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

by Unknown Author

  The tailoring bills came out of Midge’s salary, a fact for which he was more grateful than if the suits had been a gift. He was no one’s charity case. The distinction was important, because he knew former fighters who stood in welfare lines and on street corners, holding signs saying they would work for food. Back when they were at the top of the bill, they had made the rounds of all the clubs with yards of gold chain around their necks, girls on both arms, and now here they were, saying they would clean out your gutters for a tuna sandwich, expecting pedestrians to feel guilty enough to buy them the sandwich and skip the gutters. Mr. Wassermann never gave anyone anything for nothing—it was a saying on the street, and Midge had heard him confirm it in person—and the big ex-fighter was proud to be able to say in return that he never took anything from anyone for nothing.

  He liked the way he looked in the suits. They complemented his height without calling attention to his bulk, did not make him look poured into his clothes the way so many of his overdeveloped colleagues appeared when they dressed for the street, and if it weren’t for his jagged nose and the balloons of scar tissue around his eyes, he thought he might have passed for a retired NFL running back with plenty in Wall Street. Of course, that’s when he wasn’t walking with Mr. Wassermann, when no one would mistake him for anything but personal security.

  Today, however, without giving the thing much thought, he’d decided to wear the electric-blue double-breasted he’d worn to Mr. Wassermann’s office the day they’d met. He’d had on the same shade of trunks when he KO’d Lincoln Flagg at Temple Gate Arena and again when he took the decision from Sailor Burelli at Waterworks Park. He’d liked plenty of flash in those days, in and out of the ring: gold crowns, red velvet robes with Italian silk linings, crocodile luggage, yellow convertibles. Make ’em notice you, he’d thought, and you just naturally have to do your best.

  But then his run had finished. He lost two key fights, his business manager decamped to Ecuador with his portfolio, the IRS attached his beach house. The last of the convertibles went back to the finance company. In a final burst of humiliation, an Internet millionaire with dimples on his forehead bought Midge’s robes at auction for his weekend guests to wear around the swimming pool. When Midge had asked Mr. Wassermann for the bodyguard job, he’d been living for some time in a furnished room on Magellan Street and the electric-blue was the only suit he owned.

  It had brought him luck, just as the trunks had. He’d gotten the job, and right away his fortunes turned around. Because Mr. Wassermann preferred to keep his protection close, even when it was off duty, he had moved Midge into a comfortable three-room suite in the East Wing, paid for his security training and opened an expense account for him at Rinehart’s, where well-dressed salesmen advised him on which accessories to wear with his new suits and supplied him with turtle-backed hairbrushes and aftershave. On the rare occasions when his reclusive employer visited a restaurant (too many of his colleagues had been photographed in such places with their faces in their plates and bullet holes in their heads), he always asked the chef to prepare a takeout meal for Midge to eat when they returned home. These little courtesies were offered as if they were part of the terms of employment.

  Because there were other bodyguards, Midge had Saturdays off, and with money in the pocket of a finely tailored suit, he rarely spent them alone. The women who were drawn to the aura of sinister power that surrounded Mr. Wassermann belonged to a class Midge could not have approached when he was a mere pug. While waiting for his employer, he would see a picture of a stunning model in Celebrity and remember how she looked naked in his bed at the Embassy.

  There had been a long dry spell in that department after his last fight. True, his face had been stitched and swollen and hard to look at, but that wasn’t an impediment after the Burelli decision, when eighteen inches of four-oh thread and a patch of gauze were the only things holding his right ear to his head; he’d made the cover of Turnbuckle that week and signed a contract to endorse a national brand of athlete’s-foot powder. He’d considered hiring his own bodyguard to fight off the bottle-blond waitresses. But that was when he was winning. The two big losses and particularly the stench that had clung to the twelve rounds he’d dropped to Sonny Rodriguez at the Palace Garden might as well have been a well-advertised case of the clap.

  The fans had catcalled and crumpled their programs and beer cups and hurled them at the contestants. The Palace management had been forced to call the police to escort them to their dressing rooms. Three weeks later, the state boxing commission had reviewed the videotape and yanked Midge’s license.

