Hanging Curve Read online

  “You sure did,” he snapped. His face showed a flash of the same competitive temper that he’d displayed during the game, then he got the emotion in check, not wanting to jeopardize a potential sale. “But don’t worry about it. You weren’t the only one who played lousy.”

  His sales manner still needed a little polishing, I thought. “I know it was a big game for you guys,” I said.

  “Sure was. Would have give my left arm to win it. And Mr. Enoch would have give both of his.”

  “Players took the loss pretty hard?”

  “Hell yeah. That makes three years in a row them black bastards beat us.” Padgett spit. “We’ll get ’em next time, though.”

  “Should be easier now that their pitcher’s dead.”

  He shrugged. “They’ll get another. Ah, there he is.”

  A slender, middle-aged man in a chalk-striped blue business suit had stepped out of the office, tugging a snap-brim fedora over his neatly groomed gray hair. When we drew close to him, I saw the lines that creased his weathered face; on some they’d be called laugh lines, but on him they were probably caused by the sour expression that puckered his skin.

  “Mr. Enoch,” Padgett said. “This is Mickey Welch. He played with us against the Cubs.”

  Enoch’s pale eyes narrowed. “I remember him,” he said in a flat twang. “It’s not every day I throw away ten dollars.”

  I was about to protest that I hadn’t cost him a dime, but decided not to bother. Besides, the manager might have pocketed the money for himself and never told Enoch that I’d played for no pay.

  “He’s interested in a new car,” Padgett went on. “Thought we might give him a break on the price.”

  The two of them stepped aside and huddled together briefly. Then Padgett came back to me, and Roy Enoch drove off in a shiny green Elcar.

  “Good news!” Padgett reported. “Mr. Enoch says you can take a hundred dollars off any new model in stock—except the Studebakers. Got a big demand for those. And if you decide to go used, we’ll take fifty bucks off the price. That would bring that Hupmobile you were looking at down to, uh ...”

  “Nine-twenty-five,” I said. “Sounds like a good deal. Let me think it over, and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Sure, sure. I understand. But remember to ask for me, right?”

  “Of course. Oh, say, while I’m here I might as well say hi to Tater Greene. He around?”

  “Yup, he’s ...” Padgett’s attention had drifted to another potential customer browsing the lot, and he started to edge away. “... in the garage. Excuse me.”

  I walked over to the three-bay service building, a modern, well-equipped facility where four mechanics in olive drab coveralls were noisily at work. One of them was Tater Greene, hunched over the partially dismantled engine of a battered Chandler Six sedan. I smiled when I recalled the way he’d said he was “in the automobile business” as if he owned the dealership.

  “Hey, Tater,” I said. “Whatcha workin’ on?”

  He glanced up at me. “Magneto on this thing is shot. Along with just about everything else.” He stood and wiped his hands on a rag. “What brings you here?”

  “Looking for a car,” I said, maintaining the pretext. “Brian Padgett showed me a few.”

  Greene snorted. “That little prick.”

  “Huh?”

  My former teammate brushed the rag over his lumpy forehead, leaving a grease smudge that matched the color of his teeth. “I was supposed to get the sales job, and he took it right out from under me.”

  “What happened?”

  “You remember J. D. Whalen?”

  The stocky third baseman who’d pitched the final innings of the Cubs game. “Sure. What about him?”

  “He was a salesman here, and he got canned last week. Enoch knew I wanted to move into his spot, but he give it to Padgett instead.”

  “Why?”

  “The old”—Greene looked behind to be sure the other mechanics couldn’t hear—“the old bastard says I don’t got a good sales manner. Can you believe that crap?”

  Enoch was probably right, I thought, but I did sympathize with Greene’s disappointment. Instead of clean work in a suit and tie, he was stuck here in the grease and dirt, breathing engine exhaust and gasoline fumes. “I think you’d make a fine salesman,” I said. “Hell, you managed to sell me on playing with you against the Cubs.”

