ON SUNDAY MORNING, HARVEY ground some Brazilian beans in his Salton Quick Mill and was sipping the result when the phone rang.
“So you didn’t have time to call and tell about Rudy Furth?” a voice said.
“Hi, Mom. I was going to, but it’s been too crazy around here.”
“What kind of sport is that, a person gets murdered?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Play something less dangerous. Not baseball.”
“Too late, Mom.”
“Harvey, he was murdered just like that? What do they do now, give you a new roommate?”
“From now on I think I’ll take a single room on the road.”
“That’s good. So tell me—have you found anyone yet?”
“Anyone what?”
“Anyone special, that’s what.”
“Nothing’s changed since last week, Mom. You asked, and I told you I was seeing a woman who’s a sportscaster on the news here.”
“What is she, a tomboy?”
“She’s a very successful journalist, Mom.”
“Maybe you should marry her, dear.”
“Would you like that?”
“You mention a girl once over the phone and I’m supposed to know if she’ll make you a nice wife? What am I, a prophet? Mrs. Bernstein’s daughter lives in Providence, Harvey, a nice girl.”
“No, thanks, Mom.”
“Maybe you’re too picky. Norman’s married.”
“I’m not Norman, Mom. Norman’s also an English professor, which I’m not.”
“You could have been a history professor.”
“I could have been an astrophysicist, too, but I’m a baseball player. Anyway, I make four times as much money as a professor.”
“Since when is money everything? Is that how we brought you up? A good thing Big Al’s not around to hear you talk like that. In three years, you’re not going to be a baseball player. Then what?”
“Seven years ago you said the same thing to me, and I’m still playing.”
“That’s because you choked up and learned how to hit on the average.”
“For the average, Mom.”
“On, for, it’s not easy telling people my son is thirty years old and plays baseball.”
“Look at the bright side, Mom. Not everyone has a son who’s batting three hundred in the majors.”
“Well, excuse me. I didn’t realize I could be so lucky. Here I was all these years, thinking how nice it would be to have a son who used his head for a living, who healed the sick, who taught the uneducated, even, God forbid, who could draw up a will or help with the income taxes. All along, I was ashamed he wore a uniform with the name of a city on the front. And a three hundred average! This I didn’t know what a thing this was! ‘Mrs. Blissberg, so how is Harvey doing these days?’ ‘Fine, Mrs. Schottsky. My son is now hitting three hundred. And how is your son?’ ‘Oh, David is all right, I guess. He just found the cure for cancer.’ So forgive, Harvey, I didn’t know you were such a big deal. I see you’re playing in Boston this week. What night are you coming out for dinner?”
“Not dinner, Mom. They’re night games. But why don’t you drive into the city one day and I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I’ll buy you lunch, boychik. I’m still your mother.”
“How’s Monday?”
“Tuesday.”
“Fine, Tuesday it is. Come by the Sheraton around one or so.”
“Whatever you say, dear, is fine with me.”
There had been a time, when Harvey was younger, when a cunningly timed phone call from his mother almost always caused him to have a hitless game. Now it merely made him queasy. But what caught his eye when he turned to the sports pages in front of him made him particularly ill. He read the paragraph in Lassiter’s column twice:
Blissberg is one of the few players who’ll talk at all about the mysterious death of relief pitcher Rudy Furth. Although he won’t elaborate, the Jewels’ center fielder has suggested two intriguing possibilities—that the murderer may have been a member of the team or that the killer could have been connected with organized crime. That, to say the least, is more than we’ve gotten from the Homicide Division of the Providence Police Department.
When he entered the clubhouse before Sunday’s double-header with Milwaukee, he felt like Menachem Begin walking into an OPEC conference. Les Byers and Happy Smith looked up briefly from their game of Boggle on the table in the middle of the locker room and then quickly bent over the white lettered cubes. Cleavon was just coming out of the trainer’s room naked, with fresh tape on his ankles, and he stopped to run his eyes over Harvey. Rodney Salta and Angel Vedrine were draped over their chairs by their lockers, listening to salsa on a cassette player the size of an American Tourister. The atmosphere was cold enough to skate on.