  The irony was, he hadn’t gone into the tank. He’d taken the money when it was offered, and since he considered himself an ethical person he’d fully intended to fake a couple of falls and force a decision against him, but he hadn’t gone three rounds before he realized he was no match for the untried youngster from Nicaragua. He was out of shape and slow, and Rodriguez was graceless for all the fact that any one of his blows would have knocked down a young tree. Even the fellow who had approached Midge and ought to have known a fix from a legitimate loss called him afterward to tell him he was a rotten actor; he feared a congressional investigation.

  Midge had considered returning the money, but integrity had proven to be a more complicated thing altogether than he’d suspected. He was both a fighter who had sold out and a fighter who had never thrown a fight. Just trying to think where that placed him in the scheme of things gave him a headache. It hurt worse than the one he’d suffered for two weeks after he went down to Ricky Shapiro.

  On this particular Saturday off, he’d broken a date with a soap opera vixen to meet a man with whom Mr. Wassermann sometimes did business. Angelo DeRiga—“Little Angie,” Midge had heard him called, although he was not especially small, and was in fact an inch or two taller than Mr. Wassermann—dyed his hair black, even his eyebrows, and wore suits that were as well made as Midge’s new ones, from material of the same good quality, but were cut too young for him. The flaring labels and cinched waists only called attention to the fact that he was nearing sixty, just as the black hair brought out the deep lines in the artificial tan of his face. The effect was pinched and painful and increased the bodyguard’s appreciation for his employer’s dignified herringbones and barbered white fringe.

  Little Angie shook Midge’s hand at the door to his suite at the King William, complimented him upon his suit—“Flash, the genuine article,” he said—and invited him to sample the gourmet spread the hotel’s waiters were busy transferring from a wheeled cart to the glass-topped mahogany table in the sitting room.

  Midge, who knew as well as Little Angie that the electric-blue sack was inappropriate, did not thank him, and politely refused the offer of food. He wasn’t hungry, and anyway, chewing interfered with his concentration. Too many blows to the head had damaged his hearing. High- and low-pitched voices were the worst, and certain labials missed him entirely. By focusing his attention on the speaker, and with the help of some amateur lip reading, he’d managed to disguise this rather serious disability for a watchdog to have from even so observant a man as Mr. Wassermann; but then Mr. Wassermann spoke slowly, and always around the middle range. Little Angie was shrill and carried on every conversation as if he were on a fast elevator and had to finish before the car reached his floor.

  When the waiters left, the two were alone with Francis, Little Angie’s bodyguard. He was a former professional wrestler who shaved his head and had rehearsed his glower before a mirror until it was as nearly permanent as a tattoo. As a rule, Midge got on with other people’s security, but he and Francis had disliked each other from the start. He suspected that on Francis’ part this was jealousy; Mr. Wassermann’s generosity to employees was well known, while Little Angie was a pinchpenny who abused his subordinates, sometimes in public. On Midge’s side, he had a career prejudice against wrestlers, whom he dismissed as trained apes, and thought Francis disagreeably ugly into the bargain. When they were in
the same room they spent most of the time scowling at each other. They had never exchanged so much as a word.

  “I know Jake the Junkman’s been white to you,” Little Angie seemed to be saying. “Too good, maybe. Some types need to be put on an allowance. A lot of smart guys can’t handle dough.”

  Midge didn’t like what he’d heard. Everyone knew Mr. Wassermann had made his first fortune from scrap metal, but most respected him too much to allude to his past in this offensive way. He wondered if it was his place to report the conversation to his employer. So far he didn’t know why he’d been invited here.

  Little Angie reached into a pocket and took out a handful of notepaper on which Midge recognized his own scrawl. “You ain’t hard to track. Everywhere you go, you leave markers: Benny Royal’s floating crap game on the South Side, the roulette wheel at the Kit-Kat, Jack Handy’s book up in Arbordale. There’s others here. You owe twelve thousand, and you can’t go to Jake for a loan. He’s got a blind spot where gambling’s concerned. He don’t forbid his people from making a bet now and then, but he don’t bail them out either. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Midge shook his head. Mr. Wassermann had explained all this his first day. Midge hadn’t known then that the new class of woman he’d be dating liked pretty much the same entertainments as the old.

