a slight bow and moved away.

Marguerite and I stared at each other, then burst into laughter. We resumed dancing still shaking from the laughs.

“What is that accent of his?” I asked. “I can’t place it.”

“It’s
thea-tuh,”
she said. “Mr. Carlyle is a
legitimate
actor, you know. Not that he’s been on the stage in years.”

I was suddenly bumped from behind. I turned around, a low growl in my throat.

“I’m sorry,” said Florence Hampton in a slurred voice. “Please excuse me.”

“Of course,” I said, but she was already staggering through the rest of the crowd, working her way across the floor. Her face was red, and she looked queasy.

Suddenly I didn’t feel so good myself. Maybe I had to see Miss Hampton’s face to realize it. My legs had been getting shaky for some time, but by dancing slower and holding Marguerite closer I had been able to compensate. Now the unsteadiness spread beyond my legs. I’d put nothing in my stomach all day but oysters and champagne, and they were starting to churn in my belly. The seaside smell of decay and fish seemed stronger, too, and I couldn’t breathe fast enough to clear my head of the odor. I quietly sniffed at Marguerite’s neck in the hope of detecting some perfume that might relieve me; she smelled clean but I could detect no additional scents.

“Do you mind if we sit down?” I asked, trying not to make it sound too urgent.

Marguerite nodded and we returned to our table. As I plopped down in my seat, my sweat-dampened clothes stuck to me, barely giving way enough to avoid tearing. I felt a little less woozy with the chair to support me.

Then all the champagne I had ingested bubbled up from my stomach and rushed to my head, trying to blow it off as if I was a bottle and my head was the cork.

I looked at Marguerite but didn’t trust myself to open my mouth to say anything. The warning voice that lives in the back of my head was telling me to exit gracefully before I embarrassed myself.

It was Esther Kelly who gave me an out. She came back to where her husband sat. Pointedly ignoring him, she grabbed her handbag and fur-trimmed wrap and strode out of the dining room.

I quickly pulled out my watch and fumbled to flip open the cover. Giving it a cursory glance, knowing I wouldn’t be able to make out the numbers anyway, I said, “Jeez, look at the time. I’d better be getting home, I guess. With the game and the movie and all, I’m pretty beat. And McGraw doesn’t like us to be out late.” I wished I could have said something about having a game tomorrow, but there was no Sunday baseball in New York. Closing the watch, I saw a photograph and realized I had opened the wrong side.

Marguerite eyed me quizzically.

I tried to think of the best way to let her know that I wanted to see her again and to subtly find out if she was similarly interested. A sudden spasm in my belly warned me that I had no time for subtlety. “Can I—
May
I call on you some time... soon?”

She answered simply, “Yes.” And her smile told me she meant it.

Then I stood up and walked to the door, taking great pains to keep my body perpendicular to the floor.

I made it out of the dining room, then decided I didn’t feel up to traveling much further. At the hotel’s front desk, I paid two dollars for a room to spend the night.

Once in the small single room, it took only a minute to slip out of my clothes and into bed. As I settled my buzzing head onto the soft pillow, I knew that the light-headedness wasn’t due to champagne alone.

My mind was filled with alluring visions of what was in my future: a trip to the World Series, appearing on a movie screen, and spending time with Marguerite Turner.

I remembered something my teammate Laughing Larry Doyle once said. I thought it couldn’t have applied to anyone more than it did to me now:
It’s great to be young and a New York Giant.

T
here is something about the feel of a strange bed—a different sag of the mattress or firmness of the pillow—such that the instant you wake up in one, you know it’s not your own. I was well-acquainted with this phenomenon from dozens of road trips and a hundred hotels.

So when I woke in the darkness in a bed that wasn’t mine, I immediately assumed I was on the road with a roommate in a bunk next to me and a baseball game to play in the afternoon. I wasn’t sure what city we were in or who we were playing, though I had the sensation that we might be under the sea, scheduled to play the Atlantis All-Stars. My head was closed up and humming, as if my ears were filled with water.

I silently cursed whatever had woken me. I could tell that the hour was that one-way bridge from late night to early morning—the time of day when it’s too late to fall asleep again and too early to have had all the rest I needed.

Might as well get up and get oriented, I reluctantly told myself.

From experience so ingrained it was almost instinct, I prompted my body to take the critical first step: determine which side of the bed is against the wall before trying to roll out of it. Figuring out what day of the week it was and what city I was in could come later.

But even the minor task of getting out of bed proved to be too much for me. My brain couldn’t relay the order to my body.

Oh, jeez. I suddenly remembered where I was and why. The champagne.

During the night, the champagne bubbles that had been gathering in my head must have exploded in little puffs of toxic gas. And the fumes they left seemed determined to remain bottled up in my skull until they killed me. I wiggled a pinky in each ear, trying in vain to open an escape vent.

Then, with a pang of urgency, my bladder let me know why I’d awoken. I forced my hands to feel around until I found the edge of the bed and swung my legs out. Flicking on a small electric lamp on the nightstand provided enough light for me to make use of the chamber pot.

