The Babe Ruth Deception Read online

  Aurelia had rejected the undertaker’s suggestion that Speed be buried in a new suit. His black suit was brushed and pressed but still old and worn. She chose the music, the prayers, the speakers, declaring that they were what he would have wanted.

  “Doctor Fraser.” It was the pastor again. “We have refreshments.” He gestured to a small table covered with cakes and cookies. “You might fortify yourself. The service will be long. There’s much to remember about Brother Cook.”

  Fraser nodded. He chose a sugar cookie. The sweetness flooded his mouth. Did Speed like sugar cookies? He had no idea. Fraser felt like an impostor, portraying the trusted friend in whose arms Speed Cook died.

  It turned out that Pastor Powell knew his business. The service stretched on and on, numbing Fraser with endless words and heart-churning music. He recognized some of the songs—“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—though he didn’t join in. He liked those songs in variety shows, but they were different here, no longer pleasing tunes. Here they pulled him down.

  Seated with the other honorary pallbearers, Fraser felt conspicuous, surrounded by faces that ranged from beige to purple black. He imagined himself an anthropologist adrift in a new culture, one no less foreign than the tribes of the Kalahari. A handsome gray-haired man with a deep, sonorous voice delivered the eulogy. He described someone Fraser didn’t know. A generous, openhanded man who was never too busy to help others, who felt every injury and indignity suffered by his race and fought to stop them. Was the eulogist tidying up the furious and sarcastic and always competent man that Fraser knew? Or had Speed shown only one part of himself to Fraser across the barrier of race? Or was that all that Fraser could see?

  Moving down the center aisle behind the actual pallbearers, Fraser felt even more conspicuous, a clumsy goose among sleek ravens. On the street, a phalanx of Negroes stood in crisp military uniforms. Two, probably in charge, sported plumed hats from the age of Lord Nelson. Sunlight glinted off gold epaulets and brass buttons. Scabbards hung from their belts.

  A man wearing an armband gestured him to an open car. Fraser wedged in between two beefy gents who seemed like former ballplayers. Another sat in the front, next to the driver. It was hot in their suits, in the sun, waiting for the miserable ride to the cemetery.

  The man on Fraser’s left turned his head and spoke. “I understand you were with Speed,” he said. “At the end.”

  Fraser nodded, noticing that the fellow was older than he had first thought. He was about Fraser’s age. “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m glad he wasn’t alone.”

  “Did you play with him? With Speed?”

  The man shook his head. “Don’t know anyone who played with Speed Cook. You played for that man.” He leaned ahead to look across Fraser. “Isn’t that right, Jerome?”

  “Amen,” the other said.

  “So,” Fraser said, “he was your manager? Or the team owner?”

  “Hell, no,” the man smiled. “Just a teammate. Too long ago. But I played for him just the same. Isn’t that right, Jerome?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Fraser leaned back in his seat and introduced himself. Pete Johnson, the man on his left, had played outfield in Detroit and Cleveland. Jerome Hill had pitched. Both lived in Philadelphia now.

  “I’m curious,” Fraser said, turning his head from one to the other. “What kind of ballplayer was he?”

  The conversation lasted all the way to Queens, then after, when Fraser and his two new friends got something to eat and to drink. They talked into the evening.

  * * *

  The empty feeling had Fraser in its grip. Everything had come at him so fast, and then he was completely alone—Speed dead, Joshua and Violet and Eliza on the other side of the ocean. He was waiting for Eliza to send word for him to join them, or that she’d be coming back, but she never said. She must not know yet. They had made no real plans for themselves after Violet turned their world upside down. He didn’t know if Eliza would stay in England until the baby was born, or maybe she would bring Violet home if Joshua . . . didn’t work out. Maybe Fraser would join them for a while in England. Or not. Or maybe they would all stay in England forever and ever after.

  He went to the institute and saw patients. He tried with them. But the research part of his day, he didn’t even try with that. He avoided his colleagues, a course that drew no real notice. Antisocial behavior among medical researchers was hardly worthy of notice. Eliza had recruited Uncle Wilfred to look after her theatrical agency during her absence. Though Wilfred seemed a dubious choice, Fraser would have been a far worse one, so he followed his longtime practice of leaving such matters alone.

