On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery

by Tom Schreck

  One o’clock was Martha Stewart—not the one you’re thinking of. This Martha Stewart was a stack of flapjacks over three hundred pounds and had a history of (surprise!) compulsive behavior. The compulsive behavior included not only eating, but also obsessive sexual activity. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who had more sex with more people than Martha. Her issue, she told me, is that she just never felt fulfilled. She kept a running classified in the adult section of MetroCrawford, the local alternative magazine, letting the folks who were so inclined know that she was a BBW searching for fulfillment. Apparently, there was no shortage of men willing to lend a big, beautiful woman a hand when it came to her pursuit of fulfillment.

  At two p.m., I had a session with Clogger McGraw. Clogger got his nickname from an unfortunate bathroom incident at a crowded party. Suffice it to say, Clogger conspicuously interrupted the natural flow of things at this gigantic house bash and was forever stuck with this incredibly visual moniker. Clog at one time was a talented navy pilot who spent his days landing F-something-or-others on aircraft carriers. Unfortunately, this activity was the most fun for the Clogman when he was stoned out of his mind. Amazingly, Clogger made it out of the service with an honorable discharge. The real trouble began when he flew his single engine plane upside down under a Thruway overpass.

  Never a detail man, Clogger did it a quarter of a mile from a state police barracks. After the stunt, he noticed he was dangerously low on fuel and landed the plane in the right-hand lane of I-87, just south of the New Paltz exit. Clogs still had a joint going when a trooper pulled his plane over, and they got off on the wrong foot when Clogger refused to turn down the Dead on his custom plane stereo. When the trooper tried to give him a Breathalyzer, Clogger took an exaggerated inhalation on it and thanked the officer for the bong hit. He was laughing so hard when the trooper handcuffed him that he strained an abdominal muscle.

  Clogger was a trip, but he rarely showed up for sessions. He recently got his wings back on a provisional basis and he was making his money flying a plane that pulled a message behind it. Most recently he was advertising a car dealership by flying the plane past Yankee Stadium during their big weekend home stands. The Clogmeister had even developed his own following. After a few games of making the pass in his little single engine, he got bored, and boredom often led to trouble for Clog. In this case, it seemed to be harmless or at least mostly harmless.

  Instead of just flying by with the sign, Clogger started to do a series of acrobatic rolls through the sky. He planned it so it would occur at the end of the bottom of the fifth inning. It got to be a favorite with the crowd and Steinbrenner, ever the businessman, even got an exemption for Clogger to fly closer to the stadium. Pretty soon after that, the Yankee radio announcers also got into the act. Now, at the end of the fifth, they went to a commercial late so John Sterling, the announcer famous for saying, “Yankees win, thhhhhhhhhhhe Yankees win!” at the end of games could announce Clogger. He would announce Clog’s arrival and then after Clog did his roll, Sterling would say, “Clogger cannnnnnns it!” It got so popular that Steinbrenner had Sterling do it over the PA, in addition to the live radio broadcast. It was pure Clogger. Being a big Yankees fan myself, I had always wanted to see the Stadium from Clogger’s view and the Clogster agreed to let me be his copilot someday. I made him promise to stay off the Thruway on the way home.

  After Clogger came Larry Kingston, who was chronically depressed and incredibly boring to talk to. During Larry’s sessions I usually pretended to jot notes down on what he said and instead wrote out what I needed at the grocery store.

  The very last session of the day was with Emmanuel “Froggy” Bramble. Froggy was another gay guy who hung out in the park and lived pretty much the same life as Mikey. Froggy didn’t have any desire to go the transgendered route, but he was flamboyantly feminine. He accentuated a lisp as if playing to the stereotype and he often said he had no desire to change his lifestyle.

  His numerous arrests for park activity and low-level drug possessions forced him into treatment. Like Mikey, he was fun to talk to but he did very little therapeutic “work” in our sessions—whatever that is. Froggy was originally from Jamaica and he had very dark skin and wore his hair in neat cornrows. At six-two and a well-muscled 215 pounds, he didn’t really fit the body type of your basic, central-casting flamer.

