The Cincinnati Red Stalkings (5 page)

I
fanned myself with an unused 1913 Cincinnati Reds scorecard, trying to stir up the warm, humid air that hovered in the parlor. The resulting breeze was too weak to prevent sweat from trickling down my face and splashing onto the pages of the
Baseball Magazine
I was leafing through.

It was an hour or two after midnight, and I was alone, seated at my desk, where I’d stacked the publications Ollie Perriman had given me. I was in my summer underwear—a sleeveless nainsook shirt and knee-length drawers—but neither the light clothing nor the open windows could alleviate the oppressive heat. I found the quiet of the night peaceful and calming though. The only sound was the sporadic thwack of a moth bumping into the window screen; it was attracted by the glow from the brass lamp on the desk’s top shelf.

A light footstep fell behind me, and I swiveled around in my chair to see Margie coming down the stairs, tying the sash of her red floral kimono. Her tread was somewhat unsteady, and her eyes were puffy.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked in a drowsy voice.

“Can’t stop thinking about Ollie Perriman getting killed.” I shifted in my chair, carefully peeling my posterior off the leather cushion as I moved.

“It’s awful what happened,” Margie said soothingly, “but staying up and fretting won’t change things. Come back to bed, get some sleep, you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Something about it doesn’t feel right,” I said. “I don’t think this was a simple robbery gone bad.”

Margie let out a long breath, then sat down on the sofa and tucked her legs under her. “Why not?”

“Because there were valuable things left behind.” I stuck the scorecard in the magazine to mark my place and set it down. “A couple of big gold medals were hanging on the wall right above Perriman’s desk. No thief could have missed seeing them. So why didn’t he take them?”

“Maybe he thought they’d be too easy to trace?”

“Could melt them down and sell them for the gold.”

“Well ...” The muscles in Margie’s neck strained as she stifled a yawn. “Maybe he got scared after the shooting and ran out.”

“Could be. But I don’t think it happened like that. The blood on the floor was by the desk—in a corner away from the door. So I don’t think Perriman walked in and surprised the robber. And if the killer walked in and shot Perriman where he sat, why rummage through the shelves and drawers afterward, but not take the medals?”

“I don’t know,” she answered with a note of finality. “But I do know that reading all night isn’t going to help anything. How about if I get you some warm milk and cookies and then you try to go back to sleep?”

“I’m not reading. I’m looking.”

“For what?”

“Not sure ...” I’d been trying to imagine what the man who killed Ollie Perriman could possibly have been after. “It seems to me like the thief was looking for something specific, not just something he could fence for a few bucks. And from what I saw, it didn’t appear that much, if anything, had been taken. So ... I got to wondering: what if he was after something Perriman had given me? What if it’s here?”

“Oh!” Margie sat up a little straighter and her eyes opened a notch wider. “But that’s just a pile of ... What could be valuable in there?”

“I can’t imagine.” These things were interesting to me, and they were rich with memories and history, but were they valuable in the sense of being worth stealing—worth killing somebody over? “But I want to see.”

“And if you find something?”

“I’ll turn it over to the police. Maybe they can figure out who would have wanted it badly enough to kill for.”

“Good. Let the police handle it.” Margie relaxed a bit.

“You know ... it could be that the robber did find what he was looking for in the office. Maybe it just wasn’t one of the things
you
thought were valuable. Never know what’s important to someone else.”

“You could be right.”

“Good. Coming to bed then?”

“No, I’m going to go through the rest of this stuff.”

Margie began to point out how stubborn I was, then she emitted a yawn that could have sounded the way for a barge on the Ohio River. “Well, I have to go to the zoo tomorrow to talk to Mr. Stephan about that job. I’m going back to sleep.” She pulled herself up from the sofa and stretched. When she finished, her kimono was partly open.

I had a brief notion to put off going through the rest of the items until morning. No, it would nag at me all night. As Margie started for the staircase, I reached for the
Baseball Magazine.

She paused on the second step. “You’re not going to get involved in this, right?”

“No, I promise.”

Detective Forsch stubbed out his cigarette, adding the butt to an already full ashtray. “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Rawlings.”

“Glad to,” I said, although I really wasn’t. I’d finally gone to bed shortly before dawn, having found nothing of value in the materials Ollie Perriman had given me. A few hours later, I was awakened by Forsch’s phone call. He asked me to meet with him at police headquarters, and since I could think of no way to refuse, I was soon on a streetcar headed downtown.

City hall, a towering stone block structure that took up the entire block of Plum Street from Eighth to Ninth, looked more like a cathedral than a municipal building. There were even stained-glass windows depicting scenes of early Cincinnati. Inside, stunning murals covered the lobby walls, and the flooring was of decorative tiles. The opulence didn’t extend to the offices of the Crime Bureau, however. Detective Forsch and I sat in a windowless interview room on the building’s east side, with a plain pine table between us.