  His spirits rose when each letter from Eliza arrived. In one, she reported cheerfully about the wedding, a civil ceremony that almost didn’t happen when a British official demanded to see the groom’s passport. After traveling through Canada under an alias, Joshua had no passport to offer. A hurried trip to the American consulate established that the Englishman was wrong. America’s passport requirement had expired with the war. On the following day, armed with an explanation on official USA letterhead, the couple was married. It made Fraser sad that he hadn’t been there. Eliza mentioned no problem over the races of the bride and groom. None of her letters mentioned race. Fraser didn’t know if that meant there were no problems, that England was proving everything that Joshua had hoped it would be. He allowed himself to hope so.

  The three of them had taken a furnished flat in an unfashionable neighborhood. Joshua wanted to live frugally until the liquor-exporting business was up and running, though Fraser knew he must be sitting on a great deal of Rothstein’s cash. It probably was best not to flash that around, draw attention from the wrong sort. The women spent most days sightseeing while Joshua scouted for office space and worked out purchasing and shipping arrangements. Many nights they went to shows in complimentary seats provided by Eliza’s London theater connections.

  Beyond Joshua’s frugality, Eliza didn’t mention money problems. It seemed that Joshua had gotten away with it. Fraser hoped that he and Speed had helped. Did that make him a criminal, too? Was it a crime to help someone steal from criminals? The questions didn’t interest him much. He had done it for Violet. That was enough.

  Was the money worth Speed’s life? Speed might think so, but then he had some funny ideas. Knowing how the question haunted Joshua, Fraser wrote directly to him about his father’s death, so he would know the truth. And so he would understand that Speed always chose what he did, no one could stop him, and that in this case he would do it again.

  Joshua’s note back was short, nearly curt. Fraser tried not to mind. Haunting questions, guilty ones about those closest to you, didn’t yield to logic. Fraser still hated how oblivious he had been as a boy during his father’s final illness, how inept he was when he lost Ginny and their baby in a single terrible night back in Ohio. The logical explanations—that he had been a small boy, that he did his best during Ginny’s childbirth—cut no ice with his accuser. Himself.

  Eliza’s letters said nothing about when they might come home. Nor did she urge him to join them. She must be waiting for things with Violet and Joshua to settle, for her own mind to settle. He envied her. At least she was with the others. After reading each letter, he felt more alone than when he opened it. He tried to keep that feeling out of his letters back, but it must have seeped in. His were much shorter. He had less news.

  Fraser started going for nighttime walks along the Hudson, trying to quiet his mind so he could fall asleep. He had strolled those piers with Eliza when he first came to New York. He seemed to pass more toughs there now, men left behind in the mad race to get rich, but they didn’t bother him. He had picked up the New York walk, the one that told would-be criminals you would be too much trouble, they should try someone else.

  Even after the riverside strolls he slept poorly, waking up every hour or two, chasing some anxious thought about Speed, or Eliza, or Viol
et, or the baby. If it was 4 AM or later, he went ahead and started his day. Sometimes he walked in the early morning, too.

  About two weeks after the funeral, Fraser stopped at a corner on a dawn walk. He looked down. He wore the pants of one suit with the jacket from another. He turned back and watched morning spread over Manhattan like a laundered sheet. The light came gradually, striking a different window as each moment passed, revealing another building he hadn’t noticed before. The buildings turned colors, starting in blueblack murk, then finding gray, then revealing their true colors as the sun breached the horizon and forced him to shade his eyes.

  Fraser kicked at a stone on the pavement. It went a few feet. He stepped and swung his leg again. The stone skittered down the walkway. He thought for the thirtieth time about what Cook had asked him at the end, the business with the Babe Ruth IOU. Speed had cared about it. He said that it might save baseball. That sounded so melodramatic, not much like Speed, who wore his cynicism like armor, the better to shield his dreams.

