Murder at Ebbets Field by Troy Soos Read Free Book Online

pier, I could see the fashionable resort hotels of Manhattan Beach and Brighton Beach to the east and to the west, the seamy side of the island, the amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna, and the burned ruins of Dreamland.
    Turning about, I started to walk back. The sun was now its proper shade of golden yellow, the cloudless sky was correctly blue, and I could tell it was going to be a hot and humid one again today.
    I was just about off the pier, no longer over the water, when a sea gull made a low run at my head. I ducked down in reflex, and through a gap between the planks, I saw somebody laying on the sand underneath. Sleeping, I thought.
    Then I got down on my knees and looked closer. No, not sleeping.
    It was a woman. She was on her back, with matted hair covering her face and no cover at all on her naked body. Her arms and legs were bent into positions that I was sure she hadn’t assumed voluntarily. The tide had probably washed her ashore, dumping her on the beach like a piece of twisted driftwood.
    I hopped off the side of the dock and slowly approached her. When I was close enough to see her skin, I knew for certain she was dead. Her skin had a bluish tinge that was no color for a human being to be. Sand was sprinkled over her; it sparkled in yellow stripes across her body, lit by the sun through the cracks in the pier above. The purple and yellow baseball diamond that I’d seen in the Vitagraph studio flashed before my mind’s eye.
    The woman had no localized injuries that I could see—no knife cuts or gunshot wounds, no ugly bruises. She was simply dead all over.
    Green seaweed was tangled in the blondish hair that covered her face. I bent down to pull away some of the seaweed and her hair moved away with it. The face was bloated, the lips were purple, and the open eyes no longer had a personality behind them. But they had an identity—they were the white lifeless eyes of Florence Hampton.
    I felt a sudden vacuum in my gut, as if a vital organ had just been plucked out of me.
    The proper thing to do was to close her eyelids, but when I reached down, I found I couldn’t bring myself to touch her skin. So I took my boater off and laid it over her face. Then I slipped off my coat and covered her body—not to preserve her modesty but because she looked so cold.
    I then shooed away the sea gulls as best I could and trudged back to the hotel, knowing nothing could help her now. I felt no panic as I walked. Just numbness.
    I had seen Florence Hampton too recently, her memory was too fresh in my mind for her to be dead. I could still hear her voice echoing from yesterday when she laughed loudly at Casey Stengel in Ebbets Field and when she softly asked if I was all right after I tripped in the movie studio.
    At the hotel’s front desk was the same idle clerk I’d given my key to. “There’s a dead woman out back by the pier,” I told him.
    “Oh. Well, I’ll make sure somebody looks into it,” he said. He sounded as composed as if I’d told him a towel was missing from my room. Did this happen so often that it was routine for him?
    “She’s—” I hesitated, unsure how much I should say. The last time I found a body, it caused me all sorts of problems. “She looks like Florence Hampton, the movie actress,” I said.
    The clerk’s eyes widened. Then he grabbed a telephone and squawked into the mouthpiece, “Get me the police.”
    In less than five minutes, four policemen arrived. Three of them went to check on the body, while the fourth questioned me in the hotel lobby. His questions were brief and perfunctory. I told him my name, when I found her, that I had been alone on the beach, that I had seen nothing strange other than the body itself, and that I had covered her with my hat and coat but didn’t want them back. I volunteered no additional information. I said nothing about being sure of her identity, nor that I had been at a party with her the night before.
    After satisfying the easily satisfied