Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Diamond Ruby by Joseph Wallace

© 2008 by Joseph Wallace

Professional nonfiction writer Joseph Wallace’s books include The Autobiography of Baseball, which was nominated for the Seymour medal for best baseball book of 1998. He began writing short stories recently and has appeared in the anthologies Hardboiled Brooklyn, Baltimore Noir, and Bronx Noir. For his EQMM debut he employs his knowledge of baseball in a most inventive way.

“You’ve got no choice,” the man said.

He leaned back against the splintery bench, his head outlined against the steel-gray sky and sea, and smiled down at the girl sitting beside him. His teeth were white behind his thin lips, and his eyes were silvery as they scanned her face.

The two of them sitting there like father and daughter on a visit to Coney Island. But no family in its right mind would linger on the Boardwalk today, with the wind chasing curtains of sand and ragged waves grinding against the beach. The only other people in sight were hurrying past, heads down, hats pulled low over their eyes.

“No choice,” the man said again.

The girl, a fair-skinned teenager with an oval face and dark eyes, huddled deeper into her cloth coat and didn’t speak.

“You listening to me?”

Finally she lifted her head to look at him. “I’m listening,” she said in a whispery voice. “The answer’s still no.”

He shook his head, and for an instant seemed almost sorry for her. “You have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said. “You don’t get it.”

No longer smiling, he got to his feet.

“But you will,” he said.

The big man stood at home plate, waving that ridiculously heavy bat over his head and grinning out at the mound. He wasn’t young anymore, and all those hot dogs and cigars and late nights had begun to take their toll. For a few years already he’d had a bit of a shelf above his thin waist and banjo legs, but now he was running to fat, his belly pushing against his pinstriped jersey.

Same grin as always, though. Same moon face and crinkled-up eyes and pure joy in doing whatever he did. Those hadn’t changed. You almost had to smile back when you saw him.

Unless you were standing just sixty feet and a hair away from him and those amazing arms that could whip the bat around and send the ball back at you twice as fast as you threw it in. Take your head off and you’d find yourself thinking, “How’d that happen?” out in centerfield somewhere while your body was still standing on the mound.

“You ready, kid?” he called out.

Rue Thomas nodded.

The big man took a vicious cut, his bat a blur. “Then let’s go.”

The crowd loving it. How many? Four thousand, at least. Maybe five. More than had ever packed little Mansfield Grounds before, that was for sure. Yelling and screaming and making the old wooden grandstands shake. Sending a fleet of gulls flapping away towards the ocean in panic.

Everybody who could buy or beg or steal a ticket was here. Here for an event big enough to shut down Coney Island, to hush the clatter of the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt. All of the attractions silent, because what would be the use of opening till the game ended? Who would come to Coney Island today and not want to see the Babe, the Bambino, the Big Bam, Jidge.

Babe Ruth, the most famous man on earth, facing off against Rue Thomas, the seventeen-year-old Brooklyn girl with lightning in her left arm.

The Babe settled back into his coiled batting stance. He was still grinning, but Rue could see something different in those guileless eyes. They seemed to sharpen, and his face, his whole body, grew still, watchful, attentive. Focused.

On Rue, on her hand, on the ball itself.

This white sphere.

Rue was nine when she first found out.

Before that, she wasn’t much different from any other kid on East 21st Street, skinny and dirty-kneed, with a mass of dark ringlets that framed her face.

But though few noticed, her hands were different, bigger and stronger than most of the boys’. And her fingers were long and tapered, ideal for running up and down the keys of a piano, people told her, if her parents could have afforded one.

Still, she was just another neighborhood girl until the day Billy O’Reilly tried to steal her brother Nick’s bicycle.

Billy O’Reilly and his gang from up on Nostrand Avenue, coming through like a thunderstorm. Four of them, pushing poor little Tim Trotta into the bushes, throwing Cliff Jamison’s hat up onto a roof.

The usual. You just waited for it to pass, like you’d wait out the storm.