  “See, that’s a problem. I spent more’n face value buying these up. I’m a reasonable man, though. I’ll eat the difference. You got twelve grand, Midge?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  Little Angie smacked his face with the markers. Midge took a step forward; so did Francis. Little Angie held up a finger, stopping them both. “Let’s not be uncivil. There’s a way you can work it off. You won’t even have to pop a sweat.”

  Midge heard enough of the rest to understand. Mr. Wassermann, who had the ear of a number of important people, had promised to spoil an investment Little Angie wanted to make. The important people, he hinted, would be in a position to listen to reason if Mr. Wassermann were not available to counsel them otherwise. All Midge had to do to settle his debts was stand at his usual station outside the door to Mr. Wassermann’s office the following morning and not leave it, no matter what he heard going on inside.

  “What if I just owe you like I did the others?” Midge asked.

  “They was getting impatient. If I didn’t step in, you’d be wearing plaster instead of that flashy suit, peeing through a tube. And I got to tell you, patience ain’t my what-you-call forte. Francis?”

  The ugly bald wrestler produced a loop of stiff nylon fishline from a pocket. Midge knew he could prevent Francis from making use of it, but there were others in Little Angie’s employ who knew what a garrote was for. He couldn’t fight them all. Sooner or later he’d run into a Sonny Rodriguez.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Little Angie said. There’s always a place in my organization for a fellow knows the score. You won’t be out of a job.”

  Midge hadn’t been thinking about that at all. “Can I have time to think it over?

  “If I had time I’d wait for Jake to die of old age.”

  Midge agreed to the terms. Little Angie leered and tore up the markers. Francis looked disappointed as well as ugly.

  The next morning outside Mr. Wassermann’s office was as long a time as Midge had ever spent anywhere, including seven and a half rounds with Lincoln Flagg. Mr. Wassermann had some telephone calls to make and told him he’d be working through lunch, but that he’d make it up to him that night with the full twelve courses from Bon Maison, Midge’s favorite restaurant back when he was contending. He had an armchair for his personal use in the hallway, but today he couldn’t stay seated in it more than three minutes at a stretch. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, then behind him, picked lint off the sleeve of his new gray gabardine, found imaginary lint on the crease of the trousers and picked that off too. He was perspiring heavily under his sixty-dollar shirt, despite what Little Angie had said; he, Midge, who used to work out with the heavy bag for an hour without breaking a sweat. This selling out was hard work.

  Too hard, he decided, after twenty minutes. He would take his chances with Little Angie’s threats. He rapped on the door, waited the customary length of time while he assumed Mr. Wassermann was calling for him to come in, then opened the door. The garrote didn’t frighten him half as much as the anticipation of the look of sadness on Mr. Wassermann’s face when he told him about his part in Little Angie’s plan.

  Mr. Wassermann was not behind his desk. But he was.

  When Midge leaned his big broken-knuckled hands on it and peered over the far edge, the first thing he saw was the tan soles of his employer’s hand-lasted wingtips. Mr. Wassermann was still seated in his padded leather swivel, but the chair lay on its back. Mr. Wassermann’s face was the same oxblood tint as his shoes and his tongue stuck out. Midge couldn’t see the wire, but he’d heard it sank itself so deep in a man’s neck it couldn’t be removed without getting blood on yourself, so most killers didn’t bother to try.

  A torch lamp behind the desk had toppled over in the struggle and lay on the carpet, its bulb shattered. Both it and Mr. Wassermann must have made more than a little noise. The door that was usually concealed in the paneling to the left stood open. It was used by Mr. Wassermann’s congressmen and the occasional other business associate who preferred not to be seen going in or coming out. It was one of the worst-kept secrets around town.

  Midge felt sad. He walked around the desk, stepping carefully to avoid grinding bits of glass into the Brussels carpet, and looked down into his employer’s bloodshot eyes.

  “The thing is, Mr. Wassermann, I didn’t really go into the tank.”

  Mr. Wassermann didn’t say anything. But then Midge probably wouldn’t have heard him if he had.

  THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF NOWHERE

  by James Grady

  Gene Mallette and the kid named Sandy were wildcatting a double shift on an oil derrick fifty-five afternoons before Independence Day. Drill and generator motors pounded May’s prairie air. Sandy laughed about something and smiled. Then a drill chain broke, whipped like a silver tie around his neck and rocketed him to the top of the fifty-foot rig. His body swung there while pipes clattered and a driller screamed and all Gene could think about was Sandy’s teenage face smeared oil black except for his happy eyes and the glint of white teeth.

  The chain unraveled with a spin and Sandy crashed to the derrick floor.

  Gene and another guy rode to town in back of the flatbed truck with Sandy’s body laid at their boots. There’d been a spring snow two weeks before, so the truck didn’t kick up much dust from the dirt road. The earth smelled damp and good. He heard the foreman in the truck cab say maybe the drought was over. They saw a skinny deer grazing by the walls of a deserted sod house. They saw the blue misted Sweet Grass Hills rising from the yellow prairie between them and Canada. Those three volcanic crags would have been mountains anyplace else but here in Montana. The foreman drove to the Shelby undertaker parlor. As they lifted Sandy off the truck, Gene heard the mortician’s hand jingling silver dollars for those happy eyes.

  “I’m done,” said Gene, and walked to the boardinghouse.

  He put a shower and a tub soak on his tab. Sat at the dinner table with other boarders and ate stew he didn’t taste. Walked out to the sidewalk to sit on a bench, watch the people and cars around the Front Street speakeasies and make himself think about nothing, nothing at all.

  Least 1 got that, he thought.

  Just before sunset a rancher named Jensen staggered out of a speakeasy called the Bucket of Blood, walked to a roan horse cinched to one of the new electric light poles, pulled out a silver pistol and shot the horse smack between the eyes. The roan plopped to the ground so hard it snapped the cinch. Jensen pumped slugs into the beast, filling the town with the roar of the gun. He had gone through a full reload of the revolver and had its cylinder swung open for more bullets when the black Ford with a big white star painted o
n each of its front doors pulled up behind the dead horse. Texas John Otis unfolded his grizzly bear body to climb out of the car, sheriff’s badge on the left lapel of his black suit, a dead German sniper’s ten-inch broomstick handle Mauser in his right hand. Sheriff Otis ripped the shiny revolver away from Jensen and slammed the Mauser against the rancher’s skull.

  “You dumb son of a bitch!” roared the Sheriff. “You shot your own damn horse!”

  But by then Jensen lay draped unconscious across that bloody roan.

  Gene turned away and saw her walking toward him.

  He’d seen her before, back in ’06 when she was nine and he was fourteen. Her white father moved her and her kid brother off the Blackfeet Rez to educate in Shelby instead of being sentenced to an Indian boarding school. Gene’d seen her every day when he was a high school senior. She’d skipped a grade so she was a shy freshman who wore her black hair like a veil. Gene just knew she wouldn’t talk to him. Then he couldn’t talk to her while she was still in high school and he was a graduated adult doing a man’s job as a gandy dancer building railroads to bring homesteaders out West and ship the loot of the land back East. He’d seen her almost every week, often trying to corral her wild brother. Gene had seen her at the train depot the day he shipped out to the Marines for the Great War against the Kaiser. That day, damned if he wouldn’t before he died doing what had to be done, he’d gone up to her, said: “Good-bye.” She’d flinched—then lanced the gloom with her smile. When he came home from Europe with no visible scars, he’d seen her in the Shelby cemetery putting flowers on the influenza graves of the homesteader she’d married who’d been old enough to be her dad and the baby girl she’d let that dreamer father. After bloody California, as Gene’s parents and their ranch died, he had seen her move to town when the great winds of 1920 ate the homestead she’d tried to keep going while working the schoolmarm job her husband had been white enough to let her get and the town had been Christian enough to let her keep for the full year of widow’s black. Gene had watched as she waitressed at the Palace Hotel where she lived in the back room, sometimes with her brother when he was in town trying to find dollars for ivory powder he pumped into his arm. And Gene’d seen her sad smile two months earlier when he’d asked her out. She’d whispered: “I got nothing that’s worth it for you.” He’d seen her not believe him when he swore she was wrong, seen her walk away so she wouldn’t see tears fall she couldn’t catch.