Womans Murder Club 2 - Second Chance Page 21

  I reached for Warren's arm and slowly pulled myself up.

  He tried to give me an order: “Lindsay, stay down. I'm telling you now.”

  Coombs was on his back, ruptures of crimson oozing out of his blue shirt.

  I pushed by Jacobi. I had to see Coombs, had to look into his eyes. I hoped he was still alive, because when the monster took his last breath, I wanted him staring up at me.

  A few uniforms had formed a protective ring around Coombs, ordering everyone to stay clear.

  Coombs was still alive, labored sounds escaping from his heaving chest. An EMS team came running, two techs lugging equipment. One, a woman, began ripping at Coombs's bloody shirt. The other was taking his pressure and setting up an IV.

  Our eyes met. Coombs's gaze was waxy, but then his mouth twitched into an ugly smile. He tried to say something to me.

  The EMS woman was backing people off, shouting out his vitals.

  “I have to hear what he's saying,” I told the tech. “Giv” me a minute here."

  “He can't talk,” she said. “Give him room to breathe, Lieutenant. He's dying on us!”

  “I have to hear,” I said again, then I knelt down close.

  Coombs's uniform shirt had been cut open, a mosaic of ugly wounds exposed.

  His mouth quivered. He was still trying to talk. What did he want to tell me?

  I leaned closer, the blood on Coombs smearing my blouse. I didn't care. I put my ear close.

  “One last...,” he whispered. Every breath was a fight for him now. Was this how it ended? With Coombs taking his secrets straight to hell?

  One last...? One last target, one last victim? I stared into his eyes, saw the hatred still there.

  “One last what, Coombs?” I asked"

  Blood bubbled out of his mouth. He took in a hard breath, husbanding the last of his strength, straining against the power of his own death.

  “One last surprise.” He smiled.

  Womans Murder Club 2 - Second Chance

  Chapter 101

  COOMBS WAS DEAD. It was over, thank God.

  I had no idea what Coombs had meant, but I wanted to spit his words back in his face. One last surprise... Whatever it was, Chimera was gone. He couldn't hurt us anymore.

  I hoped it didn't mean he had left' one last victim before he died.

  “C'mon, Lieutenant,” Jacobi muttered. He gently pulled me up.

  Suddenly, my legs buckled. I felt as if I had no control over the lower part of my body. I saw the look of alarm on Warren's face. “You're hit,” he uttered, wide-eyed.

  I looked down at my side. Jacobi peeled back my jacket, and a wet red gash appeared on my right abdomen. All of a sudden my head began to spin. A current of nausea rose.

  “We need help here,” Jacobi shouted to the EMS tech. He and Cappy eased me back to the ground.

  I found myself staring over at Coombs, as the female tech who had peeled away the dead man's shirt rushed over to me.

  God, this was so unreal. They took off my jacket, slapped a blood pressure monitor on my arm. It was as if it were happening to somebody else.

  My gaze stayed fixed on the killer, the goddamn Chimera.

  Something a little strange, something not tracking. What was it?

  I pulled myself out of Jacobi's grip. “I have to see something... ”

  He held me back. “You have to stay right here, Lindsay. There's an ambulance on the way.”

  I pulled away from Jacobi. I got up and went over to the body. Coombs's police uniform had been peeled back off of his chest and arms. Raw wounds spotted his chest. But something was missing; something was all wrong. What was it?

  “Oh, my God, Warren,” I whispered. “Look.”

  “look at what?” Jacobi frowned. What the hell is wrong with you?"

  “Warren... there's no tattoo.”

  My mind flashed back. Claire had discovered pigment from the killer's tattoo under Estelle Chipman's fingernails.

  I put my hands underneath Coombs's shoulders and rolled him slightly. There was nothing on his back. No tattoos anywhere.

  My mind was whirling. This was unthinkable but Coombs couldn't be Chimera.

  Then I passed out.

  Womans Murder Club 2 - Second Chance

  Chapter 102

  I OPENED MY EYES in a hospital room, feeling the constraining pull of the IV line stuck in my arm.

  Claire was standing over me.

