The Tomb That Ruth Built (A Mickey Rawlings Mystery) Read online

  Chapter Ten

  This was my second stint playing for a New York baseball team, and I had visited the city many times while I was on the roster of other clubs, but I had rarely ventured into Greenwich Village. The south Manhattan neighborhood was one of the city’s oldest, and didn’t quite seem to fit in with the parts that were built later. Its streets were narrow and meandered in all sorts of directions, unlike the grid plan that was followed in most of the city. The buildings were primarily residential, of quaint construction, and wedged closely together.

  The people who lived in the Village had a distinctive character, too. Newspapers often referred to the inhabitants as “bohemians” because of their unorthodox lifestyles. The neighborhood was home to a thriving community of writers, artists, actors, and musicians, many of them exploring new and unusual ways of expressing themselves.

  Monday evening, I walked along Grove Street in the Village, looking for an address that Margie had written down for me. The windows of the homes I passed were dappled in amber by the setting sun, making them appear as if they were illuminated by candles. When I found the number I was seeking, on a tree-lined block near Seventh Avenue, it appeared so old and rundown that it very well might have lacked electric lights. The narrow, four-story red brick building, with white lintels and black ironwork, was sandwiched between two structures of similar construction. They were all built in a style that might have dated from the American Revolution, and struck me as something that I might expect to see in Savannah or Charleston instead of modern New York.

  Cradling a bottle of Mr. Tomasetti’s best Chianti in one arm, I climbed a footworn staircase to the third floor. With one more check of the address to be sure I had the correct apartment number, I knocked on 3-C and soon heard a clattering and banging from within. It almost sounded as if the place was being ransacked. The sound grew louder as someone inside approached the door.

  With a squeak of the knob and a creak of the hinges, Karl Landfors pulled open the door and greeted me with something that resembled a smile. He was dressed in his customary stark black suit with a tie of the same color. Squinting through his spectacles, he poked his pale, bony head into the hallway, looked left and right, and asked, “Where’s Margie?”

  “She had to work late at the studio,” I said. “They’re doing some big Civil War picture and Margie’s working out some of the stunts.” I held up the bottle. “I hope I’m still welcome without her.”

  “Of course, of course.” Landfors stepped aside to let me in, and followed behind. “The place is in a bit of a disarray, I’m afraid.”

  The condition of the small apartment was worse than “a bit of a disarray.” The place looked like the aftermath of an explosion in a second-hand furniture shop. The mismatched chairs, sofas, and tables were strewn about randomly. Most had clothing draped over them and dirty dishes were on several of the cushions. A few empty glasses and bottles were scattered on the hardwood floor, leaving puddles and stains from various liquids.

  On a paint-spattered easel in a corner of the apartment rested a large canvas painted in bright colors but of no recognizable image. Several similar paintings hung on the dusty, moss green walls. They were all of the modern abstract style that reminded me of something a child might produce with a box of crayons—if that child had been dosed with a little too much patent medicine.

  Stepping over debris, and squeezing past the furniture obstacles, we couldn’t avoid making the same clatter that I’d heard through the door. Landfors cautiously led the way to a relatively tidy section near the room’s one window. A threadbare velveteen daybed, with a neatly folded wool blanket and a lumpy pillow stacked on one end, served as a sofa. I recognized Landfors’ scratched Underwood typewriter on a cocktail table that did double-duty as a desk. “This is my area,” he said glumly.

  “Nice,” I lied, as I nearly tripped over a suitcase that probably served as his closet.

  “Let me open this,” he offered, taking the wine bottle. Landfors motioned for me to sit on the bed, navigated his way to a small kitchen area that looked even filthier than the sitting room, and washed out a couple of glasses. He filled them nearly to the brim and made the trip back. As he put the drinks on the table next to his typewriter, Landfors said, “I’m sorry. The place really isn’t in a suitable condition for guests. Would you rather go out?”

  “This is fine, Karl.” I reached for the wine and we each took a quick swallow without the ritual of a toast. “Interesting place,” I commented.

  “That it is.” Landfors shuddered slightly. “A bit too interesting at times, to be perfectly frank.”