  Greene smiled at the vote of confidence and went back to work on the engine. “I’ll get another chance. Padgett spends more time in the office sparking with Doreen than he does on the lot. Can’t sell cars that way.”

  “Why’d Whalen get fired?” I asked. I wondered if his poor performance against the Cubs had cost him his job.

  “Nobody knows for sure. I expect he wasn’t selling as many cars as Enoch thought he should. Could you give me that screwdriver?”

  I handed him the tool. “You told me most of the team works here.”

  “They do.”

  “How many of them are in the Klan?”

  Greene froze for a moment. “I wouldn’t know. Membership in those kinds of groups is usually secret.” I knew he was familiar with “those kinds of groups.” In Chicago, during the war, he’d belonged to one of the “patriotic” vigilante organizations that targeted Socialists, pacifists, and those with German surnames.

  “Can’t be much of a secret if it’s part of the company’s advertising,” I said. “I saw the sign outside.”

  “That doesn’t mean much. Some people just like to do business with a fellow Klansman, same as a brother Elk or Mason.”

  “So Roy Enoch is in the Klan.”

  “He owns this place; the sign is his. That’s all I know.”

  “Some folks think it was the Klan that killed Slip Crawford,” I said. “You hear anything about that?”

  “Just that he got himself strung up.”

  “You think it had anything to do with him beating us”—I hated being included among the “us”—“in that game?”

  Greene pulled out a long bolt and put it on the fender with a clunk. “Over a baseball game?”

  “There were Klansmen at the park that day. And maybe some on the team.”

  “Don’t know about the ones outside the fence,” he said. “But no ballplayer is gonna kill another player for beating him in a game.” He mopped the back of his neck with the rag. “You know how it is: If a guy beats you, you want to beat him the next time. If you kill him, you don’t get the chance.”

  Tater Greene made more sense than I’d expected. But I thought it over for a moment and realized that his line of reasoning applied to professional players like him and me. We had made baseball our lives and understood the nature of competition. Perhaps those who viewed the contest with the Cubs as a racial conflict instead of a sporting event didn’t have the sense that Greene had. “Anybody take the loss especially hard?” I asked.

  “Not in particular. We were all down about it. Mostly from pride, but some lost money.”

  “Was there a lot of betting?”

  “Roy Enoch bet with some of the other semipro owners. And Ed Moss lost out on a fifty-buck bonus he was promised if we won.”

  Maybe that’s why the manager pocketed the ten I’d passed up. “Moss work here, too?”

  “Nah, he’s with the police—a desk sergeant.”

  “Any of the players lose a lot of money?”

  He shook his head. “To tell you the truth, none of us was certain enough we’d win to risk much money on the game. Them colored boys are good ballplayers, and we all know it. Wouldn’t have had to scout for ringers if we thought we could win on our own.” He began another assault on the stubborn magneto.

  “Tater?” I waited until he looked directly at me. “You know anything about Crawford getting lynched?”

  He straightened up and answered emphatically, “I don’t know nothin’, and I ain’t heard nothin’.”

  I doubted that his answer was entirely true, but it sure sounded final, so I
left Enoch’s car lot and caught a trolley back to St. Louis.

  For the most part, I believed Greene, although he probably had some knowledge or suspicions that he chose not to share with me. And I could see the argument against any of the players being involved. I’d had a vague notion that maybe one who’d been especially embarrassed during the game would have wanted revenge. But even so, it would have required several people; no one could have beaten and hanged Slip Crawford by himself.

  By the time the trolley crossed Eads Bridge, I was inclined to believe that Crawford’s killers were most likely the men who’d been at the game in hoods and robes, not baseball uniforms. Besides, if the motive for killing Crawford was that he’d humiliated an opposing player, that would make me a prime suspect.

  The Browns gave me no chance to embarrass myself in Saturday’s game against the White Sox. I was again limited to watching from the dugout bench—which turned out to be an ideal spot from which to see our left fielder Ken Williams make history.

