Murder at Ebbets Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

into pennant winners.”
    “They have the pitching,” she countered. “That’s ninety percent of the game.”
    Save me from women who think they know baseball. Pitching isn’t more than seventy-five percent of the game. Eighty at most. “We’ll see,” I said skeptically.
    “Would you play for the Feds?”
    “No, I don’t think they’ll last. And it would kill my career. We can be blacklisted just for going to a Federal game.” Besides, although the upstart Federal League had been raiding the established leagues for every player they could get, they’d never contacted me.
    “Oh. That’s too bad. I like going to their Brooklyn games. Washington Park is just a couple blocks from my flat near Red Hook.” She said my flat. That means hers alone. As in no husband or mother—maybe not even a roommate.
    She leaned toward me. “Would you excuse me,” she whispered. “I have to go to the toilet.” No decorous nonsense about nose powdering. I liked that. This was a girl it was easy to feel comfortable with.
    I watched closely as she walked away. She didn’t glide with small delicate steps but rather loped, as if still in her jungle attire. She’d seemed more comfortable in shirt and trousers than she did in a dress. In fact, she wore the dress with indifference if not awkwardness. She moved like a tomboy forced against her will to dress as a lady. I would bet that when she was a little girl she could climb a tree faster than any boy—and probably risked going onto higher branches.
    “More champagne, sir?” A waiter held out a bottle with a white cloth wrapped around it. I nodded and he refilled my glass. The waiters were dressed in gay nineties style, in identical pink-striped shirts, black string ties, and green vests. As part of the costume, they all sported bushy black handlebar mustaches.
    The hotel tried to maintain the ambience of two decades ago, from the ornate silverware on the tables to the gilt-framed paintings on the walls to the cut-glass chandeliers that showered flickering gaslight about the room. Unfortunately, the nostalgia even extended to the music. A five-piece band was struggling through a spiritless version of “Bicycle Built for Two” as if the bicycle had a flat tire. My preference ran more to ragtime, something I could tap my feet to.
    As I was looking about the room, Florence Hampton caught my eye. She was at the table next to ours, across from me so I had a clear view of her face. She gave me a friendly smile. I returned it, then felt a small pang of guilt. I’d almost forgotten her in my preoccupation with Marguerite Turner. Then I remembered that she had passed me over for an umpire, and my guilt was assuaged.
    There appeared to be too much competition for Florence Hampton’s attention anyway. Seated on either side of her were two men I had seen earlier in the day at Ebbets Field: Sloppy Sutherland and his battery mate Virgil Ewing.
    Sloppy Sutherland was elegantly attired, as always. He wore a blue cutaway jacket, a wing collar around his throat, and a large glittering stickpin in his necktie. His impeccably barbered black hair was slicked back with so much pomade that it sparkled in the gaslight. It was Sutherland’s Beau Brummell aspirations that earned him his nickname, the same way three-hundred-pound behemoths are so often called “Tiny.” He was better dressed than any of the movie stars, but he didn’t wear his fine clothes easily. He seemed to be straining to appear dapper and graceful.
    Virgil Ewing was also in a suit and tie, but he might as well have stayed in his chest protector and shin guards. With his squat body, he could be one of only two things: a catcher or a fireplug. Ewing’s bullet head rested directly on his shoulders with no neck in between. The coarse brown hair that crowned his scalp looked like he cut it himself without the aid of a mirror. His left cheek was puffed with a massive chaw of tobacco.
    Sutherland whispered something in Miss