  “How so?”

  Fortified with another long sip of Chianti, he answered, “There are a lot of very peculiar characters coming through here—at every hour, day and night. You know I usually have something of an affinity for outcasts and iconoclasts—”

  I couldn’t help but interject, “That’s because you’re one yourself, Karl.” He’d been part of almost every new radical cause that had popped up over the past twenty years.

  Landfors smiled. “I suppose you’re right.” He appeared thoughtful for a moment. “But I always have a purpose. I want to expose injustice and bring about change. I know I’m often tilting at windmills, but I have to try. Most of the people here want to be different merely for the sake of being different. I don’t understand their strange music or their writing style or their art. I’m not a critic, but a lot of it is simply bizarre.” He waved toward the mess on the floor. “And it matches the way they live. I like things organized, but the people who pass through here seem to think that cleanliness stifles creativity. Most just stop by, leave their garbage, and move on.”

  “Who owns the place?”

  “A writer I knew from Chicago. He’s out of town and I think he’s extended an open invitation to all of lower Manhattan to use the place as a flophouse.”

  “Then why stay? You know Margie and I would be happy to have you with us. All we can offer is the sofa, but it’s yours any time.”

  “In the Bronx?” He sounded as if I’d invited him to live in Siberia. “I mean, thank you. But it’s awfully far, and I have quite a bit of work to do here.”

  I didn’t press him, and I wasn’t offended by his reaction. “You said something about the Dot King murder. Are you getting anywhere with it?”

  “Oh yes.” He went on to give me more details about the case than I cared to know. Twenty-eight-year-old Dot King, once a Ziegfeld showgirl dubbed “The Broadway Butterfly,” had been found dead in her West Fifty-seventh Street apartment. No cause was apparent, but the death was deemed suspicious—probably chloroform—and her maid claimed that thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry were missing. This had all been widely reported already, so I didn’t see that Landfors had uncovered anything new. The papers, which after her death renamed King “The Broken Butterfly,” had also profiled a number of King’s prominent lovers and “benefactors,” which kept the scandalous story fresh as each new society name appeared in print. One of them was the son of President Harding’s Attorney General and another was the scion of one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families.

  Landfors’ account was interrupted by a shrill blast of sound through the half-open window. The initial assault on the ears was followed by a relentless barrage of squeaks and squeals. “Every night,” Landfors groaned. He got up and slammed the window shut. “The downstairs neighbor plays his damned clarinet on the fire escape every night. We complain, but he says he’s going to be famous some day and that we should be grateful for the free ‘concert.’ His name is Trenton Schacht, by the way, so if he does become famous you can say you heard him here first.”

  “Soprano sax,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s not a clarinet; it’s a soprano saxophone.” I’d heard the instrument played incredibly well during spring training in New Orleans. The noise from the balcony, however, was a seemingly random sequence of notes; it sounded as if Schacht was intentionally tryin
g to avoid playing anything melodic.

  With the window closed, the shrieking saxophone was still audible but not quite as disruptive. Landfors sat back down and picked up his story. “Now I’ve got something on the Broken Butterfly case that no one else has—at least not that’s been printed anywhere. And you might find it rather interesting.”

  So far, I hadn’t, but I was willing to hear more. “What is it?”

  Unnecessarily dropping his voice to a confidential level, Landfors said, “You’ve heard of Arnold Rothstein?”

  “Everyone in the country has heard of Rothstein,” I replied. Although he hadn’t been convicted of it, there was no doubt that the notorious gambler had fixed the 1919 World Series by bribing White Sox players to throw games to the Cincinnati Reds. The scandal had been a disaster for the national pastime. “What does he have to do with it?” I asked.

  Landfors let the suspense build by taking a slow sip of wine. He then faced me with a satisfied smirk. “Arnold Rothstein was Dot King’s landlord.”

  “So?”

  “He was also, according to my sources, a frequent visitor to her boudoir.”

  “So…?” This still wasn’t all that interesting to me. Why would I care whether or not Arnold Rothstein had a mistress?

  Landfors appeared disappointed in my reaction. “I don’t think you know the full scope of Rothstein’s activities,” he said.