But then Billy grabbed Nick’s bike and took off. Nick had worked for a year delivering milk with Mr. Stephanides to buy that bike. Now, even if they saw it again, it would be wrecked. No one could bust something up like Billy could.

Nick and a couple of the others went running down the street, chasing, but it was hopeless. The littler kids just stood and watched, except for Rue.

Rue, standing in her front yard, looked down at the stone resting in her left hand. She’d picked it up without even realizing, and now she hefted it, enjoying its weight and cool smoothness against her palm.

Then she let fly, and an instant later Billy lay moaning on the street. The newly riderless bike made a gentle right turn and fell on its side.

There was a moment of dead silence as everyone stared at her. Then, shouting and cursing, Billy’s friends came running back.

Rue bent down and picked up another stone. “Watch,” she said in her wispy little-girl’s voice, a voice that was usually easy to ignore. But not now, not when the second stone whanged off a street sign, leaving a big dent. Not when she found a third one and raised her eyes to look at them again.

As his friends hoisted Billy up and half-carried him away, everyone else clustered around her. “Where’d you learn to do that?” Nick said. He was holding his bike like it was a gift from heaven.

Rue shrugged. A million hours spent throwing a ragged stitched-up ball against a white square painted on the garage wall, and no one had ever noticed.

Till now. The very next Saturday Nick brought her down to Marine Park, and an hour later she was pitching for the neighborhood baseball team.

Some people said the diamond was no place for a girl, especially a little one like Rue Thomas. But the minute they saw her fastball and drop curve and fadeaway, they shut right up.

Because they played for money, every Sunday morning in Marine Park. Money and neighborhood pride. And if it would help you win, no rule book said a chimpanzee, an alligator, a sewer rat, or a girl couldn’t play.

He showed up for the first time midway through Rue’s rookie season with the Comets, just a week after her sixteenth birthday. He was waiting outside the players’ door at Mansfield Grounds after a game, leaning against a scrawny locust tree like he had all the time in the world.

Thin, well-dressed, with a quick, toothy grin and silvery eyes. Smiling at her as she walked past, heading towards the El.

He fell into step beside her. “Buy you a soda?”

His voice gentler than she’d expected. But confident, like he was used to people doing what he wanted.

She kept walking.

“Or a — whaddaya call it? An egg cream?”

From out of town. She’d guessed from his look, and from his voice, too, though she hadn’t done enough traveling yet to figure out where. She stopped and looked him up and down, in his gray suit and well-brushed hat.

Forty years old, maybe more. And far from the first to try this. “Sorry,” she said. “Not interested.”

He laughed, showing those white teeth. “What you’re thinking, I’m not interested either,” he said. “I’m talking about business. Baseball business.”

Rue hesitated. It was 1931, and times were hard. Her parents had already moved twice, from the house on East 21st to an apartment over on Ocean Avenue, and then to another one in a worse neighborhood on Quentin Road. Sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat.

If someone wanted to talk business, you listened.

“I’ll buy you a burger,” the man said. “To go along with that soda.”

His name was Chase. He said he was from Chicago.

All she had to do, he told her, was lose every once in a while.

They sat in a booth way in the back of Benny’s, a place a few blocks towards the bad side of Coney Island. She’d never been there before, but the food tasted just fine.

She let him describe what he wanted, although she’d understood where he was headed in the first ten seconds. She knew how it worked, with ballplayers being paid to make an error here, strike out there, throw just a few bad pitches at important moments.

That kind of thing had been around as long as baseball. It’d gotten so bad that a whole World Series had been lost on purpose, Rue knew, back in 1919, when she was only four. After that they’d brought in this old man, a judge, to make sure baseball stayed on the up and up. The first thing he’d done was kick eight of the guilty players out of baseball forever.

Rue had pitched against one of them, Joe Jackson, a tired, hollow-eyed old guy, when a barnstorming team had stopped in Brooklyn the previous fall. He hadn’t been able to get around on her fastball.

