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

by Unknown Author

  And then, a few minutes later, Rick had shambled by, grinning. “Great column,” he had said. “Really well done.”

  He took another sip from his glass. That bout of praise had felt good. So why hadn’t it lasted?

  Jerry looked around the apartment, at the locked doors and windows. That’s why. Having written the column and gotten the praise from the editor should have set everything right, but no, things had gotten worse. And he knew exactly why. Every time he closed his eyes, every time he walked out on the streets, every time he looked in a damn mirror, he remembered the helplessness of being on the ground, of being punched and kicked and slapped. He had thought that after a few days, he would have gotten over it, but it hadn’t happened. If anything, it had gotten worse. Seeing a beat-up car drive by the office or his apartment building made him stop with fear, wondering who was in there. Loud voices, small groups of men, a ringing phone would start him shaking. He would wake up at 2 a.m., staring at the ceiling, wondering if perhaps those guys who had beaten him up, maybe they had noted his license plate. Maybe they knew his name. Maybe they knew where he lived.

  So he would lie there, waiting for the door to be broken in. Or to hear the phone ring.

  And the cops? Please. It had been days. He didn’t know their names, wasn’t even too sure what they looked like.

  All he knew is that they had pummeled him like they owned him, that in addition to hurting his jaw and scraping his hands, they had also shattered his little cocoon, his safe haven. He no longer felt safe either here or at work or even in his car.

  And all the good words from his editor weren’t going to change that.

  He finished off the wine, felt an urge to get another glass. Jesus, that wasn’t good, not at all, and to keep his mind off having another drink, he picked up a copy of that day’s Sentinel—a free copy, one of the few perks in the job—and idly leafed through the pages, even going into the sports section, where a little headline caught his eye.

  LOCAL BOXER IN SURPRISE WIN

  He sat up, scattering the other pages of the newspaper in the process.

  LOCAL BOXER IN SURPRISE WIN

  Jerry got up and grabbed his coat, and left the place that was still his home, but no longer a safe place.

  Back into the gym, back to the noise and the smells and the shouts, but this time he recognized what was going on, how the punches were being thrown, the way the boxers were circling around, trying to gain an advantage. Tom Hart gave him a crisp nod as he walked by, and there was Sonny, working out by himself, striking a hanging bag by himself. Jerry walked right up to him and grabbed a shoulder, and Sonny spun back, holding up his gloves in a fighting stance, until he grinned and spat out his mouthpiece into a glove.

  “Hey, how’s it going,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to call and thank you for that column. I guess I’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah,” Jerry said, “I guess you have.” He held the sports page under Sonny’s nose. “Care to explain this?”

  A shrug. “I won. There you go.”

  “Right, there you go. A fight you were supposed to lose. A fight you weren’t suppose to win. Hell, even you said that guy had fists of concrete.”

  “He surely did,” Sonny said, smiling, and Jerry noticed a swollen bruise above the boxer’s right eye. “But I also found out he had a glass jaw.”

  “And when did you find that out? Before you went into the ring, or before you scammed me?”

  Sonny’s face darkened and he said, “Watch your mouth.”

  “Those guys who beat me up. That part of the deal or just a coincidence?”

  Sonny said, “I don’t know those guys, not at all. I...I was coming out of the gym, to grab you before you left. To tell you that I changed my mind. That’s when I saw them beating you up.”

  “Maybe so,” Jerry said. “But everything else was a scam.

  Right?”

  Sonny was silent.

  Jerry went on. “What do you think I am, an idiot? I know what you did. I know what happened. This was your real strategy, your real winning combination. You and the gym guy and whatever, you got together to pump up this little bout. You needed some publicity, about the up-and-coming kid who couldn’t make it happen but still had a heart. Get interest in the fight, get a lot of betting action going on. Everybody wanting to get in on the action, thinking they had a sure thing. But you went in and spoiled the story, right? Turns out you did the whacking around, not the other guy. So. How much did you get?”

