Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

But since when did you charge a pitcher with murder for hitting a batter? There’ve been pitchers fined for throwing intentional beanballs, and there have been some brief suspensions, but criminal charges? That’s something I’ve never heard of.

But of course it wasn’t Wade Bemis that Tommy was charged with murdering.

It was Colleen.

That was whythe cops were out on the field almost before Wade Bemis hit the ground. They’d been waiting since the fourth inning. It was around then that police officers went to the Willis house in Northbrook in response to a neighbor’s complaint. They found Tommy’s wife, Colleen, in the bedroom with a carving knife stuck in her chest.

A pair of detectives came straight to the ballpark, but they had the car radio tuned to the ballgame, so before they got there they knew Tommy was pitching, and that he hadn’t allowed a hit. They got a lot of flak later on for not arresting him right away, and there’s no question but that Wade Bemis would be alive if they had, but I can see why they did what they did.

On the one hand, there was no rush. Tommy wasn’t going anywhere. All they had to do was wait until the game was over, or at least until he’d been yanked for a pinch hitter, and he could be taken into custody without making a public spectacle of the whole thing. That’s what you’d have if you arrested him in the middle of any game, and it would be even worse given the game he was pitching. Can you imagine the crowd reaction if the police interrupted a no-hitter and led the pitcher off in handcuffs? And this wasn’t just any no-hitter, it was a perfect game in the making.

You could easily have a riot on your hands.

And suppose Tommy turned out to be innocent? Suppose somebody else stuck the knife in her, and when it was all over he’d lost not only his beautiful wife but his chance for baseball immortality, all because a couple of eager-beaver cops couldn’t wait a few innings?

And here’s another thing. If they had the game on the radio, it probably means they were fans. And what kind of fan is going to screw up a perfect game?

The way it turned out, the way it goes in the record book, Tommy Willis and Freddie Olendorff combined to throw a no-hitter. That’s rare enough, but this was a no-hitter where they only faced twenty-seven batters. The one man who did reach first — not on a hit, a walk, or an error, unless you call a hit batsman a pitcher’s error — that one man was thrown out stealing. So you’d have to say the game the two of them pitched was the closest possible thing to a perfect game.

Some perfect game.

Colleen was having an affair with Wade Bemis, and Tommy found out. And they had a fight about it, and you know how it ended, with the carving knife stuck in her chest. And maybe if Bemis hadn’t said what he said at his last at-bat, Tommy would have just hung in there and pitched to him. The way he was throwing, you’ve got to figure he’d have gotten him out, and five more after him, and completed his perfect game and got his cheers and gone off quietly with the arresting officers.

Or maybe Bemis would have gotten a hit, and, with the no-hitter out of reach, Tommy would have come out of there. Maybe the Bobcats would have rallied and broken things open and won the game. I mean, it’s baseball.

Anything can happen in a baseball game.

Three days ofheadaches, three nights of bad dreams. On the third night she woke twice before dawn, her heart racing, the bedding sweat-soaked. The second time she forced herself up and out of bed and into the shower. Before she’d toweled dry the headache had begun, starting at the base of the skull and radiating to the temples.

She took aspirin. She didn’t like to take drugs of any sort, and her medicine cabinet contained nothing but a few herbal preparations — echinacea and golden seal for colds, gingko for memory, and a Chinese herbal tonic, its ingredients a mystery to her, which she ordered by mail from a firm in San Francisco. She took sage, too, because it seemed to her to help center her psychically and make her perceptions more acute, although she couldn’t remember having read that it had that property. She grew sage in her garden, picked leaves periodically and dried them in the sun, and drank a cup of sage tea almost every evening.

There were herbs that were supposed to ease headaches, no end of different herbs for the many different kinds of headaches, but she’d never found one that worked. Aspirin, on the other hand, was reliable. It was a drug, and as such it probably had the effect of dulling her psychic abilities, but those abilities were of small value when your head was throbbing like Poe’s telltale heart. And aspirin didn’t slam shut the doors of perception, as something strong might do. Truth to tell, it was the nearest thing to an herb itself, obtained originally from willow bark. She didn’t know how they made it nowadays, surely there weren’t willow trees enough on the planet to cure the world’s headaches, but still...

She heated a cup of spring water, added the juice of half a lemon. That was her breakfast. She sipped it in the garden, listening to the birds.

She knew what she had to do but she was afraid.

It was asmall house, just two bedrooms, everything on one floor, with no basement and shallow crawl space for an attic. She slept in one bedroom and saw clients in the other. A beaded curtain hung in the doorway of the second bedroom, and within were all the pictures and talismans and power objects from which she drew strength. There were religious pictures and statues, a crucifix, a little bronze Buddha, African masks, quartz crystals. A pack of tarot cards shared a small table with a little malachite pyramid and a necklace of bear claws.

A worn oriental rug covered most of the floor, and was itself in part covered by a smaller rug on which she would lie when she went into trance. The rest of the time she would sit in the straight-backed armchair. There was a chaise as well, and that was where the client would sit.

She had only one appointment that day, but it was right smack in the middle of the day. The client, Claire Warburton, liked to come on her lunch hour. So Sylvia got through the morning by watching talk shows on television and paging through old magazines, taking more aspirin when the headache threatened to return. At 12:30 she opened the door for her client.

Claire Warburton was a regular, coming for a reading once every four or five weeks, upping the frequency of her visits in times of stress. She had a weight problem — that was one of the reasons she liked to come on her lunch hour, so as to spare herself a meal’s worth of calories — and she was having a lingering affair with a married man. She had occasional problems at work as well, a conflict with a new supervisor, an awkward situation with a co-worker who disapproved of her love affair. There were always topics on which Claire needed counsel, and, assisted by the cards, the crystals, and her own inner resources, Sylvia always found something to tell her.

“Oh, before I forget,” Claire said, “you were absolutely right about wheat. I cut it out and I felt the difference almost immediately.”

“I thought you would. That came through loud and clear last time.”

“I told Dr. Greenleaf. ‘I think I may be allergic to wheat,’ I said. He rolled his eyes.”

“I’ll bet he did. I hope you didn’t tell him where the thought came from.”

“Oh, sure. ‘Sylvia Belgrave scanned my reflex centers with a green pyramid and picked up a wheat allergy.’ Believe me, I know better than that. I don’t know why I bothered to say anything to him in the first place. I suppose I was looking for male approval, but that’s nothing new, is it?” They discussed the point, and then she said, “But it’s so hard, you know. Staying away from wheat, I mean. It’s everywhere.”