Harvey went to his locker and undressed. He put on his jock and his shorts and his sweatshirt with the dark green sleeves and then his sanitary hose and his stirrups and taped them around the tops of his calves. When he reached in to yank his jersey off the wire hanger, he saw the rat. It was taped by its spindly tail to the back of his locker at eye level. Its neck was broken, and its head was twisted to the side with the mouth open in a frightened smile of tiny yellow teeth. It was big even by Rankle Park standards. Its horny little feet stuck out stiffly, like escargot forks.
The salsa played on, and Harvey finished suiting up. He pulled his practice uniform over on the rod so he didn’t have to look at the rat. There would be a better time to dispose of it.
No one on the team spoke to him for the entire afternoon. He went 0-for-8 as the Brewers swept the Jewels easily, 9-3 and 6-0. “You guys better start playing some baseball,” Chris Lentini, the Milwaukee first baseman, said when Harvey reached base for the only time all day, on a fielder’s choice late in the second game. “Else they’ll move the franchise to a small island somewhere in the Atlantic next year.”
“Try the Bermuda Triangle,” Harvey said and watched Cleavon strike out to end the inning.
He drove back to his apartment with the intention of spending Sunday evening with the new Grant biography. Next to Mickey, it was the most congenial company he could think of at the moment. As he climbed the darkened, splayed staircase to his apartment, he smelled a sweet burnt odor. He was still trying to imagine what Mr. Hughes on the third floor could be enduring for dinner as he worked his key into his lock. A voice froze him.
“Oh-for-eight, Professor. That’s not like you.”
Ronnie Mateo, in a wine-colored leisure suit, was sitting halfway up the flight of steps to the third floor. He was suckling a blunt cigar.
“I’m still not interested in any of your necklaces,” Harvey said. His key ring was in the lock, ticking softly as it swung against the plate.
“I’m not selling none, but invite me in anyway,” Ronnie said, holding the cigar in front of his face to examine it with exaggerated nonchalance.
“I was thinking of spending the evening reading about General Grant.”
Ronnie put two long hands on his knees, pushed himself up, walked down to the landing, and put his face a foot from Harvey’s. He smelled of sausage and peppers. “Grant’s dead,” he said. “And this won’t take long.”
Harvey took a step back. “What won’t take long?”
“Just open the fucking door before I use your head to do it.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Harvey said gaily. “Come in and have a drink.”
Ronnie followed Harvey into the kitchen. Harvey opened two Rolling Rocks and poured them into tumblers with a trembling hand.
“General Grant,” Ronnie said, helping himself to a club chair in the living room. “To tell you the truth, Professor, I don’t know too much about him. What war was he in?”
“Civil.”
Ronnie plunged the cigar in and out of his mouth a few times. “You’re an intelligent guy,” he said and threw an arm over the back of the chair.
“Not intelligent enough to know why you’re here.”
“Oh, yes you are. And you’re smart enough to know better than to say what you did to Bob Lassiter, and I’ll bet you’re just smart enough to keep your nose out of what you don’t know nothing about from here on out.” He drank half his beer, unaware of the parabola of foam that collected on his upper lip.
“What’s my nose been in?” Harvey was still standing.
Ronnie just stared at him.
“Okay,” Harvey said, “it was a stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I get it. You just felt like making Lassiter’s day.”
“I hardly ever talk to those guys.”
“You talked loud enough yesterday, Professor.”
Harvey managed his first sip of beer. “Look, I don’t even know what this has to do with you. I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know what you do for a living.”
“I’m a brain surgeon,” Ronnie said. “And if you keep your mouth shut, maybe I won’t operate on you.”
“What’s it to you?”
“You’re getting dumber every second, Professor.” Ronnie got up from his chair. “I don’t know what you think you know, but I want to know about it.”
“About what?”
“Your roomie’s murder. I want to know what you think you know about it.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Then why do I see you in the newspaper this morning? I know you talk to Linderman.” He relit his cigar and was in no particular hurry to suck it back to life.
“I told you I don’t know anything and I don’t know who you are, so why don’t you get out of here?”
Ronnie picked up his glass from the table. “I don’t like this beer,” he said and threw the contents in Harvey’s face.
