OF THE FIVE MOST popular topics of locker room conversation among ball players—hunting, fishing, cars, real estate, and women—only the last interested Harvey, and even then he found there was little to be gained by subjecting his views to clubhouse scrutiny. Yet clubhouses were the closest thing he had known to an office in his life, and he felt protected by their walls. It was with a feeling of returning to his natural habitat that the next morning, on Wednesday, August 29, after dropping off his Chevy Citation for a tune-up, he had a taxi leave him in the players’ parking lot at Rankle Park. Nine-thirty was early to show up for the afternoon game against Chicago that would close out the series, but Harvey felt he needed some extra work against the pitching machine under the left field stands. He liked the ball park early in the morning. Only Dunc would be in the clubhouse. When Harvey swung open the door, Dunc was standing just inside.

Contrary to the unwritten law that all major league clubhouse managers had to be seriously lacking in human qualities, Dunc was better-natured than twenty years of catering to the whims of young athletes would seem to warrant. He was short, amiable, and had a taste for apricot brandy. Harvey, who occasionally supplied him with a pint, found that in exchange Dunc was more than willing to load baseballs into the pitching machine.

At the moment, however, Dunc was wearing the distorted expression of someone who had inadvertently swallowed his chewing tobacco. His jaw hung open—revealing that in fact his tobacco was still there, in a mouth full of brownish kernels that had once been his teeth. He stood there in his white duck uniform staring somewhere to the right of Harvey’s face.

“What gives, Dunc?”

Dunc said nothing, but raised a stubby arm and pointed behind him toward the center of the locker room.

“Well, what is it?”

Dunc didn’t speak, or wasn’t able to, and Harvey went past him into the empty clubhouse.

The Providence Jewels’ clubhouse was a collection of unattractive rooms beneath the stands along the right field line. Nauseating green indoor-outdoor carpeting had been laid down over the original cement floors; given a choice, however, Harvey would much rather get dressed on an artificial surface than play on one. The lockers, open cubicles, took up three of the locker room’s four walls, and in front of each was an orange or powder blue molded plastic chair like the ones found in Greyhound bus stations; given the team’s operating budget, there was no reason to believe the management hadn’t found them in an abandoned Greyhound bus station. The fourth wall, a stretch of gray plaster, featured various calendars, schedules, bulletin boards, equipment lockers, and a large blackboard for personal messages such as “Stan—call your wife” and “You suck, Rodney,” as well as for inspirational memoranda like “Winners Are People Who Never Learned How to Lose,” usually scrawled by Felix Shalhoub in palsied capital letters.

By the door to the trainer’s room was a bat rack and next to it stacked cases of soft drinks and beer, which were fed regularly into an ice chest against a pillar in the middle of the room. A long wooden table supported a Cory coffee machine. Elsewhere, a canvas clothes hamper, piles of newspapers, and a portable television set on a folding table gave the locker room a tenement feel that Dunc and his crew of teenage assistants were unable to reform.

To the left as you entered was a door to the runway that connected the clubhouse to the dugout. It was a badly lit corridor with exposed steam pipes, and it was littered with balls of used tape, discarded Red Man foil pouches, and generations of tobacco juice. Halfway down the runway on the left was a metal door leading to a system of dark tunnels that ran under the grandstands to several storage areas and the visitors’ clubhouse. The catacombs, as they were called, were home to a colony of brown rats. Impervious to the poisons used by the occasional exterminator, they had lived in the bowels of Rankle Park for as long as anyone could remember, surviving on unfinished hot dogs, peanuts, popcorn, and old lineup cards. The rats rarely ventured into the seats, at least not during games, and only once since the Jewels had moved in had one of the grayish brown creatures wandered into the clubhouse during working hours. The reserve catcher, Happy Smith, had clubbed it to death.

Harvey saw nothing unusual in the locker room and turned impatiently to Dunc, who was still at the door.

“C’mon, Dunc,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Except for a barely perceptible jerk of his head in the direction of the trainer’s room, Dunc did not move.

The noise was like that made by a motorboat on the other side of a lake.

“Why’s the whirlpool on?” Harvey said, walking in the direction of the noise. Then he stopped.

Over the rim of the stainless steel tub, a man’s hand was draped, palm down, as if waiting to be kissed. Harvey took two steps toward it and reached out to grab a corner of one of the trainer’s tables.