  “You are a lucky girl,” she said. “I talked to the doctors. Bullet grazed your right abdomen but didn't lodge. What you've basically got is one of the nastiest floor burns you'll ever see.”

  “I heard floor burns go well with powder blue, don't they?” I said softly my lips parting in a weak smile.

  Claire nodded, tapping the taped bandage on her neck.

  “So I'm told. Anyway, congratulations... You've earned yourself a cozy desk job for the next couple of weeks.” “I already have a desk job, Claire,” I said. I blinked a confused look around the hospital room, then I pulled myself up into a sitting position. My side ached as if it were on fire.

  “You did good, girl.” Claire squeezed my arm. “Coombs is dead, and now safely ensconced in hell. There's a mob of people outside who want to talk with you. You're gonna have to get used to the accolades.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking of the misplaced attention about to come my way. Then, through the haze, it hit me.

  What I had discovered before I blacked out.

  My fingers gripped Claire's arm. “Frank Coombs didn't have a tattoo.”

  She shook her head and blinked back. “So...?”

  It hurt to talk, so the words came out in a whisper. “The first murder, Claire. Estelle Chipman... She was killed by a man with a tattoo. You said it.”

  “I could've been wrong.”

  “You're never wrong.” I flashed my eyes.

  She eased back on her stool, her brow creased. “I'm doing the autopsy on Frankie-boy Monday morning. There could be a highly pigmented section of skin, or a discoloration somewhere.”

  I managed a smile. “Autopsy... ? My professional opinion is that he was shot.”

  “Thanks.” Claire grinned. “But someone's got to take the bullets out of him and match them up. There'll be an inquiry.”

  “Yeah.” I blew out a gust of air and dropped my head back on the pillow. The whole incident, seeing the cop coming up to me, realizing it was Coombs, the flash of his gun, all came back to me as broken fragments.

  Claire stood up, brushed herts without interruption. His one fight came when Jimmy Cannon arrived.just after The Miracle of 1957

  Ted had finished an extensive forty-five-minute interview with a sizable group of other out-of-town writers. Joe McKenney, the Red Sox publicity director, asked Cannon to wait until Ted came back in but Cannon insisted on going out to left field to see Ted immediately. predictably, Ted blew his stack.

  Even though Ted's league-leading average fell off sixty points, the 1958 season was in certain respects a greater accomplishment than the season of 1957. Not only was he beset by injury or illness throughout the year, but his physical problems were complicated, during the first half of the season, by that unseemly truce with his old enemies in the press box. If the human race has learned anything from history, it is that peace treaties do not do a thing for either world peace or for Ted Williams's batting average.

  He had reported to camp with a tender ankle, the result of an accident suffered on a fishing trip in Labrador. On the second day he pulled a muscle in his side. He didn't even get into the lineup until after the Sox broke camp, and then he went in only as a pinch hitter against minor-league opposition. In his five appearances, he was sharp enough to get two home runs, a single, and two walks.

  Then, on the night before the opening-day game against Washington, he ate some tainted oysters and came down with a case of food poisoning. When he returned to the lineup, his timing was a little off, and just when it was coming back into focus, he banged his wrist
against the fence while catching a long fly ball. The wrist remained sore almost all year; Ted reinjured it again and again while sliding into base. The last time came, most uncharacteristically, while he was trying to go from second to third on a short fly ball to right field. On top of all that, he ran into a terrible streak of bad luck where by actual count, outfielders reached into the distant right-field bull pen at Fenway Park to take home runs away from him seven separate times in less than two months. There was also the annual arrival of the lung ailment, which put him out of action for thirteen days in September.

  The result of it all was that Ted got off to such a terrible start that for the first time since his freshman season he did not make the starting All-Star lineup. The Boston writers, having studied him for twenty

  years, shook their heads and let you know that Ted was not g around with those wrists anymore. They were reluctant, howev put their opinion into print. They had eaten those words too times. And, anyway, peace had descended comfortably between t

  During that early low point, Ted told me, “I know what's w The little injuries that have kept me from getting my timing dow sharp. Little things bother you in this game. It's not like hocke football, where they can strap you up and send you out almost as as new. That's not an alibi, now, it's just a way of saying that as as I know why I'm not hitting, I'm not worried. When the time cc when I'm not hitting and I don't know why I'm not hitting, that be the time to quit. When they're throwing the fastball by me, wh, find myself striking out two or three times a game, that will be time I'll know my reactions are going. And nobody will have to me. I'll know it first of all.”