  Williams was one of baseball’s best-kept secrets, despite the fact that last season he’d slugged twenty-four home runs, the second highest total in American League history. Unfortunately for Williams, the person with the most was Babe Ruth, and the Babe so dominated the National Pastime that few fans noticed the players in his shadow.

  Unlike the flamboyant Ruth, Ken Williams did little to attract attention to himself. The simple, thirty-two-year-old country boy lived a modest life. His only known activity outside of playing baseball was talking about the game, and he did so at interminable length. Sportswriters actually avoided Williams because he tended to give discourses instead of catchy quotes.

  Today, however, his bat spoke so loudly he couldn’t be ignored. In the first inning, Williams belted a home run all the way onto Grand Boulevard. He later added two more mammoth round-trippers to become the first American League ballplayer to hit three home runs in a game. Not even Ruth, who had set a new season record of fifty-nine last year, had ever achieved such a feat.

  Ken Williams’s power display was almost enough to convert me to a fan of the long ball. I’d always been a proponent of the “inside” game exemplified by John McGraw and Ty Cobb, where you relied on your wits instead of sheer strength and used the bunt and the stolen base to play for one run at a time. Watching the drives of Ken Williams, though, I had to admit that there’s something awfully pretty about a baseball arcing its way over the fence.

  After the game, while reporters were still huddled around Williams in the locker room, scribbling furiously to record his long-winded comments, I left to meet Karl Landfors at the gate.

  As the two of us walked to catch a trolley for home, Karl couldn’t stop raving about Williams’s home-run exhibition. Since I’d been trying for years to turn Karl into a baseball fan, it was gratifying to hear his enthusiasm.

  Not until we’d transferred at Delmar Boulevard, was I finally able to give him a full report on my meeting with Tater Greene. I concluded it by saying, “I don’t think Greene knows anything. And if the team was behind Crawford’s lynching, he would have heard about it.”

  “What about talking to some of the other players?” he asked. “If any of them are Klansmen, maybe they know who was involved even if they weren’t themselves.”

  “If they do, they sure aren’t going to say so. Besides, why are you so sure it’s the Klan?” I still thought Crawford’s killers were probably Klansmen, too, but there were a couple of aspects of the lynching that I didn’t understand.

  Karl frowned. “It seems obvious, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but you said yourself, they usually brag about it when they lynch somebody. Why not this time? And before now, it’s mostly been in the South, right? Why suddenly here?” In the Midwest, the Klan was generally seen as just one more fraternal organization with funny names and secret rituals. It even staged public parades and rallies.

  “That’s the worry,” Karl said. “What if it’s spreading here?”

  “I don’t know.” But I didn’t want to find out; I had other matters on my mind. “Sorry, Karl. Wish I could have been more help.”

  “Maybe you—”

  I cut him off. “I don’t have to get on my knee, do I?”

  He blinked behind his thick glasses. “Pardon me?”

  “When I ask Margie to marry me. Do I have to get on my knee?”

  “I don’t know.” Karl was clearly at a loss. “They do in the movies ... but I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything authoritative on the matter.”

  For the rest of the ride home, Karl proved as useless in advising me how to propose as I would be in advising Ken Williams how to hit home runs.

  CHAPTER 7

  Karl Landfors paced himself over the next few days. He began by mentioning his lawyer friend once or twice, then a few more times, along with some casual suggestions that I’d probably enjoy meeting the man. Before I knew it, Karl had set a time and date.

  Early Wednesday morning, Karl and I were on Market Street, in a predominantly colored section of downtown St. Louis. At the corner of Twenty-first Street, the Comet Theatre was showing Oscar Micheaux’s The Gunsaulus Mystery, billed as “The Greatest Colored Photoplay Yet Made.” Next to the movie theater was an ancient, but well-preserved, brick office building.