On the table were a green ledger book that I recognized as Ollie Perriman’s, a pack of Murads, and the ashtray, which was made from a brass artillery-shell casing. Forsch pulled a fresh cigarette from the pack, and methodically lit up. The detective was either wearing the same clothes he’d had on in Perriman’s office or an identical suit in the identical shade of drab, perhaps a plainclothes version of a uniform. Standing inside the doorway of the room was a beefy young man in the more recognizable uniform of navy blue flannel and brass buttons.

Forsch said nothing while enjoying the first few drags on the cigarette. I thought he might be trying to unnerve me by taking so long. He probably didn’t know that this wasn’t my first time in a police interview. “Got to be at the park for batting practice in an hour,” I said.

The detective’s gray eyes glittered momentarily, as if getting me to speak first was some kind of victory for him. “Wouldn’t want the team to be without your talents,” he said.

I tried to remember what I might have done to get on this man’s bad side; if I had done anything, it eluded me.

He opened the ledger. “Mr. Tinsley has completed an inventory of the collection, comparing everything in the office to Perriman’s entries in this book—and it turns out a number of items are missing.”

Huh. So it
was
a robbery. I found myself disappointed that Forsch had been right.

The detective turned the book to me and pointed to one of the lines. “And every item that’s missing has your name written next to it.”

I read one of the entries:
Ellard’s BB in Cin.,
acquired from
Anon.
who’d donated it. Written in the margin was
Rawlings.
There were similar entries for the guides and other materials now in my parlor. “Perriman gave me these things,” I explained. “He kept a record of everything in the collection, and I guess he wanted to keep track of where they went.”

“Gave them to you?”

“Yes. They weren’t worth anything. Mostly duplicates of things he already had, and he was going to throw them out otherwise. I can show you the stuff if you want.”

“That won’t be necessary. Mr. Tinsley has already confirmed that the missing items weren’t of any value.”

I was thinking to myself that this meant all the mementos in Perriman’s collection were accounted for—they were either still at the ballpark or at my house. So the killer didn’t find what he was looking for.

Forsch exhaled a stream of smoke. “You didn’t by any chance tell anybody about what was in the office, did you?”

“I probably did. There wasn’t any secret about it. Hell, Lloyd Tinsley was already starting to publicize what was going to be in the exhibit.”

“Yes, I know. Might have led somebody to think there was something valuable in there.”

I recalled the announcement that had appeared in the paper the day before Perriman was killed. “Long-lost treasures” was one of the phrases that had been used to describe the collection. “I suppose it might have.”

“Somebody who knew his way around the ballpark,” Forsch said.

“What do you mean?”

“No sign of a break-in. How’d the killer get in? And how’d he know where the things were kept?”

“Well ...”

“Unless it was somebody who’d been there before. Or somebody who’d been told where to go.”

That’s what Forsch was getting at: that I was in cahoots with somebody to steal the collection. “As far as getting into a ballpark,” I answered, “just about any ten-year-old kid can find a way to sneak in. And it happened the night after a game; anybody in the park that day could have hidden inside and waited until nighttime. As far as the robber knowing to go to the office, where else would things like that be stored but somewhere in the administrative area? And both times I went to Perriman’s office, the door was open—maybe he kept it unlocked when he was working there.”

“So you knew the door was kept open.” Implying that I could have relayed that piece of information to an accomplice, too.

“Yeah, I did. But you know, if I told somebody what was in the room to help them steal it, they’d have taken it.”

Forsch stubbed out his cigarette. From the look on his face, whatever half-baked theory he might have been entertaining about me being involved was also extinguished.

Judging by his questioning of me, his investigation wasn’t amounting to much, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that it ever would. But in case it could turn out to be of some help, I said, “There’s something I noticed when I went to the office to talk to you yesterday.”

“And what’s that?”

“One of the uniforms was partly burned. Maybe whoever killed Perriman tried to set the place on fire to cover it up.”

Forsch grunted. “You been reading the papers too much.”

The front pages of the last few days had been filled with stories and photographs of a massacre in Mayfield, Kentucky—a family of eleven had been murdered and their house burned down to try to cover up the killings. “Yeah, I read the papers. But I also know what I saw. The day before he was killed, Perriman showed me a uniform jersey he’d just gotten. It was from Cal McVey, who wore it when he was with the ’69 Red Stockings. I
know
there weren’t any burn marks when Perriman showed it to me. But when I saw it yesterday, it was burned.”

Forsch reached for the Murads. “Maybe it was an accident. You should hear how the wife yells at me about holes in my clothes.” He then stuck another cigarette in his mouth and lit up.

“It wasn’t a cigarette hole,” I said. “Anyway, just thought you might want to consider it.”

“Consider it?” Forsch’s eyes narrowed. “I got to answer to Lloyd Tinsley, I’m getting pressure from Garry Herrmann’s pals upstairs, and now I got a goddamn ballplayer—and a lousy one at that—telling me how to do an investigation?”

At least now I knew why Forsch had been so hostile to me: my bosses were giving him a hard time, so he was going to give some of it back to one of their employees. I said calmly, “It was just something I noticed, and I thought I should report it to you.”

“Fine, fine. Never mind.” As a peace offering he asked, “Cigarette?”