Murder at Fenway Park (21 page)

Could Bob Tyler be the real target of the killings—with Ban Johnson behind them? Maybe Johnson figured that a murder at the new ballpark would hurt attendance, embarrass Tyler—even put him on the way to bankruptcy. But Tyler foiled the first attempt by moving Corriden’s body out of Fenway. So Johnson’s next target is even closer to Tyler: Jimmy Macullar. If this doesn’t work, will Johnson go after Tyler directly?

Ban Johnson wouldn’t commit murder himself, of course. He’d get someone else to do it. If I were Johnson, I know just who I’d get: Harry Howell and Jack O’Connor—promise to let them back in baseball. All they’d have to do is kill Corriden—somebody they already hated....

This is crazy. Now I’m pretending to be league president and I’m planning murders.

A piercing caw outside my window woke me early in the morning. After a few minutes of grumbling about the unwelcome wake-up call, I remembered the bat laying in the gutter. And that I’d forgotten to tell Landfors about it.

There wasn’t much light in the room; I thought it was because of the early hour. Then I rolled out of bed and saw that day had come, but the morning sky out the window was overcast with dark swirling clouds. My only hard evidence in the Red Corriden case was about to be soaked.

Still in my underclothes, I did my acrobatics on the window ledge and retrieved the bat from its hiding place. Since there no longer seemed to be an impending visit from Captain O’Malley, I now had the time to examine the bat more closely.

I carefully rolled back the socks that protected it. Other than the mess on its barrel, the bat was clean and fairly bright. It must have been nearly new when it was used to kill Corriden. I took a closer look at the blood and the hair, trying to ignore the fact that they were human remains and thinking of them only as “evidence.” I spotted a thin white hair sticking out of the dark crust. Would Red Corriden have white hair?

Grabbing my razor from the washstand, I went over the patch of dried blood, scraping carefully and surgically extracting each hair. There were nine of them: five orange, two white, one brown, and one black. Laying them out straight, I could see that three of them were long—maybe four or five inches, much longer than a ball player would wear his hair. Something was wrong with my evidence.

The bone fragments! When I saw the bat in the tunnel, there had been bone fragments imbedded in the wood. I gently ran my fingertips along the bat, rotating it as I went back and forth, like eating a cob of corn. I felt nothing sticking in the wood. Bringing the bat to the window where the light was better, I ran my eyes over the bat the same way. There were no indentations from where bone fragments might have fallen out. This wasn’t the bat that killed Red Corriden.

So why was it planted in my bat bag? And whose blood and hair had been left on it?

Another calling card, maybe. The bat left on my hotel bed in April, and now this one—one that had been used.

I carefully wrapped the hairs in a clean handkerchief and put them in a dresser drawer. Maybe they would still be evidence.

The Beacon Hotel wasn’t on Beacon Hill or even on Beacon Street. It was next to Freeman & Son Fish Co., between T and Long Wharfs. On the clapboard front of the hotel were two signs: one proclaimed
TRANSIENTS WELCOME,
the other—twice as large—advertised
BEER
. I answered the call of the latter sign, and went into the hotel’s bar room.

Charlie Strickler’s new uniform suited him: green suspenders hoisted his trousers, the sleeves of his collarless shirt were rolled up above his elbows, and he wore a bar rag over his left arm like a symbol of office.

Strickler slowly drew me a draft, tilting the glass until it was almost full, then holding it upright to give it just the right head. He beamed with pride as he slid the beer in front of me. He was washed up as a ball player, but he was just hitting his stride as a bartender. “On the house,” he said.

I wanted to be a paying customer, so I guzzled the first one, then ordered another. As Charlie refilled the glass, I thought maybe I’d have time for a third.

I didn’t think of Strickler as a suspect anymore; I’d bought the explanation he gave me when I confronted him at Han-ratty’s. I knew some roommates could be real nuisances, but nobody gets himself murdered just for being annoying.

My only worry about being here was that Tyler might find out that I came to see him. But I was running out of leads, and needed to take the risk. I thought there was more Strickler could tell me about Corriden.

“This hits the spot, Charlie. Have yourself one on me.” He immediately reached for the tap to accept the offer.

“Say, Charlie,” I said. “When you were rooming with Red Corriden—”

“Come on, don’t go asking me about him. That was a hundred years ago. I got another life now. Baseball gave up on me. Now I got other things to do.”

“Just one question? That’s all I’ll ask.”

“All right, one. But I don’t like it, I won’t answer it.”

“Fair enough. I just want to know: was there anything particular that was bothering him? Somebody after him? Something like that?”

“Somebody after him? No, he never said nothing like that. But truth is, I didn’t stay in the room much when he was around. And when I did, I ignored what he said. Damn kid was always nagging at me. About drinking too much, and playing poker and craps. Especially about the cards and dice. That kid would carry on about gambling like Billy Sunday preaching against liquor. I just had to stop listening when he’d talk at me. So ... I don’t know if anything was bugging him.”

I kept my word and didn’t ask any more questions. And Charlie Strickler didn’t say anything more about Red Corriden. And then we had a few more beers and argued about who was going to be elected president.

F
or two months, I’d been convinced that Ty Cobb murdered Red Corriden. Suddenly a number of other contenders emerged with possible motives. And one of them knocked Cobb out of first place on my list of suspects.

Ban Johnson wasn’t a serious possibility, of course. And Jack O’Connor was still an unknown; perhaps Landfors would find out something more about him.

Robert F. Tyler is the one who moved into the top spot. As Peggy said, he was already involved in a crime by having the body moved. And I’d figured he was behind Jimmy Macullar’s murder. Now I found a motive for him to kill Red Corriden.

