Murder at Ebbets Field (8 page)

read the photo caption again and again, not believing that the question could have been put into print.

But that’s what it said. On the front page of the
New York Public Examiner
was a photograph of Margie and me in front of the Strand Theatre. The grainy photo showed me with an angry expression. The photographer must have timed his shot to catch my reaction to the infuriating questions about Florence Hampton.

Bad as the photograph was, the wording underneath it was worse:
Baseball player Mickey Rawlings with new actress friend Marguerite Turner. Is she next?

The accompanying article was written in sentences that read like a series of lurid headlines. According to the story, I was “a baseball player of little renown who currently warms the bench of the New York Giants.” Florence Hampton was “a notorious ex-showgirl whose wanton ways caught up with her Saturday night.” And since I “didn’t deny a close relationship with Hampton,” the paper concluded, “it is believed Rawlings met her for a midnight swim.” As for Margie: “Miss Turner seemed unaware of the perils of associating with Rawlings.”

The
Public Examiner
was trash, the kind of paper you claimed to have found on the trolley if you were caught with a copy. Just last month it reported in bold headlines that President McKinley hadn’t really been assassinated, that he had been living in South America for the last thirteen years.

Although the paper was known for being unconcerned about facts, people did read it and some of them even believed its stories.

The byline to this story read:
by William Murray.
I had his name now. And I could still hear his shrill voice from last night. I stopped worrying about the article long enough to indulge in some delightful daydreams of meeting him fist to face.

A copy of every paper that my local newsstand carried was piled on my couch. I’d gone through every one, every page. Except for the
Public Examiner,
the front pages for Thursday morning, August 6, were dominated by more important news: the expanding war between Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, England, and a bunch of smaller countries in a place called the Balkans. Most of the papers had the reaction of President Wilson and his promise to stay neutral.

Most of them also reported on the opening of
Florence at the Ballpark
but on an inside page and without the vicious slant of the
Examiner.

It only takes one paper to start a smear though.

I worried what Margie would think when she saw it. Not only about the
Is she next?
question—she’d know there was nothing to that—but also about the “warms the bench of the New York Giants” line. That was really low.

And just when things were going so well between us. Not only did I go to Madison Square Garden with her, but we danced more than any other couple and were among the last to leave.

Wait a minute.
Would
it be obvious that there was nothing to the
Examiner’s
insinuation? What if the police saw it and decided to question me again? Would I need an alibi?

I tried to figure out what time I’d left the party Saturday night and found I had absolutely no idea. I remembered opening my watch, but I never saw the watch face, just the photograph on the back cover.

And no one was with me to verify that I stayed in my hotel room that night.

This is ridiculous. I don’t need an alibi. Not because some sleazy penny paper wants to invent a scandal. Oh jeez. What if that reporter finds out that I discovered Florence Hampton’s body?

I tossed the
Public Examiner
on the pile with the other papers, then leaned back in my chair to try to relax. We were opening a homestand at the Polo Grounds this afternoon, and I had only a few hours to get my thoughts focused on baseball.

But my thoughts had a mind of their own.

I started wondering what the papers would print if they knew about Miss Hampton’s affair with James Bartlett. Hell, if they could smear a “baseball player of little renown,” imagine what they could do to a politician. The idea of a politician in a sex scandal would send the papers into a feeding frenzy.

The notion of tipping the papers off about Bartlett passed briefly through my mind. They’d forget about persecuting me if they could sink their fangs into a political candidate.

I let the idea pass on through and fade away. I had no sympathy for Bartlett, but I could never double-cross Karl Landfors that way.

Then some more ideas about James Bartlett came to mind. And these seemed worth pursuing.

“Karl Landfors, please.”

“One moment.”

I waited for the
New York Press
switchboard operator to connect me.

Landfors answered with a grumpy “Yeah?”

“Karl, it’s Mickey. I have an idea.”

“Yeah?”