  He was down to.225 when a Kansas City writer finally broke curity silence and wrote that Ted was obviously washed up. The n, day, as was to be expected, Ted hit a grand-slam home run, the st teenth grand slammer of his career, to give the Sox an 8-5 victor The day after that he slashed out three hits.

  It was not until July, though, that he brought his average up to.30 and it was not until a Boston writer accused him of choking in tt clutch that he really begin to move. The day after the magazine ca tying that article hit the stands, Ted hit two home runs and a singk to knock in seven runs in an 11 - 8 victory. One of the home runs wa his seventeenth grand slammer, tying him with Babe Ruth for secom place in that category, behind Lou Gehrig's twenty-third.

  By that time, the uneasy peace had already been shattered. On week earlier, in point of fact, Ted had brought the newspapers down on him again by spitting at a Kansas City crowd that was booing him for not running out a ball hit back at the pitcher. “I'm really sorry I did it,” Ted said, after Cronin fined him $250. “I was so mad that I lost my temper, and afterward I was so sorry. I'm principally orr about losing the $250.”

  Once the feud with both the press and the public was on again, Ted's average began to move up in the charts like a bullet. On Augus 8, he pushed into a tie with his teammate, Pete Runnels, for the batting lead. Then, with the season running out, he began to slip back. Desperate measures were called for. With a week remaining, Ted landed on the front pages again, brought the wrath of the civilized world dowr. upon him, and, needless to say, embarked immediately on a hittin streak that carried him to another batting championship,

  Ted entered the game in question, on September 22, trailing Runnels by six points. He had gone hitless in seven straight times at bat. In the first inning, Runnels singled, and Ted, hitting right behind him, grounded into a double play. Two innings later, Runnels singled again, and Ted took a third strike. Completely disgusted with himself for taking the pitch, Ted turned toward the dugout and angrily flung his bat away. Unfortunately, the bat caught for a moment on the stick, substance he used on it to give himself a firmer grip. Instead of skidding across the dirt, the bat spiraled into the air, sailed into the box seats seventy-five feet away, and hit a sixty-year-old woman. The woman, Mrs. Gladys Heffernan, turned out to be Joe Cronin's housekeeper and a longtime admirer of Ted Williams. Otherwise, the Sox would have had a healthy lawsuit on their hands.

  Ted, appalled, rushed to the railing, where the motherly Mrs. Hefleman paused to reassure him before being taken off to the first-aid room. Ted went back to the dugout with tears streaming down his face and emerged only after the umpire-in-chief, Bill Summers, had assuree him that everybody knew he had not meant to throw the bat. Ted took his outfield position to the familiar strains of unrestrained booing. his next turn at bat, he answered the boos by doubling home a run.

  Cronin, who was almost as upset as Ted was, told the press, “I was an impetuous act, but no one is sorrier than Ted is. He feel awful. We will take no disciplinary action. It was unfortunate, but we certainly know Williams didn't do it intentionally.” Mrs. Heffernan interviewed from her hospital bed, said, "I don't see why they had to boo him. It was not the dear boy's fault. I felt awfully sorry for hirr

  after it happened. I should have ducked.“ Williams said, ”I just almost died."

  From the time of the bat-throwing incident to the end of the season, he had nine hits in thirteen times at bat. The Red Sox were ending their season in Washington, and with two games remaining Ted and Runnels were tied down to the ninth decimal point,.322857643. Frank Malzone was Runnels's roommate: “Pete and I were talking before the game. He said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'Just go out and get some hits. You can still win it.'” Runnels started off with a triple. Ted followed with a walk. Runnels then singled, and Ted singled behind him. On his third time at bat, Runnels hit a home run, only to have Ted hit one right behind him.