Harvey stepped up and shoved him in the chest. Ronnie fell back in the chair. He opened his leisure suit so Harvey could see the small automatic under his arm.
“I don’t think you understand, Professor,” he said. “We’re not in the same league.”
It was one of Harvey’s failings that he could never quite believe that anyone truly wished him harm. Only when Ronnie Mateo showed him his gun was he totally willing to accept the fact that someone so pathetic could wield the least bit of power over his life. A bitter juice gurgled in his gut as he wiped the beer off his face with a sleeve.
“Who sent you here?” Harvey said.
“Guys who want to know what you think you’re doing, so why don’t you go ahead and tell me?”
“I don’t know anything.”
Ronnie got up again and came toward Harvey. “I feel myself getting very angry with you.”
Harvey flinched.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to touch you yet. It won’t look good if you go on national TV tomorrow night in Boston with something wrong with your face. I’m just using the gentle arts of persuasion.” He stood in front of Harvey and squeezed out the words: “Tell me what you know.”
Harvey breathed deeply. “All I know is about some typewriters in Rudy’s apartment. That’s it.”
“Typewriters,” Ronnie said.
“Yeah, he had some typewriters in his place when he was murdered.”
Ronnie’s mouth imitated a smile. “So what’s a few typewriters?”
“Right, what’s a few typewriters?”
“Maybe the guy collected typewriters.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe he was starting a typewriter repair business.”
“Sure.”
“What else do you know?”
“That’s it.”
“You’re making a mistake if you don’t tell me now. It don’t count if you decide to tell me later what you could tell me now. Am I right?”
“That’s all I know.”
“Just the typewriters?”
“Why, is there something else?”
Ronnie rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “How should I know? I’m just the guy asking questions. Look, Professor, I don’t know what happened to your roomie, but I would think that what you called the mob, whatever that is, would have a better way to ice somebody than to stuff him in a whirlpool. Would you agree that there’re better ways to take someone out? And three thousand bucks—that’s not the mob’s kind of money, would you agree? Those guys tip more than that in a week.”
“Sure.”
“And would you agree”—he tucked his shirt in in back to give Harvey another look at his gun—“that whenever you think that what you call the mob has something to do with your roomie’s untimely departure, when you have such thoughts, Professor, you will now know that these are not good thoughts to have, and that you will keep your mouth shut about what you don’t know nothing about? Am I right?”
“Sure.”
“I enjoyed the beer,” Ronnie said and cast a glance around the apartment. “I figured a class guy like you for a nicer place.”
“Next time I’ll bring out the good silver,” Harvey said.
“And the crystal.” Ronnie picked up his empty tumbler and heaved it against the wall, where it shattered. “Good arm, huh?” he said and left the door open behind him.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang, and Harvey rose from the love seat to pick it up.
“It’s Linderman.”
“Oh, hello,” Harvey said in a voice he didn’t quite recognize as his own.
“I’m just calling to say that was a stupid thing you told Bob Lassiter in the papers today.”
“I know. Someone was just here expressing similar sentiments.”
“Who’s that?”
“Ronnie Mateo. I think we acted out a scene from The Big Heat”
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. He didn’t get physical, I hope.”
“Basically he just threw beer in my face and showed me his gun collection.”
“I see,” Linderman said. “You want to press charges?”
“What do you think?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, Harvey, I know you want to get to the bottom of this thing, but talking to reporters about this and that doesn’t help anyone, understand? It just makes my job tougher, and I don’t think you’re making any friends. You play baseball, and I’ll run the investigation. And stay out of Ronnie Mateo’s hair, for Christ’s sake.”
“But, Linderman, if he’s got something—”
“But we don’t know that, do we? My boss wouldn’t like it if I took a guy off the street without evidence.”
“What’s he doing always hanging around the park?”
“What do I know?” Linderman said. “Maybe he’s a baseball nut. Harvey, stop asking questions. Stop talking to reporters. Stop worrying about this thing. Let me handle it over here. Keep your mind on the game. You guys can still make the first division.”
“Thanks,” Harvey said. “I appreciate the support.”