Max Allan Collins
Strike Zone
My buddy Bill Veeck made many a mark in the world of big league baseball, owning his first club at twenty-eight, winning pennants, setting attendance records. Two of Bill’s teams beat the Yankees in their heyday — the ’48 Cleveland Indians and the ’59 White Sox; only one other team managed that feat, the ’54 Indians, which was mostly made up of Veeck’s former players.
And, of course, Bill Veeck was a character as colorful as his exploding-paint-factory sport shirts — one of his many trademarks was a refusal to wear coat and tie — a hard-drinking, chain-smoking extrovert with a wooden leg and a penchant for ignoring such quaint customs as doctors’ orders and a good night’s sleep. Veeck thought nothing of commuting from Cleveland to New York, to hang out with showbiz pals like Frank Sinatra and Skitch Henderson at the Copa, or to fly at the drop of a cap out to Hollywood for a game of charades with Hope and Crosby.
“Baseball is too grim, too serious,” he liked to say. “It should be fun. Most owners are bunch of damn stuffed shirts.”
Many of Veeck’s stunts and promotions and just plain wild ideas indeed had irritated the stuffed shirts of baseball. During World War Two, when the draft had drained the game of so much talent, Veeck told Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that he planned to buy the Phillies and fill the team with black ballplayers (another buyer was quickly found). Still, Veeck did manage to put the first black player in the American League, Larry Doby, and even brought the legendary Negro Leagues pitcher, Satchel Paige, into the majors.
Nonetheless, Bill Veeck was resigned to the fact that — no matter what his other accomplishments, whether noble or absurd — he would go down in baseball history as the guy who brought a midget into the majors.
Back in June of ’61, when Veeck called the A-1 Detective Agency, saying he had a job for me, I figured it would have something to do with his recent resignation as president of the White Sox. A partner had bought out both Bill and his longtime associate, Hank Greenberg, and I wondered if it’d been a squeeze play.
Maybe Bill needed some dirt dug up on somebody. Normally, at that stage of my career anyway, I would have left such a shabby task to one of the agency’s many operatives, rather than its president and founder — both of which were me.
I had known Veeck for something like fifteen years, however, and had done many an odd job for him. And besides, my policy was when a celebrity asked for Nate Heller, the celebrity got Nate Heller.
And Bill Veeck was, if nothing else, a celebrity.
The afternoon was sunny with a breeze, but blue skies were banished in the shadow of the El, where Miller’s nestled, an undistinguished Greek-run American-style restaurant that Veeck had adopted as his favorite Loop hangout, for reasons known only to him. Any time Veeck moved into a new office, his first act was to remove the door — another of his trademarks — and Miller’s honored their famous patron by making one of Veeck’s discarded doors their own inner front one, with an explanatory plaque, and the inevitable quote: “My door is always open — Bill Veeck.”
At a little after three p.m., Miller’s was hardly hopping, its dark front windows adding to the under-the-El gloom. Bill was seated in his usual corner booth, his wooden leg extended into the aisle. I threaded through the empty Formica tables and, after a handshake and hello, slid in opposite him.
“Well, you look like hell,” I told him.
He exploded with laughter, almost losing his corner-of-the-mouth cigarette. “At last an honest man. Everybody else tells me I look in the pink — I’m getting the same kind of good reviews as a well-embalmed corpse.”
Actually, a well-embalmed corpse looked better than Veeck: his oblong face was a pallid repository for pouchy eyes, a long lumpy nose, and that wide, full-lipped mouth, which at the moment seemed disturbingly slack. His skin — as leathery and well-grooved as a catcher’s mitt — hung loose on him, and was startlingly white. I had never seen him without a tan. Though I was ten years older, Veeck in his mid-forties looked sixty. A hard sixty.
“It’s a little late to be looking for dirt on Allyn, isn’t it?” I asked him, after a waitress brought Veeck a fresh bottle of Blatz and a first one for me.
Arthur Allyn had bought the White Sox and was the new president.
“This isn’t about that,” Veeck said gruffly, waving it off. “Art’s a pal. This sale clears the way for Hank to relocate in LA. When I get feeling better, Hank’ll take me in as a full partner.”
“Then what is this about, Bill?”
“Maybe I just want to hoist one with you, in honor of an old friend.”
“Oh... Eddie Gaedel. I guess I should have known.”
We clinked beer bottles.
I had seen Eddie’s obit in yesterday’s paper — and the little story the Trib ran in sports. Eddie had died of natural causes, the coroner had said, and bruises on his body were “probably suffered in a fall.”
“I want you to look into it,” Veeck said.
“Into what?”
“Eddie’s death.”
“Why? If it was natural causes.”
“Eddie’s mother says it was murder.”
I sipped my beer, shook my head. “Well, those ‘bruises’ could have come from a beating he got, and deserved — Eddie always was a mouthy little bastard. A week after that game in St. Louis, ten years ago, he got arrested in Cincinnati for assaulting a cop, for Christ’s sake.”
Veeck swirled his beer and looked down into it with bleary eyes — in all the years I’d known this hard-drinking S.O.B., I’d never once seen him with bloodshot eyes... before.
“His mother says it’s murder,” Veeck repeated. “Run over to the South Side and talk to her — if what she says gets your nose twitchin’, look into it... If it’s just a grieving mother with some crazy idea about how her ‘baby’ died, then screw it.”
“Okay. Why is this your business, Bill?”
“When you spend six months bouncing back and forth between your apartment and the Mayo Clinic, you get to thinking... putting your affairs in order. Grisly expression, but there it is.”
“What is it? The leg again?”
“What’s left of it. The latest slice took my knee away, finally. That makes seven operations. Lucky seven.”
“Semper Fi, mac,” I said, and we clinked bottles again.
We’d both been marines in the South Pacific, where I got malaria and combat fatigue, and he had his leg run over by an antitank gun on the kickback. Both of us had spent more time in hospitals than combat.
“My tour was short and undistinguished,” he said. “At least you got the Bronze Star.”
“And a Section Eight.”
“So I lost half a leg, and you lost half your marbles. We both got a better deal than a lot of guys.”
“And you want me to see what kind of deal Eddie Gaedel got?”
“Yeah. Seems like the least I could do. You know, I saw him, not that long ago. He did a lot of stunts for me, over the years. Last year I dressed him up as a Martian and ran him around the park. Opening day this year, I had midget vendors working the grandstand, giving out cocktail wieners in little buns, and shorty beers.”
“And Eddie was one of the vendors.”
“Yeah. Paid him a hundred bucks — same as that day back in ’51.”
That day when Eddie Gaedel — 3'7'', sixty-five pounds — stepped up to the plate for the St. Louis Browns, batting for Frank Saucier.
“Funny thing is,” Veeck said, lighting up a fresh cigarette, “how many times I threatened to kill that little bastard myself. I told him, I’ve got a man up in the stands with a high-powered rifle, and if you take a swing at any pitch, he’ll fire.”
“You got the mother’s address?”