“Yeah... yeah, I got it right here.” He took a slip of paper out of his sport shirt pocket but didn’t hand it to me. “Only she’s not there right now.”
“Where is she?”
“Visitation at the funeral home. Service is tomorrow morning.”
“Why don’t I wait, then, and not bother her...”
The gravel voice took on an edge. “Ю’Cause I’d like you to represent me. Pay her and Eddie your respects... plus, your detective’s nose might sniff something.”
“What, formaldehyde?”
But I took the slip of paper, which had the funeral home address as well as Mrs. Gaedel’s.
He was saying, “Do you know the New York Times put Eddie’s obit on the front page? The front goddamn page... And that’s the thing, Nate, that’s it right there: my name is in Eddie’s obit, big as baseball. And you know what? You know damn well, time comes, Eddie’ll be in mine.”
I just nodded; it was true.
The pouchy eyes tightened — bloodshot maybe, but bright and hard and shiny. “If somebody killed that little bastard, Nate, find out who, and why, and goddamnit, do something about it.”
I squinted through the floating cigarette smoke. “Like go to the cops?”
Veeck shrugged; his wrinkled puss wrinkled some more. “You’re the one pitching. Hurl it any damn way you want to.”
Of course this had all begun about ten years before — in the summer of ’51 — when Veeck called me and asked if I knew any midgets who were “kinda athletic and game for anything.”
“Why don’t you call Marty Craine,” I said, into the phone, leaning back in my office chair, “or some other booking agent.”
“Marty’s come up blank,” Veeck’s voice said through the long-distance crackle. “Can’t you check with some of those lowlife pals of yours at the South State bump-and-grind houses? They take shows out to the carnivals, don’t they?”
“You want an athletic midget,” I said, “I’ll find you an athletic midget.”
So I had made a few calls, and wound up accompanying Eddie Gaedel on the train to Cleveland, for some as yet unexplained Bill Veeck stunt. Eddie was in his mid-twenties but had that aged, sad-eyed look common to his kind; he was pleasant enough, an outgoing character who wore loud sport shirts and actually reminded me of a pint-size Veeck.
“You don’t know what the hell this is about?” he kept asking me in his high-pitched squawk, an oversize cigar rolling from one corner to the other of his undersize mouth.
“No,” I said. We had a private compartment and Gaedel’s incessant cigar smoking provided a constant blue haze. “I just know Bill wants this kept mum — I wasn’t to tell anybody but you, Eddie, that we’re going to Cleveland to do a job for the Browns.”
“You follow baseball, Nate?”
“I’m a boxing fan myself.”
“I hope I don’t have to know nothing about baseball.”
“Veeck didn’t say you had to know baseball — just you had to be athletic.”
Gaedel was a theatrical midget who had worked in various acrobatic acts.
“Ask the dames,” Gaedel said, chortling around the pool-cue Havana, “if Eddie Gaedel ain’t athletic.”
That was my first clue to Eddie’s true personality, or anyway the Eddie that came out after a few drinks. In the lounge car, after he threw back one, then another Scotch on the rocks like a kid on a hot day downing nickel Cokes, I suddenly had a horny Charlie McCarthy on my hands.
I was getting myself a fresh drink, noticing out the corner of an eye as Eddie sidled up to a pair of attractive young women — a blonde and brunette traveling together, probably college students, sweaters and slacks — and set his drink on their little silver deco table. He looked first at the blonde, then at the brunette, as if picking out just the right goodie in a candy-store display case.
Then he put his hand on the blonde’s thigh and leered up at her.
“My pal and me got a private compartment,” he said, gesturing with his cigar like an obscenely suggestive wand, “if you babes are up for a little four-way action.”
The blonde let out a yelp, brushing off Eddie’s hand like a big bug. The brunette was frozen in Fay Wray astonishment.
Eddie grabbed his crotch and grinned. “Hey doll, you don’t know what you’re missin’ — I ain’t as short as you think.”
Both women stood and backed away from the little man, pressing up against the windows, pretty hands up and clawed, their expressions about the same as if a tarantula had been crawling toward them.
I got over there before anybody else could — several men stood petrified, apparently weighing the urge to play Saint George against looking like a bully taking on such a pint-size dragon.
Grabbing him by the collar of his red shirt, I yanked the midget away from the horrified girls, saying, “Excuse us, ladies... Jesus, Eddie, behave yourself.”
And the little guy spun and swung a hard sharp fist up into my crotch. I fell to my knees and looked right into the contorted face of Eddie Gaedel, a demented elf laughing and laughing at the pitiful sight that was me.
A white-jacketed conductor was making his alarmed way toward us when my pain subsided before Eddie’s knee-slapping laughter, giving me the window of opportunity to twist the little bastard’s arm behind him and drag him out of the lounge, through the dining car, getting lots of dirty looks from passengers along the way for this cruelty, and back to our compartment, tossing him inside like the nasty little rag doll he was.
He picked himself up, a kind of reassembling action, and came windmilling at me, his high-pitched scream at once ridiculous and frightening.
I clipped him with a hard right hand and he collapsed like a string-snipped puppet. Out cold on the compartment floor. Well, if you have to be attacked by an enraged horny drunken midget, better that he have a glass jaw.
He slept through the night, and at breakfast in the dining car apologized, more or less.
“I’m kind of an ugly drunk,” he admitted, buttering his toast.
“For Christ’s sakes, Eddie, you only had two drinks.”
“Hey, you don’t have to be friggin’ Einstein to figure with my body size, it don’t take much. Anyway, I won’t tell Mr. Veeck my bodyguard beat the crap out of me.”
“Yeah. Probably best we both forget the little incident.”
He frowned at me, toast crumbs flecking his lips. “‘Little’ incident? Is that a remark?”
“Eat your poached eggs, Eddie.”
In Veeck’s office, the midget sat in a wooden chair with his legs sticking straight out as the Hawaiian-shirted owner of the St. Louis Browns paced excitedly — though due to Bill’s wooden leg, it was more an excited shuffle. I watched from the sidelines, leaning against a file cabinet.
Suddenly Veeck stopped right in front of the seated midget and thrust an Uncle Bill Wants You finger in his wrinkled little puss.
“Eddie, how would like to be a big-league ballplayer?”
“Me?” Eddie — wearing a yellow shirt not as bright as the sun — squinted up at him. “I been to maybe two games in my life! Plus, in case you ain’t noticed, I’m a goddamn midget!”
“And you’d be the only goddamn midget in the history of the game.” Tiny eyes bright and big as they could be, Veeck held up two hands that seemed to caress an invisible beach ball. “Eddie, you’ll appear before thousands — your name’ll go in the record books for all time!”
Eddie’s squint turned interested. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Eddie, my friend... you’ll be immortal.”
“Immortal. Wow. Uh... what does it pay?”
“A hundred bucks.”
Eddie was nodding now — a hundred bucks was even better than immortality.
“So what do you know about baseball?” Veeck asked him.
“I know you’re supposed to hit the white ball with the bat. And then you run somewhere.”