She listened to Chase. Waited till she was nearly done with her Coke and hamburger before saying, “Sorry.”

He looked at her. “At least listen to what we’re offering.”

She shook her head.

Chase seemed unruffled. “Not every game, of course. Only every once in a while. Wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.” He paused for a second. “Though it might be better for you in the long run, you weren’t quite so good.”

At the time, Rue was 9–1, with an earned-run average of under 2.00.

“You’re hot stuff,” he went on. “Some think it’s a joke, a setup. Others think you’re for real. Either way, there’s a ton of action whenever you pitch, all over the country.”

Rue thought about that.

He leaned closer to her, and she could smell his cigarette breath. “Five hundred every time you do what we ask. Like every three or four starts. Nobody will ever know.”

Rue did the math. She probably had fifteen more starts left in the season, so he was talking about two thousand bucks, maybe more. A lot of money.

But lose on purpose? How could she do that? “No,” she said, draining the last of her drink and getting to her feet. “Still no.”

Her wide eyes, her quiet voice, making him disbelieve her. “You’ll come around,” he said. “You’ll change your mind.”

She turned away.

“Your problem is, you think you’ve got a choice,” he called after her. “But you don’t.”

The first time she heard that from him, but not the last.

Diamond Ruby. Belle of the Ball. Queen of Diamonds. The “Out” Girl.

The Angel of Brooklyn.

Silent Rue, sometimes, because of her fragile voice.

Even just plain Rue every once in a while. It made for a good headline joke: “Opponents Rue the Day Captain Mansfield Signed Girl Phenom.”

She’d been just fifteen when the old Army officer who owned the Coney Island Comets came to watch her pitch in Marine Park. By then she’d gotten some local attention, not that it mattered much to her. All she wanted to do was pitch, win, and collect the money she was owed to help her family scrape along.

Captain Mansfield, bluff, loud, friendly, looking at his team like it was a toy, had other ideas. “Sign with me,” he’d said, “and we’ll make a fortune.”

Underneath all his jollity he was a smart businessman. Because he certainly made himself a pretty penny from all the fans who came to the ballpark to watch Diamond Ruby, the freak of nature straight out of a Coney Island sideshow, pitch. To see this little girl with the unhittable fastball and knee-buckling curve mow down men who were heading to the majors, or who’d already been there and were heading down.

But very few of those pretty pennies ever made it into Diamond Ruby’s pockets.

Rue’s first pitch to the Babe bounced two feet in front of the plate, skipped past Jimmy Connelly, the Comets’ catcher, and rolled all the way to the backstop.

The crowd howled. Some of them were Comets fans — she could see a scattering of familiar faces — but most were here for the show, the spectacle, the Babe. If the girl pitcher made a fool of herself, that was okay with them.

But Rue had never bounced a pitch by mistake in her life. No, that wasn’t true, sure she had, once or twice. On rainy days, or freezing ones, when the ball felt like a chunk of ice in her hand.

It was warm and sunny today, though.

She met Babe Ruth a week after Captain Mansfield and the Yankees’ owner, Colonel Rupert, old war buddies, arranged the big exhibition game. The Comets, with Rue starting, would face a team of minor-leaguers and local stars... plus the Babe, the only one who really mattered. The two owners knowing that even in the depths of the Great Depression, people would hand over their hard-earned dollars for a chance to see, as one of the tabloids put it, “Big Bam vs. Great Gams.”

The Bambino was game for it. He was game for anything. Hospitals, orphanages, boxing rings, football fields, rodeos — just promise him some diversion and he’d be there.

They gathered for lunch at Lundy’s Clam Shack, a little place built on wooden stilts over Sheepshead Bay. Rue and the Babe and his business manager, a silent man in an expensive suit who sipped coffee and kept a close eye on both of them throughout the meal, and dapper Colonel Ruppert and Captain Mansfield, who kept grinning like kids on Christmas morning. All the other tables in the shack were empty, and Rue knew that this single lunch was probably costing more than she earned all year.