The churning water was the color of rosé wine. Harvey went to the whirlpool and stooped to switch off the motor. As the water settled, it revealed the form crammed into a fetal position at the bottom of the tub. The head was bent over between the knees; its blond hair fanned out and swam along the surface, mingling with flecks of blood and mucus.

Harvey closed his eyes. He did not have to see the face to know who it was. He lurched to one of the sinks and vomited, clutching the faucets with both hands. When he was through, his face wet with tears, he vomited again.

Dunc now stood behind him in the doorway to the trainer’s room. He hid his mouth behind the crook of his upraised elbow.

“It’s Rudy,” Harvey said. “Call the cops.”

Dunc disappeared, and Harvey plunged his hands into the hot red water and hooked them under Rudy’s arms.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he said, and with all his strength hoisted Rudy’s naked body out of the tub and laid him on his back on the floor. His pale knees would not go down.

His half-open eyes seemed to watch Harvey warily. Harvey closed them. Straddling Rudy’s stomach, he began pumping his chest furiously. Thick bloody water bubbled out of Rudy’s mouth and ran in trails down his cheek.

“C’mon, you bastard!” he shouted. He pried Rudy’s jaws apart and breathed into his mouth. “Oh, Jesus,” he said and moved his left hand around to the back of Rudy’s head to steady it.

He immediately jerked his hand away. Above Rudy’s ear, the skull was sticky and soft, not like a skull at all.

“He’s gone, Harvey,” Dunc was saying over him, holding a sheet. He was crying, too.

The next hour passed in a haze. Two uniformed cops arrived first, then two more, then a plainclothes detective in an ill-fitting seersucker suit. He snapped back the sheet as if he meant to surprise the body, examined it with a few efficient movements, and asked Harvey to make an identification. Then he asked Dunc and him to wait outside in the locker room. The cop who ushered them out remained there, thumbs hooked importantly on his belt. Harvey and Dunc slumped in two chairs. A lanky young man with a doctor’s bag passed through the locker room, followed by two more cops with a stretcher, a red-faced man in a brown suit, and after him, two mobile lab technicians with black cases.

Through the open door to the trainer’s room, Harvey saw the man from the medical examiner’s office touching Rudy’s body here and there and conferring with the detective. Flashbulbs went off, and one of the mobile lab men scraped away at the indoor-outdoor carpeting while the other used large tweezers to pick up rolls of adhesive tape and a pair of snub-nose scissors and drop them into manila envelopes. The cop chaperoning Harvey and Dunc went over and closed the door.

“I take it you guys found him in the whirlpool, huh?” the cop said. When neither of them acknowledged the question, the cop smacked his lips, said, “Rudy Furth—my kid brother played against him in the minors,” and resumed his post near the bat rack.

By the time the two ambulance men brought Rudy out on a stretcher in a green zippered body bag and carried him out to the players’ parking lot, the locker room had filled up with members of the team. They stood around in their street clothes with shocked faces, like worshipers discovering the desecration of their shrine. The clubhouse no longer belonged to them. The place was silent except for the crackling of walkie-talkies.

Felix Shalhoub came in with his wife, Frances. She tried to force her way past the cops into the trainer’s room, where the detective was holed up with the M.E.’s man and the technicians.

“Officer, would you mind explaining—” she began.

A cop interrupted her in a voice louder than necessary, “Lady, I don’t know what you’re doing here in the first place, but you’ll have to wait with the others.”

The door opened at last, and the man in the seersucker suit lumbered out to introduce himself in a bored, gravelly voice as Detective Sergeant Linderman of the Providence Police. He had a graying crew cut and a heavily stubbled face. Under his jacket, he wore a yellow and maroon paisley shirt. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief and stuffed it in a pants pocket, from which he pulled out a small notebook.

At this gesture, several voices erupted. The detective held up both hands in front of his face, as though protecting himself from flying objects.

“The way I understand it,” he began, “Rudy Furth’s body was found in the whirlpool by”—he consulted the notebook—“Duncan Frye and Harvey Blissbaum.” Those latecomers to whom it was news gasped in unison, then produced a trickle of Oh-Jesus’s.

“Blissberg,” Harvey heard himself say. “Harvey Blissberg.” They were the first words he had spoken in an hour.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blissberg,” the detective said. “You found him in the whirlpool?”

“Dunc found him first.”

“Please, Detective,” Frances Shalhoub blurted, “will you just tell us what you know?”

“Patience,” Linderman said. “Where’s Duncan?”