For a guy who was full of ten dollar words, he wasn’t giving me a nickel’s worth. “Listen, Karl. I have an idea about somebody else who might have wanted Florence Hampton killed.”

“Who?”

“Tammany Hall. Or whoever runs it, anyway.”

“Where’d you come up
with that
idea?”

“From you. You said James Bartlett was running for office, opposing Tammany Hall. And you said if they found out about him and Miss Hampton, they’d use it to smear him. Right?”

“Right . . .”

“Well, what if they
did
know about her, and they killed her. So now there’s a lot of attention on her death. And maybe with all that attention, it comes out that Bartlett was involved with her. Then he’s ruined, right? What do you think?”

“I think that’s utterly absurd. You don’t understand how these people work. They don’t kill people.”

“They don’t?”

“No. Well, not usually. They don’t have to. You remember Sulzer?”

“Of course.” Landfors must have thought I knew nothing that wasn’t reported on the sports pages. It was just a year ago that William Sulzer was impeached as governor of New York.

“That’s
how Tammany Hall operates. They got Sulzer elected, Sulzer didn’t do exactly what they wanted, so they trumped up some charges against him and got the state legislature to impeach him. Bingo. Sulzer is history. See? They don’t need to kill people to get what they want. Besides, it’s risky. It could backfire on them if they got caught.”

“Oh. Well, I had another idea then.”

“I hope it’s better than the last one.”

Actually, I knew it was even more far-fetched, but I figured I’d tell him anyway. It wasn’t going to lower his opinion of me any. “What if it was Bartlett’s
supporters
who killed her? What if—”

“You’ve
got
to be kidding.”

“No, listen. What if they wanted her to end the affair with Bartlett so that he wouldn’t get caught. And she wouldn’t, so they killed her to put an end to it.”

“Oh for chrissake! Make up your mind. First she’s killed to expose the affair, then she’s killed to keep it quiet. Look: forget the political angle. You don’t know anything about it.
I’ll
look into Bartlett. You work on the baseball players and movie actors.” Then he must have remembered that I was doing him a favor this time, because he added in a gentler voice, “All right, Mickey?”

“Yeah, okay.” I was ready to hang up, then added, “Oh, one more thing, Karl. You know a reporter named William Murray?”

“William Murray.... I’ve heard the name. But I don’t know him personally. He used to be a theater critic, I think.”

“Do you know what he looks like?”

“No, never met him. Why?”

“Oh, no reason.”

“She’s a pretty girl, Mickey.”

“Who?”

“Marguerite Turner, of course. You, on the other hand, look like a gargoyle in that picture.”

“Oh. You saw . . .”

“Of course I saw it. We’re a newspaper; we get all the other papers, even the
Public Examiner.
Are you sweet on her?”

“She’s okay.” Margie Turner wasn’t a topic I wanted to discuss with Landfors. “Back to Bartlett though—”

That was something
he
didn’t want to discuss.
“forget
Bartlett,” he said with an exasperated sigh.

“Yeah, okay. I better go.”

Funny thing was, as I hung up, I did have another thought about James Bartlett. If he was having an affair with Florence Hampton, when and where did the two of them meet? Maybe at night, on a Coney Island beach.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, Christy Mathewson led us out of the center field clubhouse and onto the outfield grass of the Polo Grounds. The turf felt reassuring under my spikes, and in general I felt on firmer ground here. This was what I knew—the baseball field. Not movie studios or newspapers or political machines. I was at home here.

My teammates looked similarly happy to be back in the park, with the fiasco in Flatbush behind us.

Technically, this was also the home field of the Yankees; the American Leaguers had left Washington Heights at the end of the 1912 season, abandoning their old Hilltop Park on Broadway and 166th. Until they could build a new stadium, we were letting them share ours. The Yanks were just tenants though. The Polo Grounds was truly home to only the Giants.