While they talked, the Bambino ate a mountain of steamed clams, drowning each one in butter before chomping it down. Rue tried to keep count, but lost track after thirty-four. That was early in the lunch.

“Call me Jidge,” Ruth told her. He called her “kid,” but that was okay, it was what he called almost everybody. And anyway, she was a kid, and sure felt like one facing the Babe across a table. He was bigger than she’d thought from the newsreels and pictures, and under his extra flesh she could see the rippling muscles of his arms and torso.

He saw her looking at him. “So, kid, you think you can strike me out?”

She shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “I think I can hit your best pitch into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Atlantic’s behind home plate,” she said. “Foul territory.”

His eyes narrowed. “Okay, the Pacific. Just take the ball a little longer to get there.”

“Might take longer than you think,” she said.

The Babe stared at her, then began to laugh. “Okay,” he said, as if she’d passed a test. “I got an idea. Let’s make this fun.”

“Oh, I know it’s going to be fun, Jidge,” Captain Mansfield said.

The Babe shot him a look that shut him up and turned back to Rue. “Tell you what, kid,” he said. “You bounce the first one, get everybody laughing. Then you give me something funny, like a big old curve, and I’ll swing and miss by a mile.” His face crinkled into a grin. “I’ll kick up a big fuss, a real hullabaloo, which should get the folks’ attention.”

“And after that?” Rue asked.

“After that?” Serious now, he gave her a direct look, a look of supreme self-confidence.

“After that, no script,” he said. “Just you against me, kid.”

The Babe missed Rue’s second pitch by at least three feet, spinning so hard after his wild swing that it looked like he was trying to drill himself into the ground. He stared out at her in what seemed like shocked disbelief, then threw his bat to the ground with such violence that it raised a puff of dust when it hit. Stomping around the plate, he swore and shook his fists and waved his arms around, while Jimmy Connelly and old Byron Mack, the umpire, the other players on the field, and the whole enormous bellowing crowd, ate it up.

Rue thought the grandstands might come down around her ears.

Finally Jimmy threw the ball back to her. The Babe picked up his bat and started settling himself into his stance. But then he stopped, and Rue saw him grin. He raised his bat and pointed with it towards the deepest part of centerfield.

“The Pacific Ocean, kid,” he called out.

Rue started to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat. Rubbing the ball between her palms, she let her gaze slide away from the Babe to a man sitting in the front row of the stands just to the left of home plate. A man who remained entirely still while the fans surged around him.

An old man with wiry white hair, bushy eyebrows, a lined face, and pale, piercing eyes that never seemed to blink.

Rue felt her heart thump against her ribs. She dragged her attention back to home plate. Jimmy gave her the sign: One finger for a fastball.

Just you against me, kid.

It was time.

“It’s time,” the old man said. “Well past time. This can’t go any further.”

Rue didn’t know what he was talking about. “Further?”

“Girls aren’t meant to play baseball,” he said.

Rue had heard it before, many times before, usually from opposing players before she faced them, and then again — in a different tone — after. She’d been hearing it since she was nine, and the words had long since lost any meaning to her.

Until now, just two days before her confrontation with Babe Ruth.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball, the Czar, leaned back in his chair and looked at her. He was the man the baseball owners had brought in after the 1919 World Series to kick the crooks and gamblers out of the game, the man with power enough to make the rules and enforce them.

“Baseball is too strenuous for women,” Landis said, holding her in his cold, unblinking gaze. “You are not constitutionally suited to it.”

Rue spread her arms as if to say, Look at me. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not the point. You’re setting a bad example.”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

He looked nettled. “That’s not the point either,” he said. “I can’t tolerate having you out there on the field.”

Rue felt her temper flare. “Why?” she asked, hating her passionless voice. “Because I strike them out? Because I win?”

He didn’t reply.

She took a deep breath. She’d always sworn she wouldn’t beg for anything, but still she forced the words out. “I need this,” she said.