  Sonny spoke slowly. “Like I said. I got a small trophy. Nothin’ else.”

  “You’re saying a lot of money didn’t pass hands last night?”

  Sonny leaned in, gently pushed at Jerry’s chest with his gloved hand. Jerry moved back. “I’m sure some money passed around. That’s what happens. But I didn’t see any of it. And if you’re so smart, tell me who sent you here? Okay? I sure as hell didn’t call you, did I?”

  Then it all made sense. His old-timer editor, Rick, who knew this gym and the manager. In his office, complaining about paying tuition for his daughters. Worried about cutbacks. Scratching out lottery tickets in his office, looking for that winning ticket...

  Jerry tried not to let it show on his face, what he had just figured out, but he also felt a little flush of victory. When he got back to the newspaper office and had a chat with Rick, it was back to the old ways, writing the columns he wanted to do. But here, right now, he pressed on. “No, you didn’t call me. But you know what? I just had an idea for another column. An investigative piece. About scamming in boxing, and what you told me and what really happened. All those years of work and training, what’s that going to matter if I put a story out, tainting your first real victory? How does that sound?”

  Sonny started breathing hard, stepped in even closer. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Or what? Are you going to punch me out, right here? Go right ahead. I’ll call the cops and that will make it real special, add to the column about you. Hot-blooded boxer beats up defenseless newspaper writer. Sonny, that’s what I’m planning, and that’s my strategy. What do you think about that?”

  The young boxer remained silent, staring at him, gloved fists at his side, sweat trickling down the side of his face. Jerry added, “Unless...”

  Sonny said, “Unless what?”

  “Unless we can work out a deal.”

  Sonny rubbed a glove against his face. “What kind of deal?” Jerry took a breath, remembering that burning humiliation, of being on his hands and knees and having his safe world taken away. “Here’s the deal. 1 don’t do the column. Not a word. In exchange for something from you.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked suspiciously.

  “That you teach me.”

  Sonny shook his head. “Teach you what?”

  “Teach me how to fight,” Jerry said, not really believing what he was saying, but knew it made sense, made the only sense, if he ever wanted to sleep and rest and work in peace.

  “You’re kidding,” Sonny said.

  “Not for a moment,” he said.

  “It’s going to take a lot of work, a lot of practice, a lot of exercise,” Sonny said cautiously. “Your legs and arms will burn, you’ll feel like puking up half the time, and you’ll get battered around in these rings like a Ping-Pong ball. That’s what it’s gonna take. You think it’s worth it?”

  He looked at the confidence in the man’s eyes, and looked around at the other boxers, the ones he had dismissed a few days ago as being ill-bred hulks who could only punch. Maybe so, but look at them, look at all of them. Not a single one of them was afraid.

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “I think it will be worth every second.”

  THE FIX

  by Thomas H. Cook

  It could have happened anytime, on any of my daily commutes on the Crosstown 42. Every day I took it at eight in the morning, rode it over to my office on Forty-second and Lex, then back again in the evening, when I’d get off at Port Authority and walk one
block uptown to my place on Forty-third.

  It could have happened anytime, but it was a cold January evening, a deep winter darkness already shrouding the city at six p.m. Worse still, a heavy snow was coming down, blanketing the streets and snarling crosstown traffic, particularly on Forty-second Street, where the Jersey commuters raced for a spot in the Lincoln Tunnel, clotting the grid’s blue veins as they rushed for the river like rabbits from burning woods.

  I should tell you my name, because when I finish with the story, you’ll want to know it, want to check it out, see if I’m really who I say I am, really heard what I did that night on the Crosstown 42.