It was a long trek from the clubhouse to the dugout. I’d seen ballparks that were square and ballparks that were round and some that were shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces to fit into odd-shaped building lots, but the Polo Grounds was the only one I knew that was built like a bathtub. It was less than 300 feet down either foul line, and about a mile and a half to center field. I could barely make out the pitcher’s mound in the distance, and home plate wasn’t visible at all. What dominated the view in front of me was Coogan’s Bluff rising above the double-decked grandstand. Not only was the shape of the ballpark unique, so was its location: wedged between a cliff on one side and the Harlem River on the other.

It was baseball weather today--clear blue sky, temperature in the 70s, and a slight breeze blowing out to left field. As we moved closer to the infield, cheers and applause rippled through the early crowd that came to see batting practice. Bouyed by the home team fans and invigorated by the weather, my Giant teammates carried themselves like champions and I knew our slide in the standings was coming to an end.

Unfortunately, the visiting third-place Cardinals didn’t know it. Behind the two-hit pitching of Slim Sallee and a sacrifice fly by their manager and second baseman Miller Huggins, the Cardinals shut us out 1–0.

It wasn’t a bad loss though. The game was errorless and well-played by both teams; the Cards just came out ahead this time.

The mood in the clubhouse after the game was quiet but not glum. It was a loss, so we couldn’t be happy, but I could see a new confidence in my teammates. If we played the rest of the season the way we did today, we’d have the pennant locked up by Labor Day.

After showering and changing, I felt confident enough to talk to John McGraw about something that had nothing to do with the game. I’d had another one of my great ideas: who would be better to ask about Tom Kelly than John McGraw? I figured since McGraw had a grudge against Kelly for jumping the team, he wouldn’t hesitate to tell me if he knew any dirt about him.

McGraw was in his office, still in uniform, his feet on a desk and a newspaper in front of his face. It wasn’t a large room, just something to give him a little privacy from the players.

“Mr. McGraw?” Behind his back, he was often referred to as “The Little Round Man”; to his face, he was always “Mr. McGraw.”

He lowered the paper enough to look at me over the top of it. “Yeah, kid?” His eyes had an anger in them, and I remembered that it was winning, and only winning, that mattered to McGraw. “Well-played” didn’t count unless it put the game in the win column.

“I was wondering about Tom Kelly. When he played for you—”

“Kelly!” he roared. “You thinking of doing like he did? Think you’re gonna be a goddamn movie star now?”

“No! No, I just—”

“You forget about them goddamn moving pictures!” He threw down the paper and I saw it was the
Public Examiner.
Jeez, my timing needed work.

Now I just wanted to get out of his office as quickly as possible.

“You keep the hell away from them goddamn movie people,” he ordered. “They’re only gonna get you in trouble. You want to find yourself back in Beaumont?”

“No!” One season in East Texas was enough for a lifetime. And enough for an afterlifetime—it was a better illustration of hell than any fire and brimstone sermon by Billy Sunday.

“Then you worry about baseball and winning the pennant.” He slapped his hand down on the newspaper. “I read any more crap like this, and you’re not playing for John McGraw anymore. Got it?”

“Yes.” And I did. I backed out of his office and hustled out of the park. He had me feeling guilty and worried.

It took a while for me to realize it was McGraw who’d chosen me for the movie in the first place. If I got into trouble because of it, wouldn’t it be his fault?

F
riday morning never dawned. The sun wasn’t powerful enough. to penetrate the dark massive clouds that stormed above the city.

I woke to a steady drum roll of rain pelting the awning over my bedroom window. Rumbles of thunder echoed in the background.

The rain cooled the air so much that my bedroom was almost chilly. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and plumped the pillow under my head. Listening to the gurgle of rain water running through a down spout, resting my eyes in the soothing dim gray light, and breathing air so brisk that it felt alive, I wallowed in the utter coziness of it all.

