Murder at Fenway Park (16 page)

This had more of an effect on me than the hanging scenario. I had once seen Edison’s movie
Electrocution of an Elephant.
They really killed an elephant to make it. It took him forever to die, while billows of smoke came from his legs where the wires were attached. Watching the film, I could sense the odor of burning flesh. By the time the animal finally toppled over, I was working my way out of the theater, holding my breath until I could gulp some fresh air.

I felt that I needed fresh air now. I was angry with myself that I let O’Malley’s ploy get to me.

O’Malley finally came around to the reason I was brought in. “Here’s the situation, Mickey: it looks to me like
you
murdered Jimmy Macullar. And I think it’s because he knew when you really came into Fenway Park back in April—when you claimed to have ‘found’ that body in the ballpark. I know you been talking to Macullar about it—maybe he was threatening to turn you in and tell what really happened.

“You have a bad habit of being around when guys get killed. That’s a habit we’re gonna cure you of. We haven’t found the murder weapon yet, but it’ll turn up, and I have a feeling when it does, it’ll turn up in your possession. Then you’ll be arrested. And then you’ll be convicted.” O’Malley gave me a self-satisfied smile and concluded, “The only question will be how much juice it’s gonna take to fry you.”

Tyler asked O’Malley, “Can I have a word with Mickey alone?”

“Sure. He’s all yours—for now.” O’Malley rose and all three cops left the room.

I skidded my chair around and faced Bob Tyler.

He stared at me with a mixture of pity and disgust. “You’ve gotten yourself in a no-win situation, Mickey,” he said. “If you minded your own business about that incident at Fenway, you wouldn’t have brought attention to yourself. I don’t know how you’re gonna get out of this mess now. I know O’Malley. Once he gets an idea in his head, he doesn’t change his mind. He isn’t much influenced by whether his idea is right or wrong. I’ve got a suggestion though: it’s still a good idea to keep your mouth shut. Prying into things is only gonna get you more trouble.

“Meanwhile, like O’Malley said, he’s not making an arrest until he has the gun. So you’re still a free man. Almost free. I had to take responsibility for you so you could still play. And I’ll be keeping a close eye on you, so try to stay—make
sure
you stay—out of trouble.” Tyler nodded me out the door, and I left the building with no interference from the police.

When I got home, a worried Mrs. O’Brien greeted me. “Is anything the matter, Mickey? You’re not in any trouble are you?”

“No,” I lied. “The police just wanted to ask me about an accident I saw.”

“I’ve saved you a bit of supper in the icebox.”

“Thanks, Mrs. O’Brien, but I couldn’t eat anything right now. I’m just going to turn in early.” She looked worried as I started up the stairs, and I wondered what she was thinking of her unsavory boarder.

O’Malley sounded confident that I would be convicted of Jimmy Macullar’s murder—so confident that it appeared guilt or innocence were completely irrelevant. I started to suspect that the gun that killed Macullar would inevitably turn up in my possession.

Somehow, O’Malley knew that I had spoken to Jimmy Macullar—but he couldn’t have known what Macullar told me. If he was aware that I knew about Corriden’s body being moved, he wouldn’t have tried to scare me by bringing up the Fenway Park murder. If the body I found was never officially at Fenway, then I couldn’t have officially found it there.

First there was one murder: the nameless body I found at Fenway Park. Then there was a second: Red Corriden, killed in Dorchester. Then it was down to one: Corriden
was
the Fenway corpse. Now it’s back up to two. Any chance it could be reduced to one again? Not likely.

I looked at the clock and noticed that it had only been a couple of hours since my visit to the police station. The doomed feeling that had taken root in me had already anchored itself so deeply that I thought days or weeks must have passed.

It was an agonizing night for me. I lay in bed, reviewing everything I had been through this season, and feeling myself a victim.

Then, after letting myself sink into a mire of self-pity, I jerked myself out of it. And got mad.

I was mad at O’Malley and Tyler, at the cops who brought me in, at Jimmy Macullar for getting killed. I was angry with myself for not knowing how to handle the situation.

I was mad at Peggy, for not being here to support me, for confusing me with crazy talk about slow-acting poisons and Jacques Futrelle and Red Corriden not being dead and—and
Keokuk ...

But mostly I was angry at someone unknown: the murderer—or murderers—of Corriden and Macullar.

The intensity of my vicious silent shrieking finally exhausted me. I slipped into sleep as an orange dawn began to stain my room. It was the color of Red Corriden’s hair.

I
was being pinched. By Robert F. Tyler, by Captain O’Malley, and by a killer. Gripped from three directions, with no way to slip out of the grasp. The only way to open an escape route was to pound back at one of the pincers until it broke. Which one would be weakest?

Bob Tyler? He’d already had Red Corriden’s body moved—that must be some kind of crime in itself. He also had ties to characters like Hal Chase and Arnold Rothstein—and therefore maybe to other thugs. And as my boss, he could easily keep tabs on me. Hell, he could sell me to Keokuk if he wanted to. Bob Tyler didn’t seem poundable.