When I finished, I killed the light and fell back into bed, wishing that my throbbing head could be relieved so easily. This wasn’t my first hangover, but it was without doubt the worst. Never again would I touch champagne, I swore to myself.

After a little while, I could make out shapes in the room, illuminated by the first tentative glimmer of dawn.

Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, I prodded myself out of bed again, with the goal of finding the hotel restaurant and a strong cup of coffee.

My room faced the ocean, and as I dressed I could see the sun, red and diffuse, as it spread along the horizon. Shrieking sea gulls called attention to the break of day like roosters on a farm.

By the time I put my hat on, the entire sky was glowing as if the ocean had caught fire. “Red sky in morning...” I muttered to myself, trying to remember the line.
Red sky in morning, somebody take warning.
Who was supposed to take warning? Sailors take warning. That was it. Well, good thing I wasn’t a sailor. I figured the ominous sign didn’t apply to baseball players.

In the hotel coffee shop, I guzzled two cups of its specialty, black and hot. A dozen other early risers seated around me dug into more hearty breakfasts that filled the room with the odor of greasy bacon and sweet syrup—smells that did nothing to alleviate my still queasy stomach.

I decided to go home to continue my recovery. After turning in my room key at the desk, I stepped outside and was greeted by a refreshing gust of salt air that washed into my nostrils and tingled the inside of my nose. I changed my mind about going right home and instead walked around to the back of the hotel, toward the ocean, to breathe in more of the invigorating air.

The hotel had one rickety pier projecting from the beach out into the Atlantic Ocean. No boats were moored to the pier, and except for me the beach was deserted. As I plodded through the sand, making my way to the dock, sea gulls made diving runs at me, still shrieking as if there was someone they had yet to wake. I wished for a fungo bat and a bag of baseballs to shut a few of them up.

I walked across the poorly fit weather-beaten boards of the pier as far out as I could go. Standing at its edge, I tried to inhale everything that I could from the ocean, and I imagined the waves that crashed on the pilings were being sucked in by my deep breaths. After a few lungfuls of the sea air, I felt almost lifelike.

The Sea Dip Hotel was on the border between the respectable and the disreputable sections of Coney Island. From my vantage point on the pier, I could see the fashionable resort hotels of Manhattan Beach and Brighton Beach to the east and to the west, the seamy side of the island, the amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna, and the burned ruins of Dreamland.

Turning about, I started to walk back. The sun was now its proper shade of golden yellow, the cloudless sky was correctly blue, and I could tell it was going to be a hot and humid one again today.

I was just about off the pier, no longer over the water, when a sea gull made a low run at my head. I ducked down in reflex, and through a gap between the planks, I saw somebody laying on the sand underneath. Sleeping, I thought.

Then I got down on my knees and looked closer. No, not sleeping.

It was a woman. She was on her back, with matted hair covering her face and no cover at all on her naked body. Her arms and legs were bent into positions that I was sure she hadn’t assumed voluntarily. The tide had probably washed her ashore, dumping her on the beach like a piece of twisted driftwood.

I hopped off the side of the dock and slowly approached her. When I was close enough to see her skin, I knew for certain she was dead. Her skin had a bluish tinge that was no color for a human being to be. Sand was sprinkled over her; it sparkled in yellow stripes across her body, lit by the sun through the cracks in the pier above. The purple and yellow baseball diamond that I’d seen in the Vitagraph studio flashed before my mind’s eye.

The woman had no localized injuries that I could see—no knife cuts or gunshot wounds, no ugly bruises. She was simply dead all over.

Green seaweed was tangled in the blondish hair that covered her face. I bent down to pull away some of the seaweed and her hair moved away with it. The face was bloated, the lips were purple, and the open eyes no longer had a personality behind them. But they had an identity—they were the white lifeless eyes of Florence Hampton.

I felt a sudden vacuum in my gut, as if a vital organ had just been plucked out of me.

The proper thing to do was to close her eyelids, but when I reached down, I found I couldn’t bring myself to touch her skin. So I took my boater off and laid it over her face. Then I slipped off my coat and covered her body—not to preserve her modesty but because she looked so cold.

I then shooed away the sea gulls as best I could and trudged back to the hotel, knowing nothing could help her now. I felt no panic as I walked. Just numbness.

I had seen Florence Hampton too recently, her memory was too fresh in my mind for her to be dead. I could still hear her voice echoing from yesterday when she laughed loudly at Casey Stengel in Ebbets Field and when she softly asked if I was all right after I tripped in the movie studio.

At the hotel’s front desk was the same idle clerk I’d given my key to. “There’s a dead woman out back by the pier,” I told him.

“Oh. Well, I’ll make sure somebody looks into it,” he said. He sounded as composed as if I’d told him a towel was missing from my room. Did this happen so often that it was routine for him?

“She’s—” I hesitated, unsure how much I should say. The last time I found a body, it caused me all sorts of problems. “She looks like Florence Hampton, the movie actress,” I said.

The clerk’s eyes widened. Then he grabbed a telephone and squawked into the mouthpiece, “Get me the police.”

