I suppose they could hear it in Cooperstown.
Bemis was wearing a batting helmet. You have to, and I think they even wear them in slo-pitch softball nowadays, and there’s no question that they prevent a lot of injuries. But so do seat belts, and what good are they if your plane flies into the side of a mountain?
Everybody saw the pitch, and everybody saw what happened next, with Wade Bemis falling flat and lying still, and a whole stadium full of people catching their breath. And then, the next thing anybody knew, there were a dozen cops out on the field, all of them heading for the pitcher’s mound. My first thought was that they were there to protect Tommy, to keep the Bobcats from taking a shot at him, but the Bobcats were in the same state we were, too shocked and stunned to do anything much but stand around. And the cops weren’t protecting Tommy. What they were doing was putting cuffs on him and taking him into custody.
Wade Bemis left first. An ambulance drove in from the bullpen entrance and drove right across the infield, and they got him on a stretcher and loaded him on the ambulance and drove out the way they came, siren blazing away. They didn’t need the siren, as it turned out, and they didn’t even need the ambulance, because Bemis was dead on arrival at the hospital, and he was most likely dead when he hit the ground.
Just about everybody watched the ambulance leave, and most of the crowd missed Tommy’s exit. He left in handcuffs, escorted by ten or a dozen cops, and they took him out through the dugout and the locker room so nobody really knew what was happening.
And then we finished the game.
There was some criticism later about that, some people arguing that the game should have been called on the spot, but how could you do that? For one thing, I think you’d have had a riot on your hands. You don’t call off a game every time a batter gets hit by a pitch.
Some rookie, a skinny guy named Hector Ruiz, was announced as a pinch runner, and he was awarded first base. And our closer, Freddie Olendorff, came on in relief. He took his warmup throws, and I got a hunch and called for a pitchout on the first pitch, and sure enough, Hector Ruiz was off and running. I threw down to Pepper Foxwell at second and we had him out by four feet.
The next two batters grounded out, and that was it for the Bobcats in the top of the eighth. They brought in a new pitcher in the bottom of the ninth and he walked the bases loaded, and we scored two more runs before they managed to stop the bleeding. Then Freddie went out there and shut down the Bobcats one two three, on a pair of ground balls and a foul pop that I caught for the last out.
We were in the locker room and the crowd was out of the stadium and halfway home before we found out what had actually happened that afternoon. That Bemis was dead, which was what we were all afraid of, of course, but didn’t know for a fact, not until the word filtered through to us. And that Tommy Willis was in a jail cell, charged with murder.
That was hard to believe. I think everybody knew it wasn’t an accident, that he’d thrown that ball at Wade Bemis on purpose. And some of us knew he hadn’t been trying to just brush him back, but that he meant to hit him.
And I knew just how intentional it was, because I knew what pitch I’d called and where I’d set up. And Tommy didn’t even bother to shake off my sign. He nodded and went into his windup and threw the ball straight at Bemis.
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 why the 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.
Headaches and Bad Dreams
Three days of headaches, 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.