  No matter how many times Fraser shoved the Babe’s IOU from his mind, it came back. He felt paralyzed about it, not knowing where to start. Talk to Abe Attell? To Rothstein? Where would he find them? What would he say? Why would they talk to him? Speed would have known answers to those questions, or at least would have made some damned good guesses. Also, he wouldn’t have been so gutless.

  Fraser started walking toward his building. Babe, he realized, was the place to start. Speed made the deal with Babe. The ballplayer knew Attell and Rothstein well enough to land up to his armpits in debt to them. And Babe was a neighbor at the Ansonia. Fraser would stake out the lobby until the Babe showed up. Nothing easier.

  Chapter 26

  The air felt cool, like autumn, at least it did when the breeze carried away the cigar smoke of the grandstand. The beginning of a change in season matched Fraser’s change in strategy for buttonholing the Babe. He had sat for three nights in the Ansonia’s lobby without even a sighting of the baseball star. The building’s staff, generally indulgent of its high-paying tenants, was growing wary of one who spent his nights in a lobby chair, reading and dozing. So now Fraser was trying to track the Babe down at the ballpark. That was the one time and the one place he could be sure to find Babe Ruth.

  The Saturday doubleheader had sounded like a good idea, but was turning out to be a whole lot of baseball. Fraser’s rear end ached. His scorecard lay on the concrete floor, wedged against the metal leg of the seat in front of him, untouched since the second inning of the second game. Six times he had climbed over the men seated between him and the aisle in order to stretch his legs and salve his restlessness. Ballpark etiquette barred another such expedition for at least two more innings.

  Absentmindedly, he fingered the note to Ruth in his pocket. He had composed it before the doubleheader started. It said that a relative of Speed Cook’s wanted to report on Cook’s work for Ruth. Fraser planned to give it to a clubhouse worker when the second game finally ended. He hoped Babe would be intrigued enough to see him.

  Nothing in these games with the Philadelphia Athletics held much baseball significance. The Yankees had clinched the American League pennant and were going to the World Series. They held a six-run lead in this game. A trickle of homeward bound fans began in the fifth inning and grew at the end of each half inning. It was a lot of baseball. In the top of the eighth, a buzz started among the remaining few. Men nudged their neighbors and pointed. Fraser sat forward. The Babe was walking out to the pitcher’s mound, coming in as a relief pitcher. He had hardly pitched all year. Fraser had never seen the star slugger during his pitching days.

  From the mound, Ruth’s powerful frame loomed over home plate, a mere sixty feet, six inches away. His windup was spare but his demeanor was downright frisky. Smiling, he shouted to the first batter as he stepped up to the plate. The crowd’s mood rose with the Babe’s. This was going to be fun!

  But it wasn’t. The Athletics hadn’t scored for seven innings, but they found Babe’s pitches irresistible. Line drives flew off their bats in every direction. Runners flashed from base to base and started to cross the plate. Ruth’s smile turned to a scowl. He muttered and kicked the pitcher’s mound after every hit. The score narrowed to 6–3, then 6–5. Why didn’t Yankee Manager Huggins put another pitcher in? The big man clearly had no magic in his left arm that day. Huggins made no move. The cavalry never came. Babe finally got the third out, but not until the Athletics tied the game, 6–6.

  The manager showed no mercy for the game’s greatest home-run hitter, sending Ruth out to pitch the ninth inning, too. Ruth’s demeanor was all business this time. He got three outs before any Philadelphias could score, hanging on to the tie score. Ruth shut them down again in the tenth and the eleventh. In the bottom of that inning, the Yanks finally pushed the winning run across the plate. Heading for the exits, smiling fans chattered to each other. They knew they might have seen the last game Babe Ruth would ever pitch.

  When the clubhouse man reported that Ruth would see him, Fraser found the star on a folding chair in the clubhouse, a stormy expression on his face and an unlit stogie in his mouth.

  “Say, kid,” he snarled at Fraser, “what is this? You don’t look like no relative of Speed Cook.”

  Fraser held out his hands in a calming gesture. They’d met before, more than once. Ruth’s way—treating everyone like he knew them—made it hard to know if he actually did know you. “It’s a long story, Babe. You heard that Speed died?”

