Robert Barnard - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Rue shrugged. A million hours spent throwing a ragged stitched-up ball against a white square painted on the garage wall, and no one had ever noticed.

Till now. The very next Saturday Nick brought her down to Marine Park, and an hour later she was pitching for the neighborhood baseball team.

Some people said the diamond was no place for a girl, especially a little one like Rue Thomas. But the minute they saw her fastball and drop curve and fadeaway, they shut right up.

Because they played for money, every Sunday morning in Marine Park. Money and neighborhood pride. And if it would help you win, no rule book said a chimpanzee, an alligator, a sewer rat, or a girl couldn’t play.

He showed up for the first time midway through Rue’s rookie season with the Comets, just a week after her sixteenth birthday. He was waiting outside the players’ door at Mansfield Grounds after a game, leaning against a scrawny locust tree like he had all the time in the world.

Thin, well-dressed, with a quick, toothy grin and silvery eyes. Smiling at her as she walked past, heading towards the El.

He fell into step beside her. “Buy you a soda?”

His voice gentler than she’d expected. But confident, like he was used to people doing what he wanted.

She kept walking.

“Or a — whaddaya call it? An egg cream?”

From out of town. She’d guessed from his look, and from his voice, too, though she hadn’t done enough traveling yet to figure out where. She stopped and looked him up and down, in his gray suit and well-brushed hat.

Forty years old, maybe more. And far from the first to try this. “Sorry,” she said. “Not interested.”

He laughed, showing those white teeth. “What you’re thinking, I’m not interested either,” he said. “I’m talking about business. Baseball business.”

Rue hesitated. It was 1931, and times were hard. Her parents had already moved twice, from the house on East 21st to an apartment over on Ocean Avenue, and then to another one in a worse neighborhood on Quentin Road. Sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat.

If someone wanted to talk business, you listened.

“I’ll buy you a burger,” the man said. “To go along with that soda.”

His name was Chase. He said he was from Chicago.

All she had to do, he told her, was lose every once in a while.

They sat in a booth way in the back of Benny’s, a place a few blocks towards the bad side of Coney Island. She’d never been there before, but the food tasted just fine.

She let him describe what he wanted, although she’d understood where he was headed in the first ten seconds. She knew how it worked, with ballplayers being paid to make an error here, strike out there, throw just a few bad pitches at important moments.

That kind of thing had been around as long as baseball. It’d gotten so bad that a whole World Series had been lost on purpose, Rue knew, back in 1919, when she was only four. After that they’d brought in this old man, a judge, to make sure baseball stayed on the up and up. The first thing he’d done was kick eight of the guilty players out of baseball forever.

Rue had pitched against one of them, Joe Jackson, a tired, hollow-eyed old guy, when a barnstorming team had stopped in Brooklyn the previous fall. He hadn’t been able to get around on her fastball.

She listened to Chase. Waited till she was nearly done with her Coke and hamburger before saying, “Sorry.”

He looked at her. “At least listen to what we’re offering.”

She shook her head.

Chase seemed unruffled. “Not every game, of course. Only every once in a while. Wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.” He paused for a second. “Though it might be better for you in the long run, you weren’t quite so good.”

At the time, Rue was 9–1, with an earned-run average of under 2.00.

“You’re hot stuff,” he went on. “Some think it’s a joke, a setup. Others think you’re for real. Either way, there’s a ton of action whenever you pitch, all over the country.”

Rue thought about that.

He leaned closer to her, and she could smell his cigarette breath. “Five hundred every time you do what we ask. Like every three or four starts. Nobody will ever know.”

Rue did the math. She probably had fifteen more starts left in the season, so he was talking about two thousand bucks, maybe more. A lot of money.

But lose on purpose? How could she do that? “No,” she said, draining the last of her drink and getting to her feet. “Still no.”

Her wide eyes, her quiet voice, making him disbelieve her. “You’ll come around,” he said. “You’ll change your mind.”

She turned away.

“Your problem is, you think you’ve got a choice,” he called after her. “But you don’t.”

The first time she heard that from him, but not the last.

Diamond Ruby. Belle of the Ball. Queen of Diamonds. The “Out” Girl.

The Angel of Brooklyn.

Silent Rue, sometimes, because of her fragile voice.

Even just plain Rue every once in a while. It made for a good headline joke: “Opponents Rue the Day Captain Mansfield Signed Girl Phenom.”

She’d been just fifteen when the old Army officer who owned the Coney Island Comets came to watch her pitch in Marine Park. By then she’d gotten some local attention, not that it mattered much to her. All she wanted to do was pitch, win, and collect the money she was owed to help her family scrape along.

Captain Mansfield, bluff, loud, friendly, looking at his team like it was a toy, had other ideas. “Sign with me,” he’d said, “and we’ll make a fortune.”

Underneath all his jollity he was a smart businessman. Because he certainly made himself a pretty penny from all the fans who came to the ballpark to watch Diamond Ruby, the freak of nature straight out of a Coney Island sideshow, pitch. To see this little girl with the unhittable fastball and knee-buckling curve mow down men who were heading to the majors, or who’d already been there and were heading down.

But very few of those pretty pennies ever made it into Diamond Ruby’s pockets.

Rue’s first pitch to the Babe bounced two feet in front of the plate, skipped past Jimmy Connelly, the Comets’ catcher, and rolled all the way to the backstop.

The crowd howled. Some of them were Comets fans — she could see a scattering of familiar faces — but most were here for the show, the spectacle, the Babe. If the girl pitcher made a fool of herself, that was okay with them.

But Rue had never bounced a pitch by mistake in her life. No, that wasn’t true, sure she had, once or twice. On rainy days, or freezing ones, when the ball felt like a chunk of ice in her hand.

It was warm and sunny today, though.

She met Babe Ruth a week after Captain Mansfield and the Yankees’ owner, Colonel Rupert, old war buddies, arranged the big exhibition game. The Comets, with Rue starting, would face a team of minor-leaguers and local stars... plus the Babe, the only one who really mattered. The two owners knowing that even in the depths of the Great Depression, people would hand over their hard-earned dollars for a chance to see, as one of the tabloids put it, “Big Bam vs. Great Gams.”

The Bambino was game for it. He was game for anything. Hospitals, orphanages, boxing rings, football fields, rodeos — just promise him some diversion and he’d be there.

They gathered for lunch at Lundy’s Clam Shack, a little place built on wooden stilts over Sheepshead Bay. Rue and the Babe and his business manager, a silent man in an expensive suit who sipped coffee and kept a close eye on both of them throughout the meal, and dapper Colonel Ruppert and Captain Mansfield, who kept grinning like kids on Christmas morning. All the other tables in the shack were empty, and Rue knew that this single lunch was probably costing more than she earned all year.