Dunc rose, the front of his white duck shirt splotched with pink stains from the whirlpool water. He steadied himself against the ice chest. “I saw somebody in the whirlpool when I opened up the clubhouse at nine. That’s what happened. Then Harvey came.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, so who took him out of the whirlpool?”

“I did,” Harvey said.

“Why?” Linderman said.

“I thought he might be alive, I guess.”

“My guess,” said Linderman, “is that he’d been soaking in there since last night. Who saw him last, alive?”

Apparently Dunc had been the last—or next-to-last—person to see Rudy alive the night before. After the rest of the team had cleared out, Dunc explained to Linderman, Rudy remained in the whirlpool. He liked to soak for a long time after he’d pitched; he had a bad back, and Felix had authorized him to have his own key to the clubhouse. At eleven-thirty, Dunc had turned off the lights in the locker room, poked his head in the trainer’s room to remind Rudy to lock up, and fetched him a beer from the ice chest. Dunc remembered nothing strange. He locked the clubhouse door behind him and told Jack Fera, the uniformed guard in the players’ parking lot, to knock off; Rudy would let himself out. The only cars left in the lot were Dunc’s, Rudy’s, and right fielder Steve Wilton’s, which had been there for days with a dead battery.

“Who’s in charge here?” Linderman finally asked.

“Me,” Felix said, running his hand through his strands of silver hair.

Linderman was pacing a little, biting on his pen. “You let all the players have their own keys to the clubhouse?”

“Maybe two or three,” Felix said. “I’d have to think about it. It’s not a common policy, but—”

“That’s all right; it can wait.” Linderman closed his notebook. “You gentlemen have a game today?”

When Felix nodded, Linderman added, “You plan on playing it?”

Felix looked around at the faces in the locker room. “That would probably be a bad idea,” he said.

The M.E.’s man came out of the trainer’s room, spoke briefly in the detective’s ear, and left. “Then maybe you should put in a call to the commissioner’s office, or whatever you’re supposed to do, and explain that there’s been an accident,” Linderman said.

“You think this was an accident?” Felix said.

“Not unless the man just happened to club himself over the head with a blunt object, knocking himself unconscious, and then drowned.” He stroked the plane of his crew cut. “What about his next of kin? Does he have a wife?”

“He’s single,” Felix said. “But he’s got foster parents somewhere in Wisconsin, I think.”

Felix’s wife, dressed in a skirt and blue blazer, hopped off the ice chest. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

“Okay, then,” Linderman resumed. “Now, as long as I’ve got most of the team here, I’d like to ask you to bear with me and stay here until me and Detective Bragalone’ve had a chance to talk to each of you. Briefly. Just routine.” He ran his hand over the butt ends of a few bats in the rack. “That is”—he threw a thumb over his shoulder—“unless someone already knows what went on in there and is just keeping us all in suspense.”

Linderman clapped his hands and disappeared with Felix into Shalhoub’s office off the locker room. Harvey sat in front of his cubicle and watched one of the mobile lab men clear everything out of Rudy’s locker, a few down from his. The man gingerly placed the garments, Rudy’s glove, a bottle of Selsun Blue, and a package of sugarless bubble gum in bags and envelopes. When he was through, the only thing left was a strip of adhesive tape on the metal frame above the locker that read, “FURTH #29.”

Before long, Tim Bayman, the Jewels’ pitching coach, came out of Felix’s office, where Linderman was conducting his interviews. The detective stood in the doorway looking at the team roster in one of the official programs. “Blissberg,” he called out and showed Harvey in. Linderman perched on the edge of Felix’s desk and waited until Harvey settled into a chair.

“I’ve got a shirt like that,” Linderman said, pointing at the dark green Chemise Lacoste from which Harvey had painstakingly removed the alligator. “Mine’s red.”

Harvey surveyed the detective. One of his legs was hooked over the desk corner, baring a pale patch of hairless shin above a thin white sock. He wore a big Timex. An extensive collection of Bic pens was jammed in the breast pocket of the seersucker jacket. Harvey was blearily staring at the pens when Linderman spoke again.

“I know this is tough,” he said. “You feel like talking?”

Harvey wondered what it was like to be a guy who was about to spend an afternoon telling thirty people how tough it was.

“So,” Linderman said. “You got any ideas about Rudy Furth?”

“Okay,” Harvey said in a daze.

“Okay? Yeah, I like that. But it’s not much of an answer.”

“We were roommates.”

“You were?”

“Yeah, I guess I knew him pretty well.”

“Do you know anybody who would want to kill him?”

Harvey shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

“Was he in any trouble?”