Captain O’Malley? He wasn’t above a little corruption either—he’d gone along with moving Corriden’s body out of Fenway. He now seemed determined to make me sacrificial convict in the Macullar case, and he had the means to do it. I could see no way to fight back at a man who had a police force at his disposal.

Crazy though it seemed, the killer looked like my best chance. Of course, that was largely because he was an unknown. Or
they
were unknown. I was using “killer” as a catchall: Corriden’s murderer, the gunman who shot at me in Fenway Park, Macullar’s murderer. They weren’t necessarily the same man.

There was a lot to look into, and it was time to start.

The second murder brought with it new information that I thought would help clarify the overall picture. Assuming the killings were connected, the circumstances of the second crime could shed some light on the first, and likewise the first murder could provide clues to the second.

Obviously, the phone call about meeting Fletcher wasn’t made by him. It was a setup to put me on the murder scene. Lucky for me, I couldn’t remember which saloon I was supposed to go to. Unlucky for me, walking around looking for it left me without an alibi.

The Detroit Tigers were in Boston when Macullar was killed and when Corriden was murdered. Did Ty Cobb kill both men? My instinct said no, there was too much difference in the methods. Corriden was bludgeoned—an act of violent rage that fit Cobb’s personality. Macullar was shot—a calculated crime with the added stratagem of setting me up for it. But the crimes still had to be related—maybe the second was caused by the first.

I’d learned by now that instincts aren’t proof, so I set out to get hard facts.

Picking up the morning papers, I started with the most basic. Would Macullar’s murder be acknowledged publicly, or would he, too, turn out to be an unidentified body found under a railroad bridge? No, it was official and public, though buried in the back pages:
James F. Macullar, an employee of the Boston Red Sox, was shot to death near a popular Back Bay tavern last night.
The longest newspaper report of his death contained only a couple more sentences than that. None of the articles mentioned any suspects in the case, and, I was sorry to see, not one included the fact that Macullar had been a major-league baseball player. I thought he would have wanted to be remembered as a ball player.

A quick trip to the library helped me eliminate Ty Cobb as a suspect in Macullar’s murder. I remembered that Cobb had embarrassed the Browns in Sportsman’s Park on the Fourth of July, just two days before Fletch and I went out drinking. If Cobb was in St. Louis, how could he know what saloon Fletcher and I went to in Boston? I found the newspapers for July 6, and saw that the Tigers were still in St. Louis that day. The box score showed Cobb played in the game, so there was no way he could have been in Boston to see us go into the bar. To set me up at Hanratty’s, the killer must have followed us that day—if Hanratty’s was in fact the saloon we went into. That was the next thing to be pinned down.

From the library, I walked down Boylston Street in the direction of Fenway Park. With directions from passersby, I found Hanratty’s Pub.

Before going in, I looked up at the sign above the door.
Hanratty’s
was spelled out with faint peeling green paint. Large shamrocks that were once of the same color, but now even more peeled and faded, were barely discernable on each end of the sign. The exterior of the building didn’t look familiar to me.

I walked into a standard saloon atmosphere, still with no feeling of recognition. I ordered a beer, and drank deliberately, letting my eyes wander the establishment. I tried to pick out some identifying mark that would confirm this as the bar where I had come with Fletcher.

I wasn’t convinced that this was the right place until halfway through my second beer, when I had to visit the men’s room. While discharging the first beer, I started to read some of the scribbles on the wall. Between a couple of French postcards was a poem:

That confirmed it—I remembered having seen it there before. So Jimmy Macullar was killed outside the same bar where I had been with Fletch. And the phone caller knew where that was.

Captain O’Malley said Macullar was killed
behind
Han-ratty’s. I prodded myself to go out for a took—to investigate the scene of the crime, I guess Peggy would say.

The bar had a back door near the men’s room. I slowly creaked it open, and cautiously poked my head out. I knew he must have been taken away, but I had a frightening sense of Jimmy Macullar still laying there dead.

I stepped into an alley that was strewn with broken bottles, wooden crates, rusty trash bins, and a huge decomposing rat that was covered with a pulsing swarm of green flies. There was no sign of Macullar, of course, and there was no evidence of his murder—no patch of dried blood marked the spot where he had been killed. I paced over the tightly packed cobblestones of the alley, and kicked away debris that might have covered something. There was nothing. But it would have been different had I been here when the phone caller wanted me to show up. I’d have been standing over Macullar’s body.

It
was
different with Red Corriden. I had plenty of evidence for
his
death.

Wait a minute, was that a setup, too? Was I
supposed
to find Corriden’s body? No, that couldn’t have been a setup. My train had been hours late getting to Boston. The killer couldn’t have planned on that.

Then I remembered what Red Corriden’s face had looked like. And going after the killer was no longer my preferred course of action.

The alley could tell me nothing more, so I walked home reevaluating Tyler and O’Malley for potential weaknesses.

What was that business at the police station really about? What did Tyler and O’Malley hope to win by the games they were playing with me?

Did they seriously believe I killed either Corriden or Macullar? No, they knew I wasn’t a killer. Neither of them gave me credit for having brains enough to be a murderer.

Did they believe they could convict me of murder anyway? Probably. But they would need either fabricated evidence or a forced confession.