  He was about ten minutes late, which is actually early by our clinic’s standards. Froggy was wearing knee-length black spandex pants and a white mesh shirt. He kept his wraparound mirrored sunglasses on.

  “Hello Mr. Duffy,” Froggy said.

  “Hey Froggy,” I said. “Tell me what’s been going on.”

  “Oh, you know, just doing my thing.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. You’re talking about your nocturnal park rendezvous?”

  “You say it so nice,” Froggy said, exaggerating his lisp.

  “C’mon, Frog, you know it’s not safe.”

  “That doesn’t seem to bother the steady stream of upstanding businessmen who come visit us,” he said. “’Course when I get through with them, they’re all upstanding.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “This week we had a Crawford city council member, a prominent tax attorney, and my new favorite—that TV doctor,” Froggy rolled his eyes like someone who just finished a superb flaming baked Alaska for dessert. “That man gives as good as he gets—just like he says, ‘body and spirit,’” Froggy said.

  “Look, Frog, let’s talk about drugs …”

  “He’s so cute in his white coat and to think, a TV celebrity, doing me the favors.”

  “Frog—the drugs?” I said.

  And so it went. Froggy wanted to get off bragging about his sex life and I wanted to talk about anything else. Part of it was because it was a little gross, but mostly because it didn’t help Froggy focus on doing anything to better himself. It was an uphill battle, but toward the end of the hour Froggy halfheartedly agreed to at least look at his addictive tendency.

  Such is a day in the business of saving lives. It was a full day and I had had enough. I needed to do something physical and get my heart racing, so I headed to the gym to hopefully get some sparring in. My own rule is to get a sparring session in at least every two weeks if I have no fight scheduled. If I’m training for a specific bout, then I spar three times a week. As a professional opponent, it behooves me to stay in shape in case a decent payday, short-notice fight comes up. There was the possibility of that fight in Kentucky, but I didn’t think I wanted to take it. After that, you just never know when the phone is going to ring.

  Smitty was watching a couple of teenage featherweights in the ring. The cool thing about Smitty was he gave everyone the same attention regardless of ability or potential. The determining factor about whether Smitty took time to coach you was whether you sparred with heart. If you avoided fighting, if you got in the ring and pussied it, or if you made a ton of excuses about sparring, then Smitty had little use for you. He wouldn’t be mean; he just wouldn’t take you seriously.

  Fighting was a spiritual thing to him. He believed it was an important thing in life to face what you’re scared of and keep on keeping on despite your fears. We met when I was a teenager and I was doing karate. The Y has a karate class and some of the guys from the class come in during the boxing sessions to work out or to add boxing to their skills. I thought I was a badass as a kid because I had a black belt until I decided to box with another kid who had a few amateur fights. The kid punched me in the stomach and I threw up. The next day I asked Smitty if he would train me and I never went back to karate. Real fighting, I’ve learned, involves being hit and dealing with it and in karate classes there just isn’t enough real hitting.

  If you looked at Smitty, you’d think he was the quintessential, old-time, gym-rat boxing trainer. He was in his sixties, black, and still all wiry muscle with a close-cropped head of gray hair. He favored Dickies, flannel shirts, and work boots as his fashion sta
tement. Smitty devoted his life to boxing, which made his central casting role authentic, but it was far from all he was. Smitty got out of Korea and with the GI Bill went to Dartmouth where he got a degree in American literature. He reads voraciously and continues to teach literacy courses in the state prison sixty miles away three times a week for nothing. Smitty is independently wealthy, though you’d never guess it from looking at him. He never said how he happened to make his fortune and he never flaunted it, living in one of the city’s old brownstones and driving an Olds Ninety-Eight from the late eighties.

  I loosened up and Smitty came over to work me through the mitts. In mitt work, the trainer calls out punch combinations and you have to respond with the right punches. It drills proper technique and reaction time. The way Smitty did it, it worked your defense too, because if he saw you drop your guard, he’d crack you in the face with a mitt.

  “Turn the hip over on your hook,” Smitty said. “That’s where your power comes from.”

