Strike Three You're Dead Read Online Free PDF

decided to walk home and took the enclosed pedestrian crosswalk over the expressway into the Portuguese neighborhood. Suddenly, he felt his stomach surge again, and he retched under a tree by the curb.
    The thought occurred to him that he hadn’t told Linderman about Rudy and Mickey when the detective asked if Rudy had any woman trouble. It sickened him to have to fight off thinking about the one time he had really hated Rudy. Of course, it had really been Harvey’s woman trouble, anyway, not Rudy’s. Soon after Harvey had met Mickey Slavin, while she was shooting a feature story about the team in May, he had introduced her to his roommate, and the three of them quickly formed a trio for occasional dinners out, movies, short trips. From the beginning, Harvey felt he had a claim on Mickey, but she clearly enjoyed the company of the two roommates too much to risk jarring the symmetry of her affection. Gradually, though, Mickey warmed up to Harvey, and when the two of them started sleeping together in June, Rudy took it in stride; as it was, he certainly got enough on his own. Then came the night at the Boston Sheraton, when somehow or other—in any case, Harvey didn’t blame himself—Mickey ended up in Rudy’s bed. Harvey and Mickey soon picked up where they had left off, but Rudy, who was pleasantly indifferent to the complexities of their threesome, had never mentioned the night at all.
    Harvey made his way down the brick sidewalks of Hope Street, past clapboard houses of yellow, ocher, turquoise, and pale green. They were set, without yards, directly into concrete. An old man in slippers was hosing down his car in a driveway. On a street corner, a few teenage boys in T-shirts and girls in tube tops and red toenail polish silently smoked. One of the boys recognized him: “Hey, Ha’vey, youse guys gonna win de pennet?”
    Harvey raised a noncommittal hand at him and kept walking. He was wondering what it said about him that Rudy had been as good a friend as he had on the ball club, even though just about the only thing they had in common was a fascination with Mickey Slavin.
    That Harvey was a baseball player at all, let alone a major leaguer who was batting .309 with just over a month to go in the season, still struck him as bizarre. He had grown up in a Jewish family outside Boston, where his father owned an Italian restaurant. Neither Al nor Mary Blissberg felt that baseball was the proper career for a child only two generations removed from a Polish shtetl. “My childhood,” he had quipped to a magazine writer back in the days when he talked freely to reporters, “was colored by a deep historical prejudice against wearing spikes to work.” Nonetheless, his aptitude for playing baseball attracted several pro offers, and he signed with Boston after his last year at the University of Massachusetts. His mother was able to overcome her opposition to his choice of career—death had by that time rendered his father’s opinion academic—when Harvey pointed out how vulnerable he would be to invitations to Sunday brunch once the Red Sox brought him up from the minors, which they did after a single minor league season.
    However, Harvey had never shaken off his inherited ambivalence toward the game; he continued to feel that he had somehow missed his proper calling, although he had no idea what that calling might be. For Rudy, on the other hand, the game was an all-day sucker. Baseball rescued him from a life of raising veal calves on his foster parents’ farm in southern Wisconsin; he had lost his parents in a car accident as a teenager. Now he always behaved like someone on furlough. “I love this game,” he once told Harvey, actually grabbing Harvey’s shirt to make his point. “I love it even when I lose.”
    Rudy wore fifty-dollar designer jeans and boots with three-inch heels, and he told all the tasteless jokes that had made the rounds the year before. He wore a gold I.D. bracelet on his right wrist and