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

by Unknown Author

  “No,” I said. “Two and two makes Otis a killer.”

  “Me?” asked Otis, calmly still clutching the bottles of beer. “No time for anyone else,” I said. “I was gone no more than three or four minutes. Tillman left the ring with the Swede.”

  “Could have been somebody come in while I was out,” said Otis.

  “Otis didn’t kill the guy,” Moore said, readjusting his towel, beads of water still clinging to his chest and forehead.

  “You asked how the killer could have stuffed Tillman in the locker,” I said to Otis. “When you came in, the lockers were closed and Tillman was on the floor. No one said he had been in a locker.”

  “I just...” Otis began looking at Moore and me.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Make it quick. Shelly’ll be back with a cop or ten in a few seconds.”

  Otis slumped down on the low bench and placed the beers gently next to him. He was shaking his head.

  “He come in when Archie was in the shower,” Otis said softly. “Mad as hell. He had a gun. Told me to get out of the way. Said some fool thing like Archie had messed up his life. He pushed me out of the way. Figured an old man wouldn’t be much trouble. Figured wrong. I’m old but some things you don’t forget. They just come back. I hit him hard, pit of the stomach with a left. Then a cross to his face. Missed. Hit him in the neck. Went down hard. Think I busted his windpipe. I stuffed him in the locker. Figured we’d just leave him there. Might take days before they found him.”

  “Where’d you go?” I asked.

  “Got rid of his gun,” said Otis, shaking his head. “Picked up two beers to cover.”

  The door flew open. Shelly led in a pair of uniformed cops, both retreads from earlier times helping out for the duration of the war, doing crowd control at the fights.

  “What happened?” said one of the cops, a thin guy with a pink Irish face.

  “He tripped,” I said.

  “He...” Shelly began.

  “Tripped,” I repeated. “Came in to congratulate Mr. Moore. Tripped, the bench was in the middle of the floor. He went flying over. Nothing we could do.”

  “You saw it?” asked the cop, looking at each of us.

  “Mr. Otis and I saw it,” I said. “Mr. Moore was taking a shower. Dr. Minck wasn’t here.”

  “I wasn’t here,” Shelly repeated emphatically.

  The Irish cop moved over to the corpse and went down on one knee.

  “Must have hit something,” he said.

  “Fell against the side of the table,” I said. “Weird. Hit his neck.” “Yeah,” said the cop, getting up. “I know him. Name’s Tillman. He was in that kid’s corner tonight. Tillman’s not the kind to come and congratulate someone who beats his boy.”

  “Not unless he had a few bucks on the winner,” the second cop said. He was even older than the Irish veteran and looked as if he belonged in the gang of bandits in a Bob Steele Western.

  “Who knows?” said the Irish cop.

  He looked at Otis for a long beat and then at Moore. Their eyes met and held.

  “Heard nothing?”

  “Not a thing,” said Moore.

  “Then I hope you don’t mind if I ask you one more question?” Moore shook his head to show that he didn’t mind, but the Irish cop had a knowing look on his face.

  “You sign a poster for me?” he asked. “I’ll tear one down in the hall. I save ’em. For my son when he gets back from the war. I told him you were gonna be a champ.”

  “Happy to,” said Moore.

  The cop smiled and looked at Tillman’s corpse.

  “Shame,” he said. “No place in the world’s safe anymore.” “No place,” I agreed. “A beer?”

  “Why not?” said the cop.

  Otis handed a beer to each of the cops. The Irish cop held up his bottle and said, “To the end of the war.”

  “And the memory of the fallen,” added the other cop.

  I felt like saying “Amen” but I just stood watching Shelly shake his head in confusion.

  DREAM STREET

  by Mike Lupica

  Vinny noticed that some of the cable channels, especially the ESPN one that put on the old-time shit, helped him remember things. Sometimes, when they’d show wall-to-wall boxing the week of some big fight, he’d find himself sitting there and watching the rematch between him and Dream Street in Boston. And there’d be some small moment, some little sequence of punches, and he’d surprise himself, the way he surprised Dream Street that night, when he went southpaw on him in the middle rounds.

  Vinny Tavernese wished sometimes there was a cable channel he could turn on that would tell him which room he’d left his fucking reading glasses in, or where he’d put his wallet.

  He forgot things more and more. It scared him, and nothing had ever scared him, not the other guy in the ring, not the Mob, not even Madeline, his second wife. But now he’d be on Second Avenue, walking south, and he’d stop for the light at Forty-