“Go on.”
“That’s all.”
“No it isn’t. I can see it in those pretty eyes, Betsy Jane. The rest... tell me the rest.”
She swallowed, nodded, sighed. “They... they left together. Eddie lived close, you know, easy walk home to his mother’s house — Fred was going to talk business with him. They went out the back way, around midnight. It was the last time I saw Eddie alive.”
The alley behind the bar, bumped up against the backyards of residences, would be as good a place as any for an assault.
She was saying, “But I can’t imagine Fred would do such a thing.”
“Sure you can.”
She shook her head. “Anyway, Eddie was no pushover. He carried a straight razor, you know.”
“So I hear. But I also hear it wasn’t among his effects.”
“Oh, Eddie had it that night. I saw it.”
“Yeah?”
“He emptied his pocket, looking for change for the jukebox... laid his things right on this counter, razor among them. We were sitting in this very booth... this was... our booth.”
She began to cry again, and I got over on her side of the booth, slid an arm around her, and comforted her, thinking that she really was a cute kid, and midget sex was definitely on my short list of things yet undone in a long and varied life.
But more to the point, what had become of that razor? If Fred had attacked Eddie out back, maybe that razor had been dropped in the scuffle — and if it was back there, somewhere, I’d have the evidence I needed to get the cops to open an investigation.
“Betsy Jane,” I said, “we’ll talk again... when you’re feeling up to it.”
“All right... but Mr. Heller... Nate... I am afraid. Terribly afraid.”
I squeezed her shoulder, kissed her cheek. “I’ll make the bad man go away.”
She put her hand on my thigh — her little bitty hand. Christ, it felt weird. Also, good.
Nodding to Elmer, I headed toward the rear exit, and stepped out into the alley. The night was moonless with a scattering of stars, and the lighting was negligible — no street lamps back here, just whatever scant illumination spilled from the frame houses whose backyards bordered the asphalt strip. A trio of garbage cans — full-scale, nothing midget about them — stood against the back of the brick building, and some empty liquor and beer cartons were stacked nearby.
Not much to see, and in the near-darkness, I would probably need my flashlight to probe for that missing straight razor. I had just decided to walk the several blocks to the side street where my car was parked, to get the flash, when a figure stepped out from the recess of an adjacent building’s rear doorway.
“Looking for something?” Fred Peterson asked, those cow eyes wide and wild, teeth bared like an angry animal, veins throbbing in his neck, one hand behind his back. Though he stood only five foot, his brawny frame, musculature obvious in the skintight golf shirt, made him a threatening presence as he stepped into the alley like a gunfighter out onto the Main Street of Dodge.
I was thinking how I should have brought my gun along — only usually, attending midget funerals, it wasn’t necessary.
“Get some ideas,” he said, “talking to Betsy Jane?”
He was standing there, rocking on legs whose powerful thighs stood out, despite the bagginess of his chinos.
Shrugging, I said, “I thought Eddie mighta dropped something when you jumped him.”
Peterson howled as he whipped something from behind him and charged, it was a bat, he was wielding a goddamn baseball bat, and he was whipping it at me, slicing the air, the bat whooshing over me as I ducked under the swing. Screw baseball, I tackled him, taking him down hard, and the bat fell from his grasp, clattering onto the asphalt. I rolled off him, rolling toward the sound, and then I had the bat in my hands, as I got up and took my stance.
That’s when I found that straight razor I’d been looking for, or rather Fred Peterson showed me what had become of it, as he yanked it from his pocket and swung it around, the meager light of the alley managing to wink off the shining blade.
I didn’t wait for him to come at me: I took my swing.
The bat caught him in the side of the head, a hard blow that caved his skull in, and by the time Peterson fell to his knees, his motor responses were dead, and so was he. He flopped forward, on his face, razor spilling from limp fingers, blood and brains leaching out onto the asphalt as I stood over him, the bat resting against my shoulder.
“Strike zone my ass,” I said to nobody, breathing hard.
Finally I went back into the Midgets’ Club, carrying the bloody bat, getting my share of my looks, though Betsy Jane had gone. I leaned on the bar and told Elmer to call the cops.
But the little bartender just looked at me in amazement. “What the hell did you do, Heller?”
“Somebody had to go to bat for Eddie. Call the goddamn cops, would you, please?”
No charges were brought against me — my actions were clearly in self-defense — and Eddie Gaedel’s death is listed to this day as “natural causes” on the books. Though I shared with them everything I knew about the matter, the police simply didn’t want to go to the trouble of declaring Eddie a murder victim, merely to pursue a deceased suspect. Poor Eddie just couldn’t get a fair shake in any of the record books.
A few days after the cops cleared me, Veeck spoke to me on the phone, from a room in the Mayo Clinic.
“You know, ten years ago, when I sent Eddie Gaedel into that game,” he said, reflectively, “I knew it would be that little clown’s shining moment... what I didn’t know was that it would be mine, too! Hell, I knew it was a good gag, that the fans would roar, and the stuffed shirts holler. But who coulda guessed it’d become the single act forever identified with me?”
“We’re any of us lucky to be remembered for anything, Bill,” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah. Suppose Eddie felt that way?”
“I know he did.”
For years after, Helen Gaedel remembered me at Christmas with cookies or a fruitcake. Betsy Jane Perkins was grateful, too.
Veeck expressed his gratitude by paying me handsomely, and, typically, fooled himself and all of us by not dying just yet. The man who invented fan appreciation night, who provided a day-care center for female employees before the term was coined, who was first to put the names of players on the backs of uniforms, who broke the color line in the American League, and who sent a midget up to bat — and who also bought back the Chicago White Sox in 1975 — lived another irascible fifteen years.
And wasn’t that a hell of a stunt.