New York hadn’t been this cool since spring, and it reminded me that fall would soon be here. And with fall, the World Series. I just hoped the Series would hurry up and get here while the Giants were still in first place.

I tried to imagine myself playing in the World Series. Would it be in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, against Connie Mack and his Athletics? Or would we be facing my former Red Sox teammates in Fenway?

Neither ballpark came into view. The only scene I could picture was me sitting next to John McGraw on a dugout bench as he fills out a lineup card. When he finishes, I can see that I’m not on it. Then he crumples it up, throws it on the ground, and writes a new one with a different batting order. My hopes rise only to be dashed again. He writes one lineup card after another, filling the dugout floor with his rejects, and not writing my name on one of them.

My sense of physical comfort was eventually overrun by a nagging voice in my mind. It was telling me that McGraw was right—I was in trouble.

I tried to figure out how I had gotten into such a confounding mess so quickly. What had I done wrong?

I jumped back to the beginning and quickly reviewed all that had happened.

Six days ago, I’m sitting in the visitors’ dugout of Ebbets Field, wanting nothing more than to get in the game. Then McGraw jerks his thumb at me, and I’m in a movie with Florence Hampton. Miss Hampton drowns, and Karl Landfors shows up to call in a favor: he wants me to investigate her death to protect some politician. Then a hack reporter wants to invent a scandal, so he does a front-page story suggesting I was involved in Miss Hampton’s death. McGraw sees the story and gives me hell . . .

Jeez. As far as I could tell, not only hadn’t I done anything wrong, I hadn’t really
done
anything at all. Other people had just aimed me where they wanted and pushed me along.

Well, I wasn’t going to be pushed any more. If I was going to get out of trouble, I was going to have to do it myself and set my own direction.

Although in setting my own course, I wasn’t going to aim for any head-on collisions with the more obvious hazards. Having learned from past mistakes, I knew it was wiser to steer around them when I could.

Chief among the obstacles was John McGraw. He wasn’t somebody to cross, especially if he had your career in his hands. Never mind .250, I’d have to be batting over .400 before I could risk going against his orders.

Karl Landfors, on the other hand, had no such power over me. He was in no position to give me orders.

So I decided I would go and see James Bartlett for myself.

By late morning, it was pouring so hard that the afternoon game at the Polo Grounds was sure to be canceled. Confident that I had the day off, I headed down to lower Manhattan with only my straw hat to fend off the raindrops. The only time I ever remembered to buy an umbrella was when it was already raining, and by then I was always too wet for it to help.

After a forty-minute ride on the 6th Avenue El, I arrived at Park Row to find an overabundance of government buildings. I didn’t know which one would house a district attorney’s office. What did government do to need all these buildings and offices, anyway?

I walked around the block. There was elegant old City Hall with its domed clock tower piercing the cloud-covered sky. Behind it was the Tweed Courthouse, named after Tammany Hall’s infamous “Boss” Tweed. On Centre Street was the new Municipal Building, rising forty stories from the imposing colonnade at its base to the statue that crowned its tower.

I figured if Bartlett’s an assistant district attorney, that makes him a lawyer, so the courthouse would be the sensible place for him to be.

I tried the courthouse. That wasn’t it.

Then City Hall. No, that’s for the mayor and the city council.

Finally, the Municipal Building, which I thought was just too damn big to find anything in it. I walked through the pillars of the front court and under the central archway, which allowed Chambers Street to run through it, dividing the building’s ground floor.

In the north entrance hall, I looked over the listings in the lobby directory. There were tax offices, and the Department of Sanitation, and license bureaus for just about everything—liquor, dogs, cabs, marriages, milk. And on the sixteenth floor: the District Attorney’s office.

That’s where my mission came to an end. There was no one named James Bartlett who worked in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Not an assistant district attorney, not a secretary, not a janitor.

Karl Landfors had lied to me.

Casey Stengel, on the other hand, came through for me. He called in the afternoon and offered to bring me to a Brooklyn pool hall to meet Virgil Ewing.