  “He’s a gambler—fixes games, fights, and horse races. Thinks of himself as a ‘sportsman’ but doesn’t bet on anything that isn’t rigged.”

  “You have a limited view,” said Landfors smugly. “There is much more to the world than sporting events. Rothstein bankrolls criminal enterprises of all types and he’s trained some of the city’s most nefarious gangsters.”

  Only Landfors would use a word like “nefarious,” I thought. “All right,” I conceded, “so he’s a worse crook than I thought.”

  He went on, “Among Rothstein’s more lucrative rackets is the trafficking of narcotics. And, according to my sources, Dot King paid her rent by making drug deliveries for him.”

  “You can prove that?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. My sources aren’t exactly upstanding citizens themselves, and so far none of them wants to cross Rothstein in public. But I’m working on it, and from what I’ve pieced together so far I believe Dot King tried to blackmail Rothstein—and that could have been what got her killed.”

  It sounded pretty tenuous to me, but I complimented Landfors on what he’d gotten so far and wished him well. Then it was my turn to report, and I filled him in on what was going on with the Spats Pollard investigation and the threat I’d received at Katie Day’s night club. While I spoke, a trumpet player from another nearby balcony decided to see if he could drown out the saxophone. They dueled relentlessly, each trying to play louder than the other, as I went on to tell Landfors about the man who was recently beaten at one of the other concession stands.

  “There must be a connection,” Landfors said.

  “That’s what I figure, too,” I agreed. “I’m going to look into it.”

  “Perhaps there’s another body,” Landfors said excitedly. “The stadium could be some sort of gangland graveyard!”

  “That seems a little farfetched…”

  “It’s what they do,” he said. “When a new building goes up, they often dispose of their victims in the concrete. That way there’s little chance of the bodies ever being found.” I suspected that his sources on Rothstein had been filling his ears with some wild exaggerations about gangland practices.

  I suddenly remembered Ed Barrow telling me that the newspapers had gotten wind of the Spats Pollard story. “By the way,” I said, “whatever I tell you is off the record, right?”

  Landfors gave me an offended stare. “You know I’ve never written about any of your, uh, misadventures. And I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just had to mention it. I have a feeling this misadventure might turn out to be real trouble.”

  “Then get out of it. What do you care about some petty bootlegger?”

  “I don’t care about Pollard. I do care about playing baseball. Working on this case is job security—if I drop it, I’m off the team.”

  Landfors sighed. “I’ll never understand why playing baseball is so important to you. It is, after all, just a game.”

  I had never been able to explain it to him in the past, and didn’t see any point in trying again now. The wine bottle was empty and I drained what remained in my glass. “Well, I should probably be getting home. Margie might be back from the studio by now.” I start to rise from the daybed.

  “That reminds me,” Landfors said. “When are you going to marry her?”

  I abruptly sat back down. This wasn’t a subject that I particularly wanted to discuss. “You know I already asked her,” I answered. “She said ‘no.’ ” Margie had turned me down because she’d already had a husband that I never knew about.

  “That was last year,” he said. “And she did get a divorce, so now she’s free.”

  Landfors wouldn’t understand. He had never been married, and his relationships with women were never long-lasting. He’d broken up with a girlfriend in Detroit because of some disagreement over an obscure bit of political dogma that no one else would care about. “The thing is,” I said, “I thought I knew her. We were together for years and she never told me she was married.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t even a real marriage,” he said. “It was a weekend lark when she was in Hollywood—before you were in the picture—and she got married on a dare. No wonder she forgot about the escapade.”

  I knew the details, and I realized Margie really had done nothing to hurt me, but it was still a sore memory. I tried to explain, “I asked her once and she said ‘no.’ That makes it awfully hard to ever ask again.”

  “Well, you’re a fool if you don’t,” he sniffed. “In fact, if you don’t propose to her, maybe I will.”

  That gave me my first genuine laugh of the night.

  Chapter Eleven

  What Karl Landfors had dismissed as “just a game” was being played for blood today. Ty Cobb’s Detroit Tigers were visiting the Bronx and, as usual, Cobb was on a rampage.

