The Cincinnati Red Stalkings (14 page)

“You may go home. But be prepared to return if I call for you.”

“I will,” I promised. “The team’s in Philadelphia now, though. Can I ...”

He shook his white head. “Mr. Herrmann showed good judgment in benching you for the time being. It is wise to be cautious until the full story is in. Go back to Cincinnati, and after I’ve completed my review of the matter, I’ll notify Mr. Herrmann when—and
if
—you may return to the team.”

E
ager to get out of Chicago as soon as possible, I went directly from the Federal Building to Grand Central Station to catch the first train for Cincinnati. I was uneasy just to be in the same city where the Sox trial was being held. I wanted no association with the scandal, and worried that I might have been seen entering or leaving Judge Landis’s chambers; there were probably reporters dogging him for an opinion on the trial, and I hated to think what kind of speculation they might write about me if they knew I’d met with him.

Unfortunately, the earliest departure I could get was late afternoon, so I killed a few hours by eating lunch and then reading some movie magazines that we already had at home. I avoided the newspapers because I didn’t even want to read about the trial.

But I couldn’t escape it. When I finally boarded the train, a talkative salesman took the seat next to me and gave me a rundown of the day’s proceedings. He said that the prosecutor had been dealt a setback when he tried to quote from carbon copies of the stolen grand-jury confessions; the defense objected on grounds that the copies were unsigned and had been repudiated by the players, and Judge Hugo Friend ruled there could be no mention of them. The state’s attorney fared better when he called his first witness: Charles A. Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox. One of the charges against the eight players was conspiracy to injure Comiskey’s business. Although Comiskey had a well-earned reputation as a despotic tightwad, the prosecution succeeded in portraying him as a benevolent father figure. When the defense cross-examined Comiskey concerning his actual business practices, the judge sustained prosecution objections and ruled that Comiskey’s finances were not relevant.

I tried to make it clear to my travel companion that I wasn’t about to enter into a conversation on the scandal, but he kept up a running monologue anyway. When the fellow finally paused to ask my name, I said I was “Dr. Herrmann” and that I’d been in Chicago treating smallpox victims. I soon had the seat to myself, and was undisturbed for the remainder of the journey.

The train pulled into Cincinnati’s Central Union Depot in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and I grabbed the first available cab.

I’d called Margie during a stop in Indianapolis to let her know when I’d be getting home. She was waiting in the parlor, wearing her red kimono. A worried expression was on her face.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” I said.

“Couldn’t sleep anyway.” She gave me a kiss and a hug, holding the embrace long enough that I had the sense she was seeking some kind of reassurance, not just welcoming me home.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Something happen?”

Margie bit her lip and nodded. “At the zoo. One of the leopards had a litter and three of the four cubs were stillborn. The mother might not make it, either.”

“Oh, damn. I’m sorry.”

“Then I got in a fight with the keeper. Told him again that the cats needed to be better fed and get more exercise. He told me to stick to what I knew and stay out of his business. I tried to convince him that I did know what I was talking about—I was always involved in caring for the animals we used in the movies. But he didn’t want to hear anything from ‘a dumb actress.’ So I called him a few things I probably shouldn’t have, and it got worse from there.”

I repeated that I was sorry to hear what had happened.

“I feel foolish,” she said. “It’s a zoo. Some animals are going to die. I should just accept that, but ...” She took a deep breath and shook herself out of the thought. “Let me get you something to drink.”

As she headed for the kitchen, she said, “Tell me how it went in Chicago.”

I gave her a rundown on my meeting with Judge Landis. While I spoke, I shed my clothes, tossing them on the Morris chair. I heard the tinkle of ice chunks in glasses, the sound promising some welcome relief from the heat. Despite the windows being fully open and two fans blowing, the house was sweltering.

When I was down to my underwear, I dragged myself onto the sofa. I’d spent most of the last day and a half on trains. I was exhausted, dirty, and my body still felt like it was rumbling and lurching. My mind wasn’t any calmer.

Margie came back with two large glasses of cold ginger ale. “If he’s really going to do an investigation,” she said, “you don’t have anything to worry about.” She placed the drinks on the coffee table and sat down beside me. “He’ll find out that you’ve never done a dishonest thing in your life.”

“I don’t know if that will matter to Landis.” I paused to guzzle down half the soda pop, feeling my insides refreshed by the coolness and the bubbles. “As it is, there’s no
evidence
that I did anything wrong anyway. You’d think a judge would see that, and at least let me keep playing till there was proof that I did anything more for Rufus Yates than sign an envelope. It seems like this whole trouble is because of what other players did two years ago.”

She tried a couple more times to convince me I had no cause to worry. Then we simply sat and relaxed for a little while. Margie refilled the drinks, and put Eubie Blake’s latest recording, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” on the Victrola. We listened to the record five times before going upstairs.

I was so tired that I decided a bath could wait till morning, and settled for a quick wash with a wet sponge before going to bed.

Margie was almost asleep when I said to her, “There’s been times before when I’ve been in trouble. Some of them I didn’t think I’d get out of alive. But this is worse than having my life threatened. This is reputation—it goes on after you die. And it’s something that you can never get back once it’s gone. I know baseball isn’t the most important thing in the world, but playing ball is the only thing I’m ever gonna be remembered for—and I don’t want anybody to ever think that I didn’t play on the square.”