According to Charlie Strickler, Corriden was riled up about gambling—he was on some kind of crusade. Who at Fenway Park was involved with gambling? Bob Tyler, who took payoffs from Arnold Rothstein. I thought, somehow, Red Corriden found out what Tyler had done. Then he confronted Tyler on the Tigers first trip to Fenway. And Tyler took extreme measures to squelch him. That would give Tyler an even stronger motive for having the body moved, and for having Macullar killed to complete the cover-up. And for having me killed if I kept nosing around.

That’s what I thought. But the only thing I could be really sure of was that Red Corriden didn’t kill Jimmy Macullar.

Since the Red Sox already had the pennant sewed up, Stahl decided to let some of the regulars take a rest before the World Series. I was to play second base during the short road trip to Chicago and Detroit.

The three Chicago games were unmemorable. I played mechanically, my thoughts on the Corriden and Macullar murder cases, my mind laboring for ways to get proof. I had uncovered motives, I had developed theories. But I had found no hard evidence.

And by the time the Chicago series was over, my latest theory bit the dust. I was already certain that Bob Tyler hadn’t killed Corriden himself. Now I realized that if he had someone else kill Corriden, he wouldn’t have allowed it to be done in Fenway Park. So it wasn’t Tyler.

Ty Cobb was back atop the suspect list.

Smoky Joe Wood pitched our first game in Detroit, going for seventeen wins in a row and sole possession of the American League record. The game ended up close, but Wood just didn’t have his best stuff. The Tigers hit him for six runs while the Sox could come up with only four. The loss left him in a tie with Walter Johnson for the A. L. record.

The rest of the games were pretty routine. Ty Cobb did come down to second base a few times—safely, but never head first. And my legs stayed intact.

I spent most of my time between games trying to make the most of what seemed likely to be my last chance to investigate the Corriden case. With time running out on me, I paid little heed to whether or not I was followed, and talked openly to Detroit ball players. I asked what they knew of both Red Corriden and Ty Cobb. The exact responses varied, but the essence of their content could be summed up by “good kid” and “son of a bitch,” respectively. Nothing useful.

After the second game of the series, I sought out Hughie Jennings’s office. Walking through the corridors of Navin Field, I grimly imagined Red Corriden in the runways of Fenway Park.

Jennings looked out of place behind a desk. I couldn’t picture him anywhere but in the third base coaches box, his orange hair and freckles ablaze, spurring on his team with the rebel “Ee-yah” yell that gave him his nickname. I asked him straight out what I wanted to know: how could he be sure that the body he identified in Boston was really Corriden. He seemed to think the inquiry a strange one, but he didn’t hesitate to answer. He said the corpse was difficult to look at but easy to identify: he knew it was Corriden by a distinctive spike scar on the left leg.

That wasn’t a big help to the investigation, but it was worth tying up a possible loose end. To my surprise, I felt no satisfaction in finding that Peggy was wrong about the body not being Corriden.

During our last night in Detroit, I lay disconsolate in my hotel bed, wondering what to do next. Fourteen days left in the season, and I was completely out of ideas. It’s bad enough to see time ticking off so quickly, but to let it pass without knowing how to make use of it was exasperating.

Billy Neal was still up, playing his usual game of solitaire. Snapping the cards, placing jack on queen, ten on jack, nine on ten ... I resented seeing someone so pointlessly killing time. Didn’t he know how valuable it could be?

“Playing solitaire the only thing you ever do, Billy?”

“Nope. Sometimes I play poker, sometimes bridge.”

“Oh yeah. Didn’t you play with Clyde Fletcher once?”

“Mmm—yeah. A couple years ago, I guess.”

“Fletch told me Hal Chase was in the game—and he cheated.”

“Yeah, he sure did. Didn’t cheat by himself, though.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, it was a
bridge
game—almost impossible to cheat without a partner. Fact, it was your pal Fletcher who was in on it with him.”

“
Fletcher?
Are you
sure?
”

“Hell, yeah. I should know, I lost a bundle.”

Fletch. Jeez.

I listened intently to Billy Neal’s breathing, waiting for it to turn into the slow regular rhythm that would indicate sleep. For the first time, I’d have preferred a roommate who snored. I knew who the murderer was, and needed to call Karl Landfors.

After I was convinced that Neal was asleep, I padded out of our room in my stocking feet and went down to a public phone in the lobby.

Landfors’s number was answered with a groggy, “Yeah?”

“Karl, this is Mickey.”

“What the—do you know what
time
it is?”

“Yeah, real late. Listen, I know who killed Jimmy Macullar—
and
Red Corriden. And if you help me, I think I can prove it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I got it solved. Look, we’re leaving Detroit first thing in the morning. I should be back in Boston by Thursday. Can you be there—in Boston?”

“Mmm, I think so. Yeah, sure, I should be able to get away.”

“Great! When we get together I’ll lay it all out for you. There’s one more thing: do you know any bookies in New York?”

“No ... I don’t think so.”

“Can you find one?”

“Find a bookie in New York? Gee, there’s a tough assignment.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. See if you can put a bet on Joe Jackson to win the batting championship.”

“What?”

I repeated, slowly, “Find out if you can put a bet on Joe Jackson to win the American League batting championship. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Oh! Wait a minute. I heard from my friend in Sacramento: Jack O’Connor’s been playing for Alameda in the California State League this year. He’s sending me some box scores. They show O’Connor was playing in Bakersfield when Corriden was killed. And he was in Sacramento when Macullar got it. It couldn’t have been O’Connor.”

“Yeah, I know it wasn’t him. It wasn’t Ty Cobb, either.”