  I threw four or five more hooks in a row, none of which pleased Smitty.

  “Do you want to hit like a bitch your whole life?” he growled. “Throw the hip into the hook!” he said.

  This has been going on since I was a teenager. I didn’t have much power in my punches and I knew it. Power in boxing comes less from muscle strength and more from the subtle shifting of body weight. Some fighters naturally have the knack of shifting their body weight just right so they maximize their power. If you don’t have it, you can have success by being crafty in the ring and by hitting the other guy more than he hits you. Without the shifting of body weight, it’s tough to get one-punch knockout power.

  “Smitty—I’m trying,” I said. “I’ve been fuckin’ trying since I was fourteen.”

  “Let it happen, Duff. Let your hip out, then snap it in at the right moment. It’s just like givin’ it to a chick,” Smitty said.

  He’s used that analogy every day I’ve been in the gym since I was fourteen. Maybe if Lisa let me throw it to her once in a while it would mean something to me. Smitty finally changed up from the hooks and had me working some other combinations and moving. Moving and being crafty was my game, and it’s what keeps me in boxing. I get knocked out, but I rarely take beatings, because I know how to move. That’s why I can beat the local guys and the nobodies and can’t beat guys with one-punch power.

  “You’re good for today, Duff,” Smitty said. “I ain’t got nobody for you to spar.”

  “I was hoping to get some work in the ring. Ain’t nobody around?” I said.

  “Nobody for you, Duff. If you really want to, do some bag work,” Smitty said. “You got to let me know about the deal in Kentucky.”

  “I don’t want to go down there unless they come up with more money.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Smitty said. He was no Don King, but he knew how to work small-time promoters and squeeze the most money out of them.

  I did a few rounds on the bag, once again pursuing the elusive right hook. As a lefty, I hooked off my right hand, and no matter how I broke it down, I couldn’t get the snap Smitty was looking for. I guess I was destined to hit like a bitch.

  I finished up and was undoing the wraps on my hands and absentmindedly watching a couple of teenagers in the ring when I saw Kelley come in the front door. He occasionally dropped by the gym to hit the bags. He didn’t have any gear with him and he was still in uniform.

  “Hey Kel,” I said. “Dropping by to watch the next heavyweight champ do some work? Hate to bum you out, but I’m finished for the day.”

  “Duff, I got some bad news.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Walanda was murdered this afternoon.”

  6

  I showered and headed home, staring at the lines in the road, the sky, the street signs—anything that kept me from thinking. I felt guilty; I felt negligent and incredibly sad because I liked Walanda. She asked me for help and she asked me to protect her and now she was dead. I dismissed her fear and shrugged it off as the rantings of a crazy crackhead, which was the exact type of disrespect that Walanda hated so much. I felt like shit.

  Walanda was a fuck-up, there’s no doubt about that, but she tried. It wasn’t long ago that she told me about her plans to go get training to become a certified nurse’s aid. That may not sound like a whole lot, but in Walanda’s world of multigenerational welfare and crime, it was huge. Sure, she was an addict, she was a prostitute, but she also cared about her kids, including this stepkid I never even heard of. For all her faults, Walanda never quit trying and though it wasn’t obvious to many people, I knew she was doing what she could to be better. When you come down to it, that’s about all you could ever ask of anyone.

  I got to the Moody Blue and prepped myself for Al’s assault. Sure enough, as soon as I put the key in the lock I heard his paws hit the floor, move across the carpet, scratch across the tile, and then bounce off the inside of the door. I opened the door and he sprung up, again hitting me in the nuts, but at least this time I was prepared. Besides, Al, low-riding pain in the ass that he was, deserved a little slack today. I don’t know shit about animal psychology and my Muslim brother didn’t seem to be all that emotionally complex, but the guy did just lose his mom.