It was almost noon when I woke up. Margie had left for the zoo, and she’d left me a cherry pie for breakfast and a note saying that she’d promised Erin and Patrick Kelly that I’d take them to Chester Park. I was happy with the pie, but not with the promise she’d made to the kids. I thought she should have asked me first. And if she had, I’d have said no; I wasn’t in any kind of mood to be around children today.

After a hot bath, a couple cups of coffee, and most of the pie, I was feeling a little better. The rumble of the train was out of my system, and the meeting with Landis felt a little more remote now that I was back in the comfort of home.

I carried a cup of coffee into the parlor and sat down at the desk, where the publications Ollie Perriman had given me drew my attention.

I started flipping through the issue of
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
that carried the portraits of the 1869 team, then the copy of Ellard’s
Base Ball in Cincinnati.
I wanted to go back for a while, step into that era and forget about the present. But it didn’t happen. I read about the game against the Troy Haymakers, when the Haymakers withdrew from the field to protect the wagers of gamblers. Things weren’t so much better in those days; the past was no refuge. I sighed and closed the book.

Okay, forget about going backwards, I told myself. The question for me to face now was clear: What could I do about Rufus Yates?

That photograph of Yates and me shaking hands remained vivid in my mind. When I’d seen it again in Landis’s office, something about it had struck me as odd, but I couldn’t tell exactly what. Now I studied the mental image until I realized what was wrong: the newsboy in the shot was holding up a paper for display, but he had never tried to sell it to us. He must have done it for the benefit of the photographer, to establish the time of the meeting. So running into Yates wasn’t a chance encounter. It had been carefully pianned—I’d been set up.

What did I know about Rufus Yates? Only what I’d heard from Garry Herrmann and Judge Landis. According to them, he was a former ballplayer, a petty thief, and had connections to Arnold Rothstein, the man who financed the fix of the 1919 World Series.

Staring absently at the baseball memorabilia on my desk, I suddenly thought of a new angle on why Ollie Perriman might have been killed. My previous assumption about the motive for his murder might have been off by half a century. Maybe it had nothing to do with whatever happened in 1869. Maybe Perriman had something in his collection that could implicate someone in the World Series scandal.

My thoughts were interrupted by the Kelly children at the front door. They didn’t say anything, but looked up at me as if to ask, “Can Mickey come out to play?”

With as much enthusiasm as I could manufacture, I said, “Ready to go to Chester Park?”

Margie was home from the zoo by the time the kids and I returned from “The Home of Happiness,” as the amusement park billed itself.

I was grateful to her for what she’d done, and was pretty sure that she intentionally hadn’t checked with me first about going to the park so that I wouldn’t have the chance to decline. Being with the children for a while was the best thing for me; between answering their questions, plying them with ice cream and hot dogs, and taking them to every attraction from Hilarity Hall to the boat rides on the lake, there was no way I had time to fret. I ended up enjoying the afternoon as much as they did.

The only awkward moment was when Patrick asked why I wasn’t on the road with the team. I gave him the story about having bad vision and headaches. It struck me that I was so worried about somebody thinking I could be dishonest on the field, that I was willing to lie to a child.

After Margie returned the Kellys to their aunt, it was back to trying to figure out what I could do to clear up the trouble I was in.

Over dinner, I told Margie my idea that Ollie Perriman’s death might have to do with the 1919 World Series.

“How was he involved in that?” she asked skeptically.

“I don’t think he was involved, but he might have gotten hold of something incriminating when he was acquiring things for his collection. A lot of what he had was recent material.”

“And someone wanted it back.”

“Right. Like Arnold Rothstein. They say he’s the one who had the grand-jury confessions of Joe Jackson and the others stolen because he thought he might have been mentioned in them. Maybe he thought Perriman had information that could implicate him in the fix, too. According to Judge Landis, Rufus Yates works for Rothstein, so maybe he was the one who broke in and killed Perriman.” Another possibility occurred to me. “You know, it could be that Yates did it on his own—not to protect Rothstein, but to protect himself
from
Rothstein.”

“What do you mean?” Margie asked. “Why would he do that?”

“Edd Roush and Greasy Neale told me some of the Reds were also offered bribes to throw the series. What if Yates was the one who tried to fix things the other way? He double-crosses Rothstein and tries to get Cincinnati to lose instead. The way the odds were, he’d have cleaned up betting on the Sox.”

“Except Cincinnati didn’t lose, so why would Arnold Rothstein be mad at Yates?”

“I don’t think Rothstein is the type to forgive a double cross just because it didn’t work.” I added, “But I intend to find out for sure.”

Margie sighed. “Why don’t you wait for Judge Landis to clear you? Maybe you don’t have anything to worry about.”

I told her about the Judge’s decisions of the past few months and how they didn’t instill any confidence in me that he’d do the right thing. “I need to look into this myself,” I said. “Talk to some people who might know Yates and Rothstein.”

“But if you get
more
involved,” she cautioned me, “won’t that make him less likely to clear you?”

She had a point. Gamblers and bookies were the ones most likely to have the information I wanted, but if Landis found out I was in contact with such men, it could be over for me. “If he finds out about it,” I said. “The trick is to keep that from happening.”