  Well, it’s Jack. Jack Burke. I work as a photographer for Cosmic Advertising, my camera usually focused on a bottle of perfume or a plate of spaghetti. But in the old days, I was a street photographer for the News, mostly shooting fires and water main breaks, the sort of picture that ends up on page 8. I had a front page in ’74, though, a woman clinging with one hand to a fire escape in Harlem, her baby dangling from the other hand like a sack of potatoes. I snapped the button just as she let go, caught them both in the first instant of their fall. That picture had had a heart, and sometimes, as 1 sat at my desk trying to decide which picture would best tempt a kid to buy a soda, I yearned to feel that heart again, to do or hear or see something that would work like electric paddles to shock me back to my old life.

  Back in those days, working the streets, I’d known the Apple down to the core, the juke joints and after-hours dives. I was the guy you’d see at the end of the bar, the one in a rumpled suit, with a gray hat on the stool beside him. It was my seed time, and I’d loved every minute of it. For almost five years not a night had gone by when I hadn’t fallen in love with it all over again, the night and the city, the Bleeker Street jazz clubs at three a.m. when the smoke is thick and the riffs look easy, and the tab grows like a rose beside your glass.

  Then Jack Burke married an NYU coed named Rikki whose thick lips and perfect ass had worked like a Mickey Finn on his brain. There were lots of flowers and a twelve-piece band. After that the blushing bride seemed to have another kid about every four days. Jack took an agency job to pay for private schools, and that was the end of rosy tabs. Then Jack’s wife hitched a ride on some other guy’s star and left him with a bill that gave Bloomingdale’s a boner. The place on Eighty-fifth went back to the helpful folks at Emigrant Savings, and Jack found a crib on West Forty-third. Thus the short version of how I ended up riding the Crosstown 42 on that snowy January night in the Year of Our Lord, 2000.

  The deepest blues, they say, are the ones you don’t feel, the ones that numb you, so that your old best self simply fades away, and you are left staring out the window, trying to remember the last time you leaped with joy, laughed until you cried, stood in the rain and just let it pour down. Maybe I’d reached that point when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night. And yet, I wasn’t so dead that the sight of him didn’t spark something, didn’t remind me of the old days, and of how much I missed them.

  And the part I missed the most was the fights.

  I’ll tell you why. Because all the old saws about boxing are true. There’s no room for ambiguity in the ring. You know who the winners and the losers are. There, in that little square, under the big light, two guys put it all on the line, face each other without lawyers or tax attorneys. They stare at each other without speaking. They are stripped even of words. Boxers don’t call each other names. They don’t wave their arms and posture. They don’t yell, Hey, fuck you, you fucking bastard, you want a piece of me, huh, well, come and get it, you fucking douche bag....while they’re walking backward, glancing around, praying for a cop. Boxers don’t file suit or turn you in to the IRS. They don’t subscribe to dirty magazines in your name and have them mailed to your house. They don’t plant rumors about drugs or how maybe you’re a queer. Boxers don’t come at you from behind some piece of paper a guy you never saw before hands you as you step out your front door. Boxers don’t drop letters in the suggestion box or complain to your boss that you don’t have what it takes anymore. Boxers don’t approach at a slant. Boxers stride to the center of the ring, raise their hands and fight. That was what I’d always loved about them, that they were nothing like the rest of us.

  Even so, I hadn’t seen a match in the Garden or anywhere else for more than twenty years when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night, and the whole feel of the ring, the noise and the smoke, had by then drifted into a place within me I didn’t visit anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a boxing story in the paper, or so much as glanced at Ring magazine. As a matter of fact, that very night I’d plucked a Newsweek from the rack instead, then tramped onto the bus, planning to pick up a little moo shoo pork when I got off, then trudge home to read about this East Hampton obstetrician who’d given some Jamaican bed-pan jockey five large to shoot his wife.

  Then, out of the blue, I saw him.

  He was crouched in the back corner of the bus, his face turned toward the glass, peering out at the street, though he didn’t seem to be watching anything in particular. His eyes had that look you’ve all seen. Nothing going in, precious little coming out. A dead, dull stare.