  I cracked open a Schlitz and sat down on the good side of the sofa. Apparently, Al had a busy and productive day, because the remainder of the foam rubber that he started on yesterday was chewed up and spit out on the floor in front of the couch. I didn’t have the energy to get furious right now. I slumped into the couch, threw on the TV, and took another pull off the Schlitz. The local news was on, but they wouldn’t be reporting on a jail incident because the jail was pretty good at keeping stuff like that out of the media and even if it did get out, the press had a tendency not to care when people like Walanda got killed. Just another dead crack ho.

  The thought of not taking Walanda’s phone call ate at me. When the fourth Schlitz gave way to the fifth, sixth, seventh, and, I think, eighth, it didn’t get any better. I was drunk, but the beer didn’t touch the feeling in my gut. I knew it wouldn’t, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  Kelley told me it looked like it was just a battle over jailhouse dominance. Someone, or a couple of someones, caved in the side of her head with a mop wringer. She was found outside the chapel by one of the corrections officers and, to no one’s surprise, no inmate saw anything or knew anything. Kelley said that one of the COs told him that it might’ve been over cigarettes—either Walanda stole somebody’s or somebody stole hers. It’s the sort of thing that happens inside jails and prisons and I believe it happens so much because wherever people are, they have to struggle over power. More cigarettes means more power, just like more money means more power, or more stock shares means more power.

  Just the same, the fact that she had called me, scared for her life, didn’t sit right with me. Still, it wouldn’t be much of a reach to figure the two events were mutually exclusive. After all, it’s not uncommon to feel in danger in jail, especially when you’re schizophrenic and addicted to crack. It’s also not terribly unusual to be assaulted in jail. The two could’ve just happened. All her yelling and carrying on about “Webster” made no sense.

  There wouldn’t be much of an investigation. Walanda had no family around, she was a crack ho who didn’t vote, and she was a criminal. The DA wouldn’t exactly be overwhelmed with pressure to solve this one. That wasn’t right and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Right now, I was getting bombed, so there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about anything. Going to bed made the most sense to me.

  The next morning came a whole lot sooner than I expected. Having gotten Schlitzed the night before, I didn’t anticipate rising and shining. I also didn’t anticipate my Muslim brother, Allah-King, barking incessantly at the foot of my bed at 5:04 a.m. For reasons probably only revealed to Muhammad, the short-legged pain in the ass wouldn’t shut up. I yelled at him, I threw pillows at him, I tried to throw the contents of the half-empty Sch
litz on the nightstand at him—none of it mattered. He was a barking machine.

  I sat up in bed and got one of those waves of wishy-washiness that comes with an overindulgence in that product that made Milwaukee famous. Trying to think of anything to stop the racket, I stepped out of bed to get the long-eared beast some food so he’d shut up. I was slightly dizzy when I got out of bed and when I stepped toward Al, my bare foot splatted into something slippery, sending my vastly hungover body to the hard tile. I had a good idea of what it was without looking, but, like a bad car wreck, I couldn’t not look. Sure as shit, it was between my toes and because of the fall, all over my foot.

  All through this, Al never stopped with the racket, though I swear to God, I thought I heard him laughing through the barking. I hopped to the bathroom to stick my shit-foot under the showerhead, and for some reason the sight of me hopping threatened Al. He growled and jumped at me, again striking me in the nuts and sending me sprawling, shit-foot and all, into the bathroom wall. I now had a streak of dog shit throughout my house, poo between the toes, and a bump on my hungover head from the second of two falls in the last forty-five seconds. This is not what I consider nursing a hangover.

  I cleaned my foot, mopped the floor, fed the beast, and took a shower. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the office, but I had to. The Michelin Woman was gunning for me and any unexplained absences would surely do me in. Walanda’s death would be a big administrative deal not because ol’ yellow teeth cared about Walanda’s loss of life, but because she would have to oversee the filling out of forms that would have to be filed with the state. On top of that, an incident such as this would undoubtedly mean an emergency meeting of the board.

  The board was comprised of the biggest group of phonies and opportunists I’d ever met. They got on the board because it was politically correct for them. For some, it meant a tax deduction, for others, help with the Jewish vote, and for others, business connections with other board members. They’d come in their suits and ties and say a bunch of crap like they gave a shit about the people we served and then leave in their BMWs and go about their business.