In less than five minutes, four policemen arrived. Three of them went to check on the body, while the fourth questioned me in the hotel lobby. His questions were brief and perfunctory. I told him my name, when I found her, that I had been alone on the beach, that I had seen nothing strange other than the body itself, and that I had covered her with my hat and coat but didn’t want them back. I volunteered no additional information. I said nothing about being sure of her identity, nor that I had been at a party with her the night before.

After satisfying the easily satisfied officer, I went to the trolley station to go back to Manhattan.

By the time I got home, my headache was back with a ferocious intensity and my apartment was sweltering with the heat of another scorcher.

I first went into the kitchen. After I threw some wood into the belly of the stove and lit a fire, I overloaded the coffee pot to make a brew powerful enough to do battle with the champagne bubbles still percolating in my brain.

While the pot heated up, I stripped off all my clothes and flung them on the couch. Then I plugged in an industrial-sized electric fan to stir the air.

When the coffee was done, I brought a mug of it in to the sitting room and settled into My Chair—a deep oversized wing chair with green leather upholstery and brass tacks studded around the seams.

I took a sip of the gritty black liquid and waited for my brain to come back to life. While I waited, I chewed on the grounds that stuck in my teeth and tried not to think of Florence Hampton, not even of Marguerite Turner. I didn’t want to dwell on anything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours because I didn’t want to imagine their consequences. Right now I wanted to focus on the familiar surroundings of home and be comforted by them.

Having a place of my own was relatively new to me, and I relished the independence that came with it. For years, I was a gypsy infielder, playing for factory teams and barnstorming squads, never spending more than a few months in any one place. My only homes were cheap boarding houses and hotels with low enough standards to take ball players.

Now the Giants were paying me $2,700 a year, more money than I ever thought I’d earn at baseball. Enough for me to lease a one-bedroom apartment on 158th Street near Broadway, a few blocks from the Polo Grounds. It wasn’t cheap—$42 a month—but it had all the modern amenities: an electric outlet in every room, all-night elevator service, and guaranteed fireproof. I even had a view of the Hudson River from my fifth-floor window.

Most important, though, it was self-contained, with a kitchen, a bathroom, and a telephone in the parlor. No more nosy landladies to sneak past, no more sharing bathrooms with other boarders. I was now king of my own castle. If I wanted to, I could spend the entire day sitting naked in the parlor. All in all, for a little ol’ country boy from New Jersey, I was doing pretty well for myself.

The only problem with the apartment was that I wasn’t quite sure what I should put
in
all these rooms. At least hotels and boarding houses were furnished. My white walls were as bare as the hardwood floors. And with the exception of my chair and bed, the only furniture was what had been left by previous tenants: a ratty brown horsehair sofa, a small bookcase that looked as if it had been constructed from old packing crates, a pine dresser with drawers that stuck, and a few small mismatched tables. “Early American Abandoned” would best describe the decor. But it was home and it was mine.

The lack of sleep from the night before sent a welcome wave of drowsiness over me. I put the half-full coffee cup on the floor and closed my eyes.

The gas bubbles were trying to beat their way out of my skull. And they had organized now, hammering away in unison like the waves that crashed against the pier behind the Sea Dip Hotel. Three bangs at my head then a pause. Three more bangs, harder. Wait a minute... waves don’t break in sets of three.

My eyes popped open. With the next pounding attack, I realized the knocking wasn’t internal. It was my door. Who the hell would be here on a Sunday morning—was it still morning?

I ran into the bedroom and slid into a robe. “Coming!” I yelled, trying to forestall any more raps. I made it to the door just as the knocking resumed and yanked it open.

There stood the grim reaper, come to claim me. Just like in the pictures: a skeletal figure garbed in somber black, with a death pallor on his gaunt face.

But instead of a scythe, he carried a rolled-up newspaper. And on his long thin nose he wore steel-rimmed spectacles that magnified his sunken gray eyes. He was an inch or two shorter than me and many pounds lighter. Recognition twinkled in the back of my brain. This was no apparition. I knew this person from somewhere.

Exhibiting a sudden sign of life, he stuck out a bony hand. “Hello, Mickey.”

The sniffy voice pinned down his identity. “Karl Landfors. I’ll be damned.” I grasped his hand and found it wasn’t a pleasant thing to touch. “Uh ... come in.”

He removed his derby and stepped in. “Thank you.”

Then there was an awkward silence. We’d lost touch with each other, and I wasn’t sure who was responsible for the break. I tried to remember when I’d last seen him. I knew it had to be less than two years ago, but so much had happened—and Landfors’s sparse brown hair had receded so much more—that it seemed longer.

I offered a seat.

“No. I’m fine, thank you.” A reasonable answer since he could see that the couch was covered with clothes. And My Chair had a forbidding look that warned, “No one sits here but my master.”

“Interesting apartment,” he observed. “Different.” He said “different” in a way that came out as “dreadful.” My apartment suddenly felt smaller with two grown men in it and not quite so nice.

“Let me, uh ...” I started scooping up clothes. “In case you change your mind.” I hustled the bundle into the bedroom and threw it on the bed. Stepping back into the sitting room, I closed the bedroom door behind me. “Well, how about some coffee?” I offered.