  When he’d first come up to the big leagues in 1905, Cobb quickly established a reputation for himself as a supremely talented but surly hothead. Aggressive ball playing was one thing, but the volatile Cobb often carried this to the point of outright violence. The “Georgia Peach” ruthlessly cut the legs of opposing players with his slashing spikes, and he got into frequent fistfights with his own teammates, as well as opponents, fans, groundskeepers, and anyone else whom he felt had insulted or offended him. He unleashed punches and kicks with the same ferocity that he ran the base paths. In 1912, during a visit to New York, he even went into the stands to beat up a crippled Yankees fan who had been heckling him. To Ty Cobb there were no strangers, only enemies he hadn’t met yet.

  Since Cobb viewed every casual encounter as an opportunity for a new fight, when he developed a long-term grudge against someone it could precipitate all-out warfare. For several years now, one of the most prominent targets of Ty Cobb’s wrath was Babe Ruth. Cobb used an extensive array of weapons, most of them mean and petty, against the big guy.

  One of the reasons Cobb despised Ruth was because the Babe had supplanted him as the game’s premier player. The Tiger also hated the fact that Ruth had brought about a change in the way the game was played. Cobb, along with John McGraw and others, loved the strategy of playing for one run—place hitting, bunting, hit-and-run, stealing bases. But then the slugging Ruth came along and everyone wanted to see home runs. The ball was made livelier to help satisfy the fans’ demand for homers and the tactics of “inside baseball” had fallen out of favor. All it took to score a run now was a big swing and an obliging fastball. When I was his teammate, I’d heard Cobb say more than once that “any big ape could do it.”

  By now, in his third
year as Detroit’s player-manager, the thirty-six-year-old Cobb’s legs had slowed considerably but he’d lost none of his intensity and he tried to instill it in his players. As manager, he insisted that any man who played under him demonstrate the same kind of single-minded aggressiveness that he had epitomized for so many years. If a player was too easy-going or friendly for Cobb’s taste, he’d get another player to harass him until he was fighting mad. My former teammate Bobby Veach was a good-natured player who’d been subjected to this tactic. Cobb ordered big Harry Heilmann to taunt his fellow outfielder and light a fire under him, with the result that the happy-go-lucky Veach played a bit harder and got some more hits but he was no longer happy and he no longer spoke to Heilmann.

  Cobb used the same strategy on opposing players, which never made sense to me. He claimed it was to unsettle the other team, but if he believed that angry ballplayers tried harder, why would he provoke them? Yet that was what he was doing today to Babe Ruth.

  Undoubtedly on Cobb’s orders, Detroit starting pitcher Hooks Dauss threw his first two pitches directly at the Babe’s head when he came to bat. Neither of them made contact, but they got under the Babe’s skin. In the fourth inning, after eluding two more intended beanballs, Ruth connected on one of the sharp-breaking curves that had earned Dauss his nickname and hit a slicing liner to the opposite field. While the crowd cheered the long drive, Detroit’s rookie left fielder Heinie Manush scampered to play the ball off the carom and made a strong throw just in time to hold the Babe to a double.

  Ruth wasn’t held for long. On Dauss’s first pitch to Wally Pipp, Ruth got a good jump and stole third. The crowd cheered even louder as the grinning Babe stood and brushed clay from his uniform. It was exactly the kind of play that Ty Cobb loved—when it wasn’t done against his team. From my spot in the first base coach’s box, I could hear Cobb screaming at Dauss for letting Ruth get an easy stolen base. Because his home runs received so much attention, it was easy to forget that Ruth was much more than a slugger. This was already his fifth stolen base of the season, more than the aging Cobb had totaled so far. Ruth’s steal promptly paid off as Pipp drove him in with a solid single up the middle. That caused Cobb to renew his ranting at Dauss. When Dauss got the ball back, he angrily threw it down on the ground; I couldn’t tell if it was because of Pipp’s hit, Ruth’s run, or the fact that his manager was loudly berating him in front of forty thousand fans. Whatever the reason, Dauss was lucky that the umpire had called time or Pipp could have made it to second base.