  We walked into the front office of F. W. Aubury, Attorney-at-Law, and were greeted by his receptionist, a pretty Negro girl with bobbed hair. “Mr. Landfors,” she said with a prompt smile, “you’re right on time.” Reaching for the telephone, she nodded a greeting in my direction, and informed the person on the other end of the line that we’d arrived.

  She then showed us into a small office that was sparse on furnishings but flush with papers. They sprouted from the open drawers of an oak file cabinet, and spilled over from above the law books that lined the back wall. There were also teetering stacks of papers on the desk, piled so high that they almost hid the slim colored man seated behind them. If not for his calm demeanor, I would have guessed that the office had been ransacked.

  “Mickey,” Karl said, “this is Franklin Aubury.”

  “Good to meet you,” I said.

  Aubury stood, rising to a height of about five-eight, and we shook hands. “My pleasure. Karl has told me quite a bit about you.” The lawyer’s speech was clipped and precise, and his appearance was equally fastidious, although not fashionable. His stark black suit and stiff-collared white shirt were so similar to Karl’s that the two of them might have shared the same tailor. They were also similarly devoid of hair, Karl having lost his to nature while the lawyer’s head was shaved. Besides skin color, and the fact that Aubury had some muscle under his, the most noticeable difference between the two men was in their choice of spectacles: Aubury wore gold pince-nez that made him appear older than the thirty or thirty-five years I estimated him to be.

  He gestured to a couple of chairs and invited us to sit down. Karl and I had to clear off so many newspapers and journals before we could that I wondered when Aubury had last had a client in his office.

  “What kind of law do you practice?” I asked. “Karl mentioned you work for the NAACP.”

  “I work with them on certain issues,” he said. “But I do not work for them. I work for all people of the colored race, and with anyone who shares our goals. Lately, my efforts have been directed primarily toward passage of antilynching legislation.”

  He and Karl not only dressed alike, I thought, but they both spoke in the same humorless tone.

  Aubury removed his pince-nez, and methodically cleaned the lenses with his pocket handkerchief. “But let us talk baseball for a moment, if we may. I’m quite a fan—I even played a bit myself back in college.”

  I glanced at Karl, who I knew was utterly devoid of athletic ability, and smiled, relieved to hear that there was a difference between these two. “I’m always happy to talk baseball,” I said.

  Aubury leaned back. “Do you know when the League of Colored Base Ball Clubs was organized?”
/>   “Two years ago, wasn’t it? 1920.”

  “No, that’s the Negro National League. The first professional league for Negro players was the League of Colored Base Ball Clubs—in 1887.”

  “Huh.” I had no idea they’d organized a league that long ago.

  “Have you heard of Sol White?” he asked next.

  I shook my head no.

  “He published the first history of colored baseball back in 1907. White was also a fine player in his time, and still coaches.” Aubury adjusted his glasses. “How about Frank Grant—do you know of him?”

  Strike three. “Did you want to talk baseball,” I replied, “or give me a history test?”

  Karl cleared his throat at my bluntness.

  Aubury flashed a surprisingly warm smile. “Point taken.” He let his chair spring upright. “What I would like you to understand is that colored baseball is not a recent development. Baseball is part of our culture, and important to our community. It’s almost as important as church—in fact, some colored churches change the times of their services when they conflict with scheduled ball games. Colored boys dream of becoming baseball players the same as white boys do, and a Negro League ballplayer is as much a hero to our people as a Babe Ruth or a Walter Johnson.” Aubury pressed his fingertips together in a peak. “That brings me to Slip Crawford.”

  From the first time Karl suggested that I meet his friend, I knew it was primarily because of the pitcher’s death. “What about him?” I asked.

  “Slip Crawford was a local hero. He grew up in a shanty in East St. Louis, and played semipro baseball with the old Imperials there. Last year, he made it to the Negro National League, pitching for the Indianapolis ABCs—struck out twenty batters in his second game. And this season his pitching would have given the St. Louis Stars a shot at the championship.” Aubury paused. “Unfortunately, his pitching was too good. He beat a white team, and they hanged him for it.”