  “Yeah,” Ruth said, “I heard. Tough luck.”

  “I was there, when it happened.” Ruth looked up. “The last thing he said was about a job he was doing for you, getting something back for you. It seemed important to him.”

  “Yeah,” Babe said, leaning back and eyeing Fraser. “So?”

  “Do you still need it?”

  The Babe grimaced and looked Fraser up and down. “No offense, kid, but you ain’t exactly the type for the job he was doing. I got places to be.” Ruth turned away and then turned back. “Say, that wasn’t why that coon got killed, was it? Doing the job for me?”

  “That wasn’t it,” Fraser said. “It was a car accident.”

  Babe nodded. “That’s good. I mean, not good, but I wouldn’t want to be why he croaked.”

  Fraser decided to try again. “Listen, I worked with Speed on other jobs. Don’t get fooled by the suit.”

  Ruth shook his head. “What do you think you can do about it?”

  “You’ll still pay for what he was trying to get?”

  “Sure, sure, kid.” Ruth stood and started unbuttoning his jersey. The clubhouse was emptying fast. “Do you know why I needed him to get it?”

  “Speed didn’t say, but I’m guessing it has something to do with you not wanting to be involved with certain people, with the baseball commissioner and the Black Sox business.”

  “Who would?”

  “My other guess is that there’s something more behind it, something more than just gambling.”

  Ruth stopped in his undressing. “Don’t hurt yourself guessing. It won’t help anything.” He reached for matches and started to light his cigar. When it was burning, he narrowed his eyes. “Do I know you?”

  “No, not really.” Fraser stepped closer to Ruth and lowered his voice. “If I get it, what you want, I want the money to go to Cook’s family.”

  “Sure, kid. Once the money’s out of my pocket, it can go to Old Mother Hubbard, all I care.”

  “Where do I find these people, the ones you need to get it from?”

  Babe gave him a disgusted look. “Listen, if you don’t know where to find them, you definitely ain’t the man for the job.” He turned his back and shrugged out of the shirt, dropping it on the floor. Fraser thought for a moment.

  “Who else is working on this problem for you?”

  “Doc, these guys aren’t your strong suit. No fooling.”

  The “Doc” showed that Babe was starting to remember him. Fraser decided to
push. “I’m thinking you’ve got nothing here. I’m bidding against nothing. You’re just sitting around with your eyes closed, hoping nothing bad happens. Speed was your only move, and now he’s gone. Let me make that move for you. If I come up empty, what’ve you lost? Just get me started. Where do I find them?”

  Ruth took a silk shirt off a hanger and pulled it over his thick shoulders. “All right. It could be your funeral. Remember I told you.” Fraser nodded. “You know Lefty’s, on Broadway, right there at Times Square?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Rear booth, on the left. Every morning of the year, as long as he’s in town.”

  “Just walk in the front door?”

  “Best way I know to get inside. You may not get real long to talk. He’s not a patient guy. You should know what you want to say.”

  Chapter 27

  Turning sideways past waitresses and customers, Fraser worked down the left-hand side of Lefty’s. He held his furled umbrella next to his leg so it wouldn’t drip on anyone. Halfway down the aisle, he caught a glimpse of a man in the last booth. That had to be Rothstein. Fraser stopped to shake out his umbrella again, using the pause to get a better look at his quarry.

  Reputation, not appearance, drew his eye to the gambling king. Neither large nor small, Rothstein had a high forehead, bland features, a small mouth. The short hair was combed carefully. His dark-colored bow tie was knotted tight. His suit was equally dull. He stared impassively at two men across from him, not saying anything. He could have been an accountant preparing for a day reviewing receivables.

  When Fraser began to move, a hulking figure who badly needed a shave stepped from a side booth. This domesticated gorilla placed a palm against Fraser’s chest. “Hey, pal,” he said. His voice sounded like it was scraped over a cheese grater. “Where ya think you’re going?”

  Meeting the gorilla’s gaze, Fraser said, “I have a matter with Mr. Rothstein.” He moved to get by. The other man shifted to block him. His hands were large and blunt, perfect for clenching into fists.