Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw

by Unknown Author

“Yes, sir.”

  “But how much could he or anybody make betting a four-rounder? You can’t stake a bundle on a prelim; the commission would know about it in a heartbeat. Suspend the purses, nobody would collect anything.”

  “Maybe it ain’t just about the fight, mister.”

  “You mean, maybe it’s like a gesture of good faith.” Typhoon finally sat down in an easy chair across from me. He crossed his long legs.

  “Yes, sir. Maybe.”

  “A small favor that would prove he could do big ones.” Typhoon rubbed his hand across his face. “Thing is, once a man doing heroin, he ain’t thinking straight anymore.” This was a very bright kid. Not book-smart, I’d bet he had never made it out of the eighth grade, but he obviously had a growing sense of how things worked in the low lives of the city.

  “So you think he came to my office just to throw you off the scent, to look like he was legitimately concerned.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” Typhoon looked around the room. “Think he got your name out of the phone book.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, sir.” He bounced up again. “I better go.”

  “Want to stay here tonight?”

  He turned his steady gaze back at me.

  “In your house?”

  “Yeah. This couch folds out. If you’re that concerned about Merman.”

  “Couldn’t do that, mister; hotel I’m staying in up in Harlem plenty good enough. Nobody gonna hurt me there.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll see you at the gym tomorrow. We gotta play this straight, like Jerry’s telling the truth and nothing but.”

  “Okay.” He handed me his empty glass. “Thanks for the water, mister.”

  “Anytime,” I told him.

  Typhoon wiped his hands on his slacks and headed for the

  door.

  “Kid, you ever hear Jerry say anything about a fella named Knocky O’Brien?” I said as he prepared to exit.

  The young fighter shook his head. “No. Guy I’m fighting, his name O’Brien.”

  “Knocky’s his father.” I didn’t want to say “was.” Typhoon had enough on his mind already. “How about Nick Thomopolous? Ever hear that name?”

  Typhoon bit his lip and nodded. “Yes, sir. Own a lot of fighters. I ain’t sure, but I think Mr. Merman buying his drugs from him.”

  “That’s where he gets his heroin?”

  “I seen them talking quiet in the corner at the gym and sometimes Mr. Merman get real nervous until he see him.”

  “Strung out.”

  “Yes, sir. Don’t relax till he see him.”

  “That figures.”

  “Yes, sir. Thanks again for the water."

  Typhoon was about to leave when the doorbell rang. His eyes got very wide.

  “Go in my bedroom and stay there,” I told him.

  He turned without a word and sped into the back. When I heard the bedroom door close, I opened the front door.

  Standing in the hallway were Staten Island’s elite homicide bulls, Murphy and Clark. Murphy looked happy, Clark appeared uncomfortable and gassy.

  “We know he’s here,” Murphy said, just like he’d learned it at the movies.

  I didn’t say a word. Murphy reached into his pocket and extracted a sheet of paper. “This is a warrant for the arrest of Charles Walker, also known as Typhoon Walker.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Murphy’s eyes froze over. Clark rubbed his stomach. I figured him for a guy still getting over a late lunch.

  “Not kidding, asshole,” Clark said, stifling a belch.

  “Kidding?” Murphy said softly, but with great force. “This dinge is going to fry for killing my brother-in-law.”

  With that the two cops entered the apartment and jogged toward my bedroom.

  “Kid,” yelled Murphy, “do yourself a favor and get the fuck out of that bedroom right now.”

  When nothing happened, Clark kicked the door open and I could see Typhoon Walker standing on the fire escape outside my bedroom.

  “Kid, come back in,” I yelled, but it was like trying to shout instructions to a deer standing in a meadow during hunting season. Typhoon just stared at me and the next thing I knew Murphy had shot him twice in the chest. The kid gripped onto the edge of the fire escape for a couple of seconds and then just slumped down, bleeding right through the rusting metal slats onto the African violets that Mrs. Leitner kept on the floor below. Then Murphy aimed one more time and basically blew Typhoon Walker’s head off.

