Free Strike Three You're Dead by R. D. Rosen

coffee table on a small blue shag rug, and lots of track lighting. He walked over to the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator, where he found some beer, three cartons of orange juice, a can of high-protein powder, a few plastic containers of coleslaw and macaroni salad, and some knockwurst. There were also a couple of steaks, as though Rudy had been expecting someone for dinner. On the floor by the stove was a plastic bowl filled with crusty cat food. The cops had probably taken Wanda, Rudy’s Siamese cat.
    He went upstairs, where he had never been before, and found a room with a television set and more butcher-block furniture, an elaborate wicker chair suspended from the ceiling, and a few hanging plants. It looked like a double spread in Apartment Life. In the bedroom, Harvey found a water bed covered with a bamboo-patterned comforter, a dresser, and a couple of canvas director’s chairs. He opened the sliding closet door to find a multicolored row of slacks and sports jackets. On the shelf above, Rudy’s sweaters were arranged neatly in color groups, like swatches of fabric. On the floor below, two dozen pairs of shoes stood in strict formation, facing the wall. No one would have guessed that the town house’s tenant had spent even a single day—much less his boyhood—on a farm.
    Harvey ran his hand across the sports jackets hanging on the closet rod. A thin cream-colored garment fell from between two jackets. He picked it up and studied it, a lacy thing with a snap at the crotch. Harvey knew there was a name for it, but couldn’t remember what it was. The label said it was all silk, and it also said, “The Bare Essentials, White Plains, New York.” He threw it on top of the sweaters.
    There was a faint sound, a rustling, in the far corner of the closet, behind Rudy’s suits. Harvey waited a cold moment for the sound to come again. It did, and was quickly followed by the appearance of Wanda, picking her way through the shoes. She raised her dark brown face toward Harvey and emitted a reproachful meow. Harvey picked her up and draped her over his shoulder, where she remained while he looked through Rudy’s dresser drawers; they contained neat piles of professionally laundered shirts and Gold Cup socks. On the glass on top of the dresser was a jewelry box with some cuff links and rings in it. Next to it sat a bowl of coins, a bottle of Aramis cologne, and a stack of back issues of Sporting News. Rudy had a place for everything, and Detective Linderman and his men had managed to leave everything in its place.
    With one hand on Wanda’s back, Harvey riffled through an issue of Sporting News. As he did, he noticed a photograph under the glass on top of the dresser. He pushed aside the stack of newspapers to get a better look.
    It wasn’t a photograph. It was Harvey’s baseball card. The photo on the front, from a few seasons past, showed Harvey in a Boston Red Sox uniform. He had a bat slung over his shoulder, and the face looking roguishly at the camera was more youthful, less angular. Harvey remembered how the photographer from the bubble gum company had coaxed him. “Don’t look so grim,” he had said. “You don’t want to frighten all those millions of kids, do you?” Harvey knew that on the back of the card, along with his statistics, was a simple cartoon of a man wearing a mortarboard, with the caption: “Harvey has a degree in history from the University of Massachusetts.”
    He put Wanda down and lifted the edge of the glass and slid the card out. The thought of Rudy with his baseball card sent a tremor of grief and pity through him. He slipped the card into his shirt pocket, then noticed something else under the glass—a piece of stationery folded into eighths. He worked it out and opened it. It was a sheet of personalized stationery with a Pawtucket address, and it read, in a careful turquoise hand:
Dear Rudy,
    Well, I feel like an idiot writing you, but I had to tell you how much I adore you.