At seven o’clock I was riding the Fulton Street elevated, on my way to take him up on his offer.

The rain had exhausted itself by now, and the clouds had parted enough to let an orange sunset squeeze through and cast its hue on the city.

I got off at Willoughby and walked half a block toward Pearl Street. The air felt clean after the rain, the summer dust all washed out of it. Puddles large enough to be small ponds filled the streets, and squealing barefoot children filled the puddles. Some played with toy boats; most just played with other children, splashing and dunking each other while passing automobiles sprayed muddy cascades over them.

Casey Stengel was at our appointed meeting place in front of the Loew’s Royal Theatre. He was demonstrating his batting stance to a group of street urchins, while regaling them with a story about—actually I couldn’t tell what his story was about, except that it had something to do with baseball. I wasn’t sure if the kids could tell either, but it didn’t seem to matter to them. They were enthralled by Stengel, and I remembered what was best about being a big-league baseball player: the adulation of youngsters. To a kid—especially a boy—one baseball player is worth ten movie stars.

“Hey, Mickey!” Stengel called when he spotted me. He dismissed his audience with the parting advice, “Remember to lay off the high ones, boys.”

We walked down the street together for another block. “Here we are,” he said when we reached Marsten’s Billiard Parlor. A swinging sign over the front door advertised:
Pool, Billiards, Snooker.

“I told Ewing I’d be bringing you around tonight,” Casey said as we walked in. “By the way, don’t call him Virgil; Virg is okay, or Ewing, but not Virgil. He doesn’t like it. Although I don’t see anything wrong with the name myself. It’s better than Lave Cross—his name is really Lafayette. Now isn’t that a helluva moniker for a ball player? But that’s not the strangest name I ever heard. There was this fellah ...”

With one look I could tell that Marsten’s Billiard Parlor was for serious players. This wasn’t a saloon with a pool table or two, where playing pool was something you did while drinking beer. Marsten’s was all pool tables and no bar.

More than twenty tables were neatly arranged in two rows. Well-dressed but tough-looking players had every one of them in use. Tall chairs lined the walls, their seats filled by silent men who paid rapt attention to the games in progress. Polished brass cuspidors were placed at frequent intervals on the carpeted floor, and ceiling fans turned slowly overhead to circulate cigar smoke. Frosted white lights hung low over each table; their brightness brought out the rich color of the felt, a green almost as pretty as well-kept infield grass.

Casey led the way to the back, where there was a smaller room on a level a foot higher than the main floor. Only one table was in the room; it had elaborately carved woodwork with inlaid ivory markers and leather net pockets.

Virgil Ewing was lining up a shot with a pool cue that looked like a straw in his meaty hands. He was wearing a yellowed undershirt that clung tightly to his barrel chest and droopy gray trousers that hung from one suspender. His face, red with concentration, was distorted by a lump the size of a cue ball in his stubbly left cheek.

Half a dozen other men and a boy I recognized as the Dodger bat boy were in the room watching Ewing. One man had a cue stick in his hand and a resigned look on his face; he was sitting in a chair and looked like he’d been there for a while.

I’d played pool myself a few times. At first I thought nothing could be easier than to hit a ball that’s sitting still. Then after some friendly games that invariably ended up costing me money, I realized it was harder than it looked.

Virgil Ewing quickly pocketed four balls. After each shot, the cue ball was left in perfect position for the next one.

The boy kept score by sliding a marker on a string, and he gave a small cheer at each shot Ewing made. He was about twelve years old, with a friendly innocent face and a small slim body that was hunched at his right shoulder. He was wearing his Dodgers cap with obvious pride and seemed equally proud to be in a pool hall with grown men. A batboy for the Brooklyn Dodgers by day and a pool hall denizen by night—he must be the envy of every boy in his neighborhood.

Ewing paused from his shooting to chalk the tip of his cue.