  I sat down on my bed, sick to my stomach.

  Clark looked at me. “Don’t look so blue, Jack. We just saved the state of New York a bunch of dough. Keep this bum in the Death House through all the fuckin’ appeals? Come on, we put him out of his misery.”

  I turned to Murphy.

  “Hope this makes your wife happy.”

  He put his gun away and wiped his mouth, as if he had just ingested the juiciest of steaks. “You don’t know how she suffered, you fuckin’ Jew bastard, when that nigger offed her sister. This is just a little gift for her, like a pin or something.”

  “Joe, relax,” said Clark.

  “This kid didn’t do it,” 1 told him.

  Murphy smiled, if you want to call it that.

  “The fuck he didn’t. He just tried to shoot me, didn’t he?”

  An hour later, after Typhoon Walker had been wrapped up like a Persian carpet and carried out of my apartment, I picked up my phone with still-shaking fingers and dialed Jerry Merman’s number. I wasn’t at all surprised to see that it had been disconnected. He had fingered his own kid, undoubtedly followed him out to Queens, and then dropped a dime on him. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands.

  But I didn’t have to.

  At ten o’clock my phone rang, and it was Toots Fellman, calling me from his desk at the News.

  “Thought you’d be interested to know that we just got a report that Jerry Merman was found in his apartment. Heroin overdose.”

  I just stared at the phone for a minute.

  “That’s three dead people today,” I told Toots when I had regained my powers of speech.

  “Well, that’s heroin,” Toots said simply.

  “Bet you anything they had Merman bump off Knocky, because he owed them, and then they nailed him just to shut him up.”

  “Because you can’t ever trust a junkie.”

  “Particularly this junkie. Jesus, did I screw this up.”

  “You’re a detective, Jack. Not a fucking psychic. Have a drink and go to sleep.”

  I hung up and went to take a shower. A long hot one. When I got out, I toweled myself off and turned on my television. The Graham-Castellani fight was starting, and seated at ringside were Nick Thomopolous and beside him, smiling ever so happily, was Lieutenant Murphy.

  I got up and shut off the set, then poured myself a bourbon and said kaddish for Typhoon Walker, whose ghostly presence filled the apartment.

  YOU DON’T EVEN FEEL IT

  by Lawrence Block

  She found them at the gym, Darnell in sweatpants and sneakers, his chest bare, Marty in khakis and a shirt and tie, the shirt a blue button-down, the tie loose at the throat. Marty was holding a watch and Darnell was working the speed bag, his hands fast and certain.

  She’d been ready to burst in, ready to interrupt whatever they were doing, but she’d seen them like this so many times over so many years, Darnell working the bag and Marty minding the time, that the sight of them stopped her in her tracks. It was familiar, and thus reassuring, although it should not have been reassuring.

  She found a spot against the wall, out of his line of sight, and watched him train. He finished with the speed bag and moved on to the double end bag, a less predictable device than the speed bag, its balance such that it came back at you differently each time, and you had to react to its responses. Like a live opponent, she thought, adjusting to you as you adjusted to it, bobbing and weaving, trying not to get hit.

 
But not hitting back. . .

  From the double end bag they moved to the heavy bag, and by then she was fairly certain they had sensed her presence. But they gave no sign, and she stayed where she was. She watched Darnell practice combinations, following a double jab with a left hook. That’s how he’d won the title the first time, hooking the left to Roland Weymouth’s rib cage, punishing the champion’s body until his hands came down and a string of head shots sent the man to the canvas. He was up at eight, but he had nothing left in his tank, and Darnell would have decked him again if the ref hadn’t stopped it.

  “The winner, and...new junior middleweight champion of the world...Darnell Roberts!”