Judge Landis gave the slightest shrug inside his expensive suit. “I’m sorry.”

They sat in silence for a few moments in the dimly lit room with its smell of cigars and whiskey and treated leather. Then she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “What about Saturday?”

“Saturday,” the Czar said, shaking his head. “I’ve given a substantial amount of thought to Saturday, and I’ve decided to let the game go on as scheduled. The fans — and Captain Mansfield — would be too disappointed if I canceled your—” He cleared his throat. “Your confrontation with the Babe.”

His thin lips turned downward. “But I will make the announcement immediately afterwards.” He shook his head. “Articles about you in The Sporting News, Baseball magazine,even The New York Times. You’re making a mockery of the game.”

“Jidge doesn’t think so,” she said.

Landis’s bushy eyebrows shot upward like outraged caterpillars. “Oh,” he said, “now we’re taking lessons in dignity from Babe Ruth?”

After that she knew it was hopeless. He was just an old man. He had no idea what it felt like to be standing out there on the field during a game. The Babe did, and Jimmy Connelly, and she did too. Every player did. But not the Czar.

She got to her feet, the room’s still air roaring in her ears. He rose too, came around his desk, and walked her across the room.

“Enjoy your last hurrah,” he said, closing the door behind her.

You’ve got no choice.

“See?” Chase said. “Told you so.”

They’d met this time at a delicatessen in Borough Park, a world away from Coney Island and anyone she knew. The windows were streaked with steam, and a bowl of pickled tomatoes sent up sour fumes from the tabletop between them. They were the only people in the place speaking English.

“You knew that Landis was going to throw me out?” Rue asked.

“Sure.” Chase looked bored. “Only a matter of time.”

He showed his teeth. “Notice something about baseball?” he said. “It’s all about white men.”

Rue took a deep breath. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

His eyes brightened and he leaned forward. “Just throw one pitch,” he said. “That’s all we’re asking.”

Jimmy Connelly signaled fastball.

Rue nodded. She stood on the rubber, the ball shielded in her glove. Usually, all her focus would be on the plate, the batter, the catcher’s mitt. But this time she let her attention stray from the Babe, deadly serious now, and back over to Judge Landis in the first row.

Her eyes met his. He didn’t blink or change expression.

Then, amid all the blurred frenzy of the crowd, she glimpsed more purposeful movement, a dark figure moving towards him.

In a moment, much sooner than she’d anticipated, Chase stood behind the Czar’s left shoulder. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a cloth cap pulled low over his brow.

Rue saw his hand come out of his coat pocket, saw the glint of sunlight off steel, and knew at last exactly what was about to happen.

Though really, she’d known from the start.

Judge Landis didn’t notice, nor did Captain Mansfield beside him, or any of the fans around them. Just as Chase had predicted, every eye, every camera, was focused on the field, on the battle between pitcher and batter.

Rue went into her windup.

Enjoy your last hurrah, she thought.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

Rue nodded.

“You sure? Be a bad idea to miss.”

“I can hit him,” she said.

“In the head?”

She didn’t answer.

Chase frowned, then made a face and shrugged. “Okay, yeah, that’s a lot to ask. But we’ve got a ton riding on the Cubs this year, and they have a straight shot through the Series if the Babe’s not right.” He paused. “Would be a great exacta, but that’s okay. You just plunk Ruth good, put him on the ground, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

“What do you mean — the rest?”

For a moment his face darkened, but he got hold of himself. “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then she said, “If I say yes, I’ll be able to keep pitching?”

“Garr-annn-teeed.” He looked calm now, relaxed, as if he’d just put a penny into a gumball machine and knew the gum would soon come rolling out of the chute. “The next commish will know who’s really in charge.”

He paused, thinking about it. “Might even be, no one will want the job.”

“All right,” Rue said. “I’m in.”

Chase smiled.

“Garr-annn-teeed,” he said again.

The most famous man in America standing at home plate.

The crowd bellowing with anticipation.