“Virg,” Stengel said. “This is Mickey Rawlings. You two met before, I think.”

I nodded hello and offered my hand to Ewing. He shook it with a hard grip. “How you doing?” he drawled.

Ewing’s opponent, a lean pale man who looked as if he spent a lot of time in pool halls—and judging by his clothes didn’t make much money at it—mumbted, “Rawlings.... You that sonofabitch cost Sutherland his shutout?”

I shrugged. Yeah, I cost him his shutout, but I wasn’t a sonofabitch.

The man rose from his chair and slid his hand on the cue until he was gripping it like a club. “You got some nerve coming in here. Goddamn Giant bastard . . .”

I had an impulse to grab a ball from the table, to throw it at him if I had to. I held back though. Ruining the game would only get everybody mad.

Stengel warned him, “If you want to start something, you’ll be taking on the both of us.”

Another man, who’d been seated next to Ewing’s opponent, stood up. He looked like a bonebreaker, at least six foot four and more powerfully built than Virgil Ewing. He crossed his thick arms across his chest; his face was expressionless. If he was going to make it two on two, Casey and I were in trouble. I glanced back over my shoulder. It was a long way to the door, and we’d have to make it past a lot of Brooklyn pool players. Might as well stay and fight.

“Hell, boys,” Ewing said with a smile on his face. “Let’s not have us no trouble here.” He spoke like a tantalizing slow curveball; you wanted to either finish his sentence for him or answer before he stopped speaking. He shifted his tobacco from his left cheek to his right. “Now there ain’t no reason to be mad at Rawlings here. He was just doing what McGraw told him to. Ain’t that right, boy?”

I nodded. Although I didn’t like the way he called me “boy.”

“See?” Ewing said to his opponent. “What I tell you, Spike? It weren’t his fault.” Spike? I don’t want to fight a guy named Spike. Ewing added, “Besides, it don’t matter none to me if Sloppy Sutherland gets himself a shutout or not. So you just set yourself back down and take it easy.”

Spike didn’t. He took a step forward, grumbling, “Still ain’t got no business coming here iike—” The big fellow next to him unfolded his arms, grabbed Spike by the scruff of his neck, and pulled him down into his seat.

“C’mon now, Spike,” Ewing said. “I remember when you didn’t like having Southern boys coming in here. But once you got to know me and Billy there, you changed your mind, didn’t you?” Ewing had nodded toward the big man, so I took it he was Billy.

Ewing continued, “Hell, least we can do is be hospitable to somebody from just across the river.” Turning to me, he said, “You come to play, Rawlings?”

“No, I came to talk.”

“Talk.
Hell . . . what you want to talk about?”

“Alone. It’s kind of personal.”

“Ain’t no need to be secret. You can see we’re all friendly here. Anything you want to say to me you can say in front of my pals.”

“It’s about Florence Hampton,” I said loudly. I thought it might convince him that our talk should be private. It didn’t.

At the mention of her name, Ewing’s friends started to make grunting sounds and vulgar comments. They sounded like ten-year-old boys snickering over a French postcard. The batboy giggled at their quips.

Ewing bent over the table, lining up another shot. “What you want to know? If she was any good?” His friends started hooting and the batboy almost fell off his chair.

I leaned over the table from the other side, putting my face inches from his. “Miss Hampton was a friend of Margie Turner,” I said through gritted teeth. “Miss Turner is a friend of
mine.
Either you show some respect for the lady, or I will feed you the eight ball.”

“Oooo ... scary,” taunted Spike.

Billy elbowed him quiet.

Ewing stood back up. We both knew my threat was empty. He could have ground me up in one fist if he wanted to. He looked annoyed but not angry. It was the look of someone who knows he’s in the wrong but doesn’t like having it pointed out. “What do you want?” he said.

“At the party, on Coney Island, you asked Miss Hampton to go swimming with you afterward. Did she?”