  He’d moved up two weight classes since then. Junior middleweight was what, 154? And middleweight was 160, and he’d held the IBF title for two years, winning it when the previous titleholder had been forced to give it up for reasons she hadn’t understood then and couldn’t remember now. The sport was such a mess, it was all politics and backroom deals, but all of that went away when you got down to business. You sweated it out in the gym, and then you stepped into the ring, you and the other man, and you stood and hit each other, and all the conniving and manipulation disappeared. It was just two men in a pure sport, bringing nothing with them but their bodies and whatever they had on the inside.

  He was a super middleweight these days. That meant he’d have to be under 168 when he weighed in the day before the fight, and seven to ten pounds more when he actually stepped into the ring. You wanted those extra pounds, she knew, because the more you weighed the harder you punched.

  Of course your opponent had those extra pounds, too, and punched harder for them.

  Darnell had run through his combinations, and now he was standing in and slugging, hitting the bag full force with measured blows that had all his weight behind them. And Marty was standing behind the bag, holding on to it, steadying it, while Darnell meted out punishment.

  Marty saw her then. Their eyes met, and she didn’t see surprise in his, which meant she’d been right in sensing he knew she was there.

  Other hand, Marty hardly ever looked surprised.

  She drew her eyes away from Marty’s and watched Darnell as he hit the bag with measured lefts and rights. He weighed what, 185? 190? But he wouldn’t have trouble making the weight. He had two months, and he was just starting to train. All he had to do was work off twelve or fifteen pounds. Rest was water, and you sweated it out before you stepped on the scales, then drank yourself back to your fighting weight.

  She always used to love to see him hit the heavy bag. It was fun to watch him train, watch that fine body show what it could do, but this part was the best because you saw the muscles work beneath the skin, saw the blows land, heard the impact, felt the power.

  Early days, watching this, she’d get wet. Young as she was back then, it didn’t take much. And, young as she was, it embarrassed her, even if nobody knew.

  Fifteen years. They’d been married for twelve years, together for three before that. Three daughters, the oldest eleven. So she didn’t get wet pants every time she watched him work up a sweat. Still, she always liked the sight of him, digging in, setting himself, throwing those measured punches.

  She wasn’t liking it much today.

  “Time,” Marty said, but he went on holding the bag, knowing Darnell would throw another punch or two. Then, when his fighter’s hands dropped, he let go of the bag and stepped out from behind it, smiling. “Look who’s here,” he said, and Darnell turned to face her, and he didn’t look surprised either.

  “Baby,” he said. “How I look just now? Not too rusty, was I?”

  “I heard it on the news,” she said.

  “I was gonna tell you,” he said, “but you was sleepin’ when I left this morning, and I didn’t have the heart to wake you.”

  “And I guess it was news to you this morning,” she said, “even if you signed the papers yesterday afternoon.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Last I heard,” she said, “we were thinking about quitting.”

  “I been thinkin’ on it,” he said. “I not ready yet.”

  “Darnell...”

  “This gone be an easy fight for me,” he said. He had the training gloves off now, and he was holding out his hands for Marty to unwind the cotton wraps. The fingers that emerged showed the effects of all the punches he’d landed, on the heavy bag and on the heads and bodies of other fighters, even as his face showed the effects of all the punches he’d taken.

  Well, some of the effects. The visible effects.

  “This guy,” he said. “Rubén Molina? Man is made for me, baby. Man never been in against a body puncher like me. Style he got, I can find him all day with the left hook. Man has this pawing jab, I can fit a right to the ribs in under it, take his legs out from under him.”

  “Maybe you can beat him, but—”

  “Ain’t no maybe. And I won’t just beat him, I’ll knock him out. All 1 need, what you call a decisive win, an’ then I get a title shot.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I fight, probably for the WBO belt, or maybe the WBC. And I win, and that makes three belts in three different weight classes, and ain’t too many can claim that.” He beamed at her, and she saw the face she’d seen when they first met, saw the face of the boy he’d been before she ever met him. Under all the scar tissue, all the years of punishment.

  “And then I hang ’em up,” he said. “That what you want to hear?”

  “I don’t want to wait two more fights to hear it,” she said. “I worry about you, Darnell.”

  “No call for you to worry.”