The cold-eyed old Czar on his feet like everyone else, as still as death in his black coat and black hat.

The man in the aisle beside him, teeth shining white, something half-hidden in his hand.

The girl on the mound, awaiting an oncoming storm only she knew about.

The long, breathless moment preceding the pitch.

Rue rocked back, raised her hands above her head, broke them apart, hurled herself forward with the controlled violence that always ended with a fastball whistling across the plate. Only not this time. This time, in the middle of her motion, she stumbled.

Or seemed to stumble.

Her arm whipped forward and she released the ball, just as the toe of her spikes caught on a chewed-up patch of ground and she fell flat on her face.

Lying there, unmoving, she heard the dull, solid thump. There was a moment’s pause, as if the world itself was holding its breath, and then the silence was broken by a woman’s high-pitched shriek. This was followed by the upwelling, frightened sound of the crowd.

Rue got slowly to her feet. She took her time looking over, because she didn’t really need to. She knew what she was going to see.

But she had a role to play, so when she did look, she found herself running towards the stands. The commissioner of baseball was standing there, his face ashen as he stared down at something lying at his feet.

Chase, glazed eyes half open, an enormous purple knot sprouting from his left temple.

Rue scrambled over the railing and dropped to her knees beside the stricken man. Her face was full of shock and concern as she put her mouth close to his ear.

“To answer your question, I can hit anything I want to,” she whispered, “where I want to.”

He blinked, and his lips moved, but no sound came out.

“And I always have a choice,” she said.

She got back to her feet and moved closer to Landis. He was hanging on the railing with both hands.

“It’s him,” she said so only he could hear. “Chase. I didn’t get a chance to warn you — it happened too fast.”

Rallying himself, the commissioner spoke to the cops who had congregated around his seat. It only took them a few seconds to find the knife pinned under Chase’s body. That got everybody’s attention.

When he was gone, heading to the hospital under the law’s watchful eye, Rue looked up at the Czar. After a moment he gave a brief, reluctant nod.

“Thank you,” she said, and went back to work.

It was the day before the big game, the “Battle ’tween Teen and Titan,” in the words of one poetic scribe, and Judge Landis was exhausted.

He’d had enough. The New York dailies and out-of-town papers alike had been mad with excitement and anticipation for days. Reporters from as far away as Seattle and Santa Fe had been ringing his telephone off the hook. It was all he could do to keep his opinions to himself for one more day.

So the last thing he needed was to see the girl, the cause of all this tumult, walking into his office and perching on the edge of his desk as if she owned it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

She didn’t answer at once, but there was an expression on her face that he’d never seen there before. She looked, he thought suddenly, like someone who’d just won the World Series.

“Miss Thomas,” he said, struggling to keep his temper, “we have nothing further to talk about.”

“But we do,” she said.

And then, leaning forward so he’d hear every word, she told him what it was, and what they were going to do about it.

“Think you can get one over this time?” Babe Ruth asked her.

Rue grinned. They were standing midway between the mound and the plate. The players were back in their positions, and the crowd, quiet and subdued now, was focused on the field again.

“Sure,” she said.

“Good. Then let’s give them a show.”

He turned away, then looked back over his shoulder. “Hey, kid.”

She waited.

“Heard that old windbag Landis was going to toss you out after the game.”

Rue shook her head. “You heard wrong. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah?” The Babe looked surprised. “Glad to hear it, ’cause you can throw.”

“And you can hit, Jidge,” she said.

He laughed and headed back to the plate. Got right into his stance, no fooling around this time. Jimmy Connelly signaled fastball, and Rue threw one.

The bat whipped around, and there was a sound like a cannon shot. The ball streaked upward and headed towards the Pacific Ocean.

The crowd let loose. The Babe dropped his bat and watched the blast leave the yard before starting his laughing, clownish circuit around the bases. Rue, stone-faced, held up her glove and waited for the ump to toss her a new ball.

But inside she was smiling. Sometimes, she knew, you just had to give the fans what they’d come to see.