  “He comes over to me,” Malzone says, “and he said, 'He's not going to let me win this thing, is he?' ”

  “I said, 'Naw, I guess not, Pete.' I said, 'Got to get another one. If you get another one, he can't catch you.'”

  On his fourth try, Runnels finally made out. Ted singled, to take over the batting lead for the first time that season. At the end of the day, Runnels was three for six, but Ted was three for four. On the season, Runnels was.324. Ted was.326.

  In the final game, Ted clenched the batting title with a double and a seventh-inning, game-winning home run, that lifted the Red Sox into third place.

  “I don't think anyone else in this league but Ted could have beaten me in a race like this,” Runnels said. “It's no disgrace to finish runner up to Williams in a batting championship.”

  An equally gracious Williams was saying that Runnels had hit the ball just as hard as he had over that final week, and maybe harder. “I was lucky,” he said, “because my balls had distance and some of his were hit right at the fielders.”

  At the age of forty, Ted Williams had won another American League batting title. He was going to have two more years--the dreadful, injury-ridden season of 1959 and a year of injuries and personal anguish capped off in triumph,

  I realized what a great guy Tom Yawkey was, and I will always sing his praises as a terrific guy and a man. I knew he would have liked to have a stronger relationship with me, but I never did want to pursue that aspect of it.

  --TED WILLIAMS

  the of the standard flights of fantasy when baseball fans get toO gether centers on the stupendous feats of hitting that would have been achieved if Ted Williams had been able to play half his games in yankee Stadium and Joe DiMaggio had been able to take dead aim at the left-field wall at Fenway Park.

  Ted Williams, for one, isn't so sure. “The thing of it is, when you get in them short ballparks, like DiMag in Fenway and Williams at New York, they pitch a little different to you. All you got to do is look at the statistics. Doggone it, you don't get anything to hit.”

  It was Joe Cronin who first gave Ted reason to think about it, and Cronin wasn't talking so much about the ballpark as about the recognition and acclaim. “It was my first or second year in the big leagues,” Ted says, “and Joe took me to a restaurant with his wife and somebody else. He said 'You know, Ted, some day when you're looking back, you may be sorry you didn't play in New York.' I was just a young kid. I didn't have an
opinion really. He said, 'No, there are two things you are going to wish you could have done in your career. First, that you didn't play in New York, and also that you weren't a faster runner.' For damn sure, he was right on that last one.”

  It could have happened. There were at least two times during Ted's career when there were serious conversations between Tom Yawkey and Dan Topping, the Yankees owner, about a WilliamsforDiMaggio trade. And that's not counting a most intriguing proposition that came to Ted within a week after he retired.

  A more fruitful area for speculation, however, would go like this: Forget the fences and look to the ownership. What would have happened, in other words, if Ted Williams had grown up under the hard eyed businessmen who ran the Yankees organization and Joe Di Maggio had fallen under Tom Yawkey's beneficent gaze?

  With the Yankees ownership you either toed the line or you were gone. It didn't matter how much the players hated Casey Stengel. George Weiss, the general manager, had impressed on them that nobody was indispensable, and so when Stengel barked at them they jumped, For that matter, the players themselves were known to haul a fresh rookie out into the back alley and show him their knuckles. “You're fooling with our money” was the way that tune went.

  On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the Red Sox's permissive attitude was exactly what Ted needed. Birdie Tebbetts, the old psychologist (he has a B.S. in philosophy from Providence College), seems to think so. “Joe Cronin has never got the credit he deserves in the way he treated Williams,” Tebbetts says. “He knew he had a troubled kid, and he held him under a loose rein. He disciplined him only when he had to and then went back to allowing Ted Williams to be Ted Williams.”

  On that assessment, Ted agrees completely. “I know how lucky I was--I know how lucky I was--that I played for a manager like Joe Cronin. Joe Cronin came closer to treating me like a father, with good advice, friendly advice, intimate advice, than any other single man in my life. He had a beautiful family, and he was a tremendous father. Lovely kids. Lovely wife. He was a handsome Irish guy, and I envied him how he could bullshit the press. He could get a guy he didn't like and have him going out of the office thinking Joe Cronin was a helluva guy. Joe Cronin would have been as good a politician as a ballplayer.”