  His clothes were so shabby that if I hadn’t noticed the profile, the gnarled ear and flattened nose, 1 might have mistaken him for a pile of dirty laundry. Everything was torn, ragged, the scarf around his neck riddled with holes, bare fingers nosing through dark blue gloves. It was the kind of shabbiness that carries its own odor, and which urban pioneers inevitably associate with madness and loose bowels. Which, on this bus packed to the gills, explained the empty seat beside him.

  I might have kept my distance, might have stared at him a while, remembering my old days by remembering his, then discreetly stepped off the bus at my appointed stop, put the whole business out of my mind until I returned to work the next morning, met Max Groom in the men’s room and said, Hey, Max, guess who was on the Crosstown 42 last night? Who? Vinnie Teague, that’s who, Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock. Mother of God, he’s still alive? Well, in a manner of speaking.

  And that might have been the end of it.

  But it wasn’t.

  You know why? Because, in a manner of speaking, I was also still alive. And what do the living owe each other, tell me this, if not to hear each other’s stories?

  So 1 muscled through the crowd, elbowing my way toward the rear of the bus while Irish Vinnie continued to stare out into the fruitless night, his face even more motionless when looked upon close up, his eyes still as billiard balls in an empty parlor.

  The good news? No smell. Which left the question. Is he nuts?

  Language is a sure test for sanity, and so I said, “Hey there." Nothing.

  “Hey.” This time with a small tap of my finger on his ragged shoulder.

  Still nothing, and so I upped the ante. “Vinnie?”

  A small light came on in the dull, dead eyes.

  “Vinnie Teague?”

  Something flickered, but distantly, cheerlessly, like a candle in an orphanage window.

  “It’s you, right? Vinnie Teague?”

  The pile of laundry rustled, and the dull, dead eyes drifted over to me.

  Silence, but a faint nod.

  “I’m Jack Burke. You wouldn’t know me, but years ago, I saw you at the Garden.”

  The truth was I’d seen Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, quite a few times at the Garden. I’d seen him first as a light heavyweight, then later, after he’d bulked up just enough to tip the scales as a heavyweight contender.

  He’d had the pug face common to boxers who’d come up through the old neighborhood, first learned that they could fight not in gyms or after-school programs, but in bar-rooms and on factory floors, the blood of their first opponents soaked up by sawdust or metal shavings in places where no one got saved by the bell.

  It was Spiro Melinas who’d first spotted Vinnie. Spiro had been an old man even then, bent in frame and squi
rrelly upstairs, a guy who dipped the tip of his cigar in tomato juice, which, he said, made smoking more healthy. Spiro had been a low-watt fight manager who booked tumbledown arenas along the Jersey Shore, or among the rusting industrial towns of Connecticut and Massachusetts. He’d lurked among the fishing boats that rocked in the oily marinas of Fall River and New Bedford, and had even been spotted as far north as coastal Maine checking out the fish gutters who manned the canneries there, looking for speed and muscle among the flashing knives.

  But Spiro hadn’t found Vinnie Teague in any of the places that he’d looked for potential boxers during the preceding five years. Not in Maine or Connecticut or New Jersey. Not in a barroom or a shoe factory or a freezing cold New England fishery. No, Vinnie had been right under Spiro’s nose the whole time, a shadowy denizen of darkest Brooklyn who, at the moment of discovery, had just tossed a guy out the swinging doors of a women’s shelter on Flatbush. The guy had gotten up, rushed Vinnie, then found himself staggering backward under a blinding hail of lefts and rights, his head popping back with each one, face turning to pulp one lightning fast blow at a time, though it had been clear to Spiro that during all that terrible rain of blows, Vinnie Teague had been holding back. “Jesus Christ, if Vinnie hadn’t been pulling his punches,” he later told Salmon Weiss, “he’d have killed the poor bastard with two rights and a left.” A shake of the head, Spiro’s eyes fixed in dark wonderment. “I’m telling you, Salmon, just slapping him around, you might say Vinnie was, and the other guy looked like he’d done twelve rounds with a metal fan.”