  “They had this show on television. Muhammad Ali? They showed him talking before the Liston fight, and then they showed him like he is now.”

  “Man has got a condition. Like that actor used to be on Spin City”

  “That’s Parkinson’s disease,” Marty said. “That Michael J. Fox has. What Ali has is Parkinson’s syndrome.”

  “Whatever it is,” she said, “he got it because he didn’t know when to quit. Darnell, you want to wind up shuffling and mumbling?” He grinned, did a little shuffle.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Just jivin’ you some,” he said. “Keisha, I gonna be fine. All I’s gonna do is win one fight and get a title shot, then win one more and get my third belt.”

  “And take how many punches in the process?”

  “Molina can’t punch worth a damn,” he said. “Walk through his punches, all’s I gotta do.”

  “You think Ali didn’t say the same thing?”

  “It may not have been the punches he took,” Marty put in. “They can’t prove that’s what did it.”

  “And can you prove it isn’t?” She turned to her husband. “And Floyd Patterson,” she said. “You don’t think he got the way he is from taking too many punches? And that Puerto Rican boy, collapsed in his third professional bout and never regained consciousness.”

  “That there was a freak thing,” Darnell said. “Ring ropes was too loose, and he got knocked through ’em and hit his head when he fell. Like gettin’ struck by lightnin’, you know what I’m sayin’? For all it had to do with bein’ in a boxin’ ring.”

  If the boy hadn’t been in the ring, she thought, then he couldn’t have got knocked out of it.

  “You worry too much,” Darnell said, and gathered her in his arms. “Part of bein’ a woman, I guess. Part of bein’ a man’s gettin’ the job done.”

  “I just don’t want you hurt, Darnell.”

  “You just don’t want to miss the lovin’,” he said, “the whole last month of training. That’s what it is, girl, innit?”

  “Darnell—”

  “All that doin’ without,” he said, “just make it sweeter afterward. You think about that, help you get through the waitin’ time.”

  “Tell her,” Darnell said. “Tell Keisha how it went.”

  “He had a brain scan and an MRI,” Marty told he
r. “This was to make you happy, because he had a scan after his last fight and there was no medical reason for another one.”

  “He’s been slurring his words,” she said. “Don’t you call that a reason?”

  “He sounds the same as ever to me,” Marty said.

  “Maybe you don’t listen.”

  “And maybe you listen too hard.”

  “Hey,” Darnell said. “Maybe I gets a little mushmouth some of the time. Sometimes my lips be a little puffy.” He tapped his head. “Don’t mean nothin’s messed up inside.”

  “All the punches you’ve taken—”

  “Let me tell you something about the punches,” he said. “Gettin’ hit upside the head? Nine times, you don’t even feel it. It don’t hurt. Body shots, a man keeps beating on your ribs, man, that’s a different story. Hurts when he does it and hurts the next day and the day after. Head shots? Don’t mean nothin’ at all. Why you lookin’ at me like that?”

  “Nine times.”

  “Huh?”

  “‘Nine times, you don’t even feel it.’ That’s what you just

  said.”

  “So?”

  “Nine times out of ten, you meant.”

  “What I said.”

  “No, you just said nine times.”

  “Well, shit,” he said. “You tellin’ me you didn’t know what I meant?”

  “I’m telling you what you said. You left out some words there.” “Man, there’s a sign,” he said heavily. “I must have brain damage, leavin’ out ‘out of ten’ like that.”

  “It’s cumulative, Darnell.”

  “What you talkin’ now?”

  “Punches to the head, the effect is cumulative. Even if you barely feel them—”

  “Which I just said I don’t.”

  “—they add up, and you reach a point where every punch you take does real damage. It’s irreversible, you can’t turn it back, and once you see signs—”

  “Which there ain’t yet.”

  “If you’re slurring words,” she said, “then we’re seeing signs.” “What happens,” he said, grinning, “my tongue gets in the way of my teeth an’ I can’t see what I’m sayin’. Why you lookin’ at me like that?”