Was that episode at the police station an attempt to make me confess? If it was, it was a pitiful one. They’d have to be a lot rougher than that to get an innocent man to confess to murder. Perhaps they would get rougher yet—once the baseball schedule was over and Tyler no longer needed me in one piece.

Or they might be intending to fabricate evidence, frame me for Macullar’s murder. O’Malley’s words,
it’ll turn up in your possession,
kept running through my mind. I had the feeling that either they already had the gun or knew where it was. Maybe they’d simply plant it in my room if they couldn’t find the real murderer—if they’d even be looking for the real murderer. But if they already had the gun that killed Macullar, why bring me in to the station? Why not just plant it in my room, arrest me, and get it over with?

The only explanation I could see was that the encounter at the station house wasn’t an attempt to break me down into a confession—it was to scare me into keeping quiet until they decided to go ahead with framing me. They were giving me some time—probably because Tyler wanted to wait until the season was over. I preferred to think that Tyler’s reprieve was due to the value he placed on my abilities, but it might have been to avoid bad publicity and a loss of ticket sales.

Anyway, I couldn’t see where Tyler or O’Malley had any weaknesses I could attack. It was back to finding the killer.

I really didn’t know much about Jimmy Macullar—far less than I knew about Red Corriden. I didn’t know who his friends were, if he had family, where he lived. I knew almost nothing about the living Macullar, just how his death had put me at risk of electrocution. It was time to learn something about the quiet Mr. Macullar.

Macullar had mentioned that he was born in Boston, so I thought some of his relatives might still be in the city. I checked back in the newspapers that reported his death, and found that his funeral had been held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the South End.

I called the church and said I was a friend of his just in from St. Louis. I was sorry I had missed the funeral, but wanted to pay my respects to the family. I was given the name and address of a sister, Mary Macullar, in Jamaica Plain.

The trolley ride to Jamaica Plain took the route I had traveled with Peggy when we went to the Arnold Arboretum, almost exactly a year ago.

At the Centre Street address was a tall red-brick house that looked as if it had been plucked off of a Beacon Street foundation and transported to this stretch of road. It was far grander than its neighbors—almost a mansion. I couldn’t picture Jimmy Macullar living here.

I expected a maid or an English butler to answer my knock, but instead the door was opened by a brawny young man who made Hippo Vaughn look like Wee Willie Keeler. Despite the heat and humidity, he was wearing a woolen sweater that made me itchy just looking at it.

“Aye?” he demanded.

“My name’s Mickey Rawlings. I, uh, I knew Jimmy Macullar. I wanted to pay my respects. Is there a Mary Macullar here?”

“Come in.” He gave me barely enough room to slide past him into the front hall. He closed the door and poked me inhospitably in the back. “Hat,” he grunted. I quickly removed my boater and held it in front of me with both hands.

The young man left me alone in the hallway. He returned minutes later, pushing a wheelchair that held a pixie of an old woman. She was bony thin, and her wrinkled white skin hung loose from her throat and arms. She wore a dark green dress that was several decades out of fashion. Her fingers played idly with the lace loops of a white shawl that was folded over her lap. The only real sign of life came from her eyes—dark, darting, demanding eyes.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Mickey Rawlings, ma’am. I knew your brother.” I paused in case she wanted to correct me about the relationship; I was only assuming she was Mary Macullar.

“Were you a friend of his?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t know him as well as I would have liked to, but I’d like to think I was his friend. He was the first person I met when I joined the Red Sox. I’m sorry I didn’t get to his funeral. And I’m sorry about him, being, uh ...”

“Being killed,” she finished. She didn’t sound distraught about it. “Thank you for coming to see us, Mr. Rawlings. It’s nice to meet a friend of his. I haven’t seen my brother in forty years, so I don’t know many of his friends.”

“Yes, Mr. Rawlings. You see, my brother thought he was a disgrace to the family. Going off to be a
baseball
player, the way he did.” She almost gagged on the word “baseball.” “We’re a proud family, Mr. Rawlings. My father—our father—was Thomas Macullar. He came here in ’48 without a penny to his name. And he built a fortune. You’ve heard of Macullar Ice?”

“Uh, no ma’am.” Miss Macullar looked offended by my ignorance. “I’ve only been in Boston a short while,” I added as an excuse.

“Hmph. Well, Mr. Rawlings, my father built the Macullar Ice Company. A shrewd businessman, he was. He set us up harvesting ice from Jamaica Pond. Imagine: farming something that you never have to plant, never fertilize, and every year your crop comes in the same. What could be a better business? People will always need ice, and we will supply it. At a very handsome profit.”

“Jimmy didn’t want to work for the ice company?”

“No, he made his choice: he went for baseball instead of business. And he stuck with his choice—for life. I give him credit for that. We would have taken him back, but he was too proud. I don’t happen to think that baseball is the worst thing in the world—the theater is much worse.” She added defiantly, “We’ve never had an
actor
in the family, Mr. Rawlings.”

“I’d like to help find out what happened to Jimmy... Do you know why anyone might want to, uh—”

“Kill him. Are you a police officer, Mr. Rawlings?” She plucked harder at her shawl.