The game remained scoreless into the top of the ninth inning. And that’s when I figured out how Hal Chase did it.
Jake Stahl hit a grounder to third to open our half of the inning, and I kept my eyes on Chase from the moment the bat made contact. While the ball skipped to the third baseman, Chase stayed anchored well off the first base bag. Then just before the ball was fielded, he broke for the base. When the third baseman’s throw arrived, Chase was hustling as hard as he could to take the throw at first—but his initial delay ensured that he wouldn’t be in time to catch the ball cleanly. The son of a bitch. He was really throwing the game.
Yesterday, with the sight of a dead man still fresh in my eyes, I would have thought that murder was the most heinous of crimes. But now I’d seen Hal Chase try to throw a baseball game. It was an offense that seemed worse than murder—a crime less gruesome, but a sacrilege more sinister.
Chapter Five
Before the first game in Shibe Park, I worried that I would be intimidated by playing against the Athletics. Not only were they my old boyhood favorites, but just off their second straight World Series win, they would likely be Boston’s toughest competition for the American League pennant.
Once the first game began, however, my awe for the Athletics faded away. Maybe because it wasn’t the same field where I had watched them as a boy.
My nonchalance lasted only until the next day, when we faced Gettysburg Eddie Plank. Plank had been pitching for the A’s since I was nine years old. He was one of those hurlers I batted against time and again in countless daydreams. Somehow the prospect of trying to hit him in real life didn’t seem as promising as it did in my fantasies of years ago.
My first at bat against Plank turned out to be an embarrassingly futile effort. I felt physically weak, with no strength in my legs or power in my arms. I swatted at three pitches and struck out without even a foul tip.
In my second try against him, I was just angry enough with myself that it offset the nervousness. The net effect was that I felt strong and sharp. On his second pitch, I tagged a line drive single up the middle, just inches over Plank’s head. At first base, I cheered to myself: I can hit Eddie Plank! Yes, I belong in the big leagues.
I ended up one for four, but that one felt like plenty. Plank won the game, giving Philadelphia a split of the first two games of the series.
After the game, the locker room was the usual babel of talking, groaning, cussing, and spitting. Still generally ignored by teammates, I changed quietly, barely paying attention to the intermittent comments that buzzed around me.
“He got himself killed.”
That caught my attention. I wasn’t sure who said it, or what preceded it. I lifted my head and tilted it this way and that, angling my ears to try to extract additional information from the fragmented words and phrases that darted about the room.
“Look at these goddam corns—my feet are killin’ me.”
“Anybody seen my towel?”
Hchoowook. Shptoo. Splat!
So far nothing useful. Come on, somebody ask who got himself killed.
“I gotta get myself some new spikes.”
“Okay, who took my towel?”
“Who’s pitchin’ tomorrow?”
“Found him under a railroad bridge.”
There! That was a strange sentence for a baseball clubhouse.
I began to successfully filter out the extraneous conversations, and pick up only those comments that didn’t fit in with typical locker room chatter. In no particular order, I was able to gather that a baseball player had been killed, the fellow’s name sounded like “Carrigan,” he played third base for Detroit, his body was found under a railroad bridge in Boston, it was discovered after the Tigers’ last series there, and he had died as the result of a mugging. Since Detroit had preceded us in Shibe Park, I figured that’s how this news started to get around.
I was hoping for information about the dead man I stumbled upon in Fenway Park, and was disappointed. The locker room conversation obviously referred to someone else. I remembered the newspaper story I read about the body that was found in Dorchester, and this fit what I heard in the clubhouse.
Instead of going straight to the hotel after leaving Shibe Park, I took an aimless walk through the streets of North Philadelphia. My thoughts were confused and largely incoherent, but they eventually agreed on one frightening conclusion: a deadly trend was developing.
Although my find at Fenway Park was a horrible one, it was the horror of one gruesome sight, one shocking experience. Now, even more chilling, was the possibility that it wasn’t an isolated incident. Two violent deaths—was it two and counting?—had occurred within a short time of each other. And both were connected with Fenway Park. One victim—maybe a fan—was found in the stadium, and the other had just played there. Could the splendid new ballpark be jinxed?
The walk didn’t help me sort things out any, so I grabbed a cheese steak sandwich at a street vendor and went back to the hotel room.
Laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, I realized that I wasn’t going to clear anything up just by thinking. If I wanted to find out what happened, I would have to talk to people, ask what I wanted to know. But talking could get me in trouble.
Tyler had made it clear that I’d better keep my mouth shut about the dead man at Fenway Park. Of course I knew that his main concern wasn’t my protection as he claimed—he probably wanted to avoid bad publicity more than anything else. Whatever the real reason for his orders, Bob Tyler seemed a man who would not tolerate having them disobeyed.
And then there’s the police. If they failed to find the real killer, the cops might decide to clear up the case by convicting the handiest suspect. Having been found at the crime scene, Captain O’Malley already had me pegged for that role. Asking questions would only draw additional attention to myself.
I wasn’t entirely sure which would be worse: facing Tyler’s wrath or O’Malley’s handcuffs.
Wait a minute ... I can ask questions about the Detroit player—it was only the body at Fenway that Tyler had told me to keep quiet about. If Tyler gives me hell for asking about the dead Tiger, I’ll swear I did as I was told, and pretend it never occurred to me that the deaths were connected.
I was still awake when Clyde Fletcher came into our room, much earlier than usual, grumbling about the insufficient nightlife in Philadelphia.
Hchoowook. Shptoo. Ping!
I looked at him as he sat on his bed. His head seemed to list to one side to balance the massive chaw of tobacco that puffed out his cheek. It gave a tilt to the one huge bushy eyebrow that spanned across both his eyes as it tried to stretch from ear to ear.
Although he seemed unpromising as a source of information on anything but vices, I decided to try to talk with Fletcher. If there was no response, at least I wouldn’t be losing out on much.
Trying hard to sound as if I just wanted to pass the time, I asked him, “You know a player named Carrigan?”
“Bill Carrigan?”
I shook my head at the name of the Red Sox catcher. “No, this guy is with Detroit. Or he was, anyway. Some guys in the clubhouse were saying he got himself in a scrap.”
Fletcher looked puzzled, then seemed to remember him. “Oh. Corriden. Yeah, Red Corriden. He was in the last series in Boston. Too bad about him.