Harvey just looked at him.

“Let’s see,” Linderman said. “There’s gambling, for starters. How’s that? Or maybe he ran around with the wrong people. Woman trouble? Maybe he was sleeping with somebody’s wife. Am I making any sense to you? Did he ever tell you somebody was after him?”

“No. I can’t see any of that.”

Linderman waited for Harvey to continue, which he didn’t. “I mean, your roommate’s been murdered. You must know something about him.”

“I know he was one of the few guys on the team I really got along with.”

Linderman pushed himself off Felix’s desk and began circling it. “What’s wrong with the rest of the guys that you didn’t get along with them?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How’d you mean it, then?” The detective stopped behind the desk to thumb through Felix’s desk calendar. He was working his mouth as if he had something lodged under his gum.

“I just meant that Rudy and I—you know, roommates grow on each other. Can I have a cigarette?”

“Take this one,” Linderman said, tossing him the unlit Marlboro he had been holding since the beginning of the interview between his thumb and middle finger. “It’s not doing me any good.” He fumbled another cigarette out of his pocket and began playing with it.

“He was a funny guy,” Harvey said. “Like a big kid.”

“Rest of the team get along with him?”

“As far as I know.” Harvey glanced around the tiny office, trying to recall that he was at the ball park.

“But not like you got along with him?” Linderman craned his neck to look at Harvey.

“Maybe not. One thing about Rudy, he had a mouth on him. Some players don’t like that.”

“You mean he talked too much?”

“More like at the wrong times. He could get on a guy.”

“Look,” Linderman said, walking again, “I know there’re about seven or nine things you’d rather be doing, but bear with me, will you? What do you mean, he could get on a guy?”

Harvey struggled for an anecdote. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. The questions themselves fogged his memory. “Well, one thing he’d always do was if some guy complained about something, Rudy liked to say, ‘B.F.D.’ It didn’t matter what you were complaining about; it was just his way of getting attention, I guess. He was an orphan; he wanted people to like him, but he could rub them wrong. Rudy didn’t always wear real well.”

“Am I supposed to know what B.F.D. is?”

“Big fucking deal,” Harvey said.

“I get it. But you don’t know who could’ve been rubbed the wrong way hard enough to kill him for it?”

“No, I’m telling you, this whole thing doesn’t, it’s—”

“You mean he had a mouth on him, but he never used it to give you, his roommate, any clue as to what he was doing in the whirlpool this morning?” Linderman heaved himself up on the desk and finally lit his cigarette with an 89-cent lighter he ferreted from his pants pocket. “There was no special tension between Rudy and any of the others?”

“I don’t know of anything out of the ordinary.”

“What’s the ordinary?”

“Look, I don’t know. One guy doesn’t like another guy’s attitudes or his politics, or the way he borrows your shampoo and doesn’t give it back, or the fact that he gets more playing time. Do you like all the guys on the force?”

“Did he carry a lot of money? Cash?”

“He wasn’t broke.”

“I mean, a lot of money. Like try a thousand dollar bill.”

“A thousand?”

“We found one in there with him.”

“Where?”

“In the whirlpool.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“No reason why you should’ve. They don’t float. There was a crumpled thousand dollar bill at the bottom of the whirlpool.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Sure it’s interesting. If it belonged to Rudy, then robbery probably wasn’t the motive. And if it didn’t belong to him, I’d like to know who.” Linderman tapped some ash into his palm, bounced it once, and let it fall to the floor. “Harvey, do you have your own key to the clubhouse?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, but that doesn’t—”

“Doesn’t mean anything. I’m just asking. My keen deductive mind tells me that whoever killed your roommate didn’t have to have a key to get to him. See, Furth could’ve let his killer in, or he could’ve been in there all along and no one knew it. I might even entertain the thought that Furth could’ve been killed somewhere else and then put in the whirlpool.”

Linderman spotted Felix’s ashtray, a ceramic piece in the shape of a hollowed-out half-baseball, and poked out his cigarette. Harvey did likewise. “See,” Linderman said, “the field’s wide open. I just thought you might want to narrow it for me.”

Harvey shook his head.

“All right,” Linderman said, pushing himself off the desk and walking to the door. “Why don’t we take this up again some other time?”

Harvey got out of his chair. “You’ll find the bastard who did this,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Linderman took the rolled-up roster out of his inside jacket pocket and moved his finger until he found the name after Blissberg.

“Les Byers,” he said thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the black kid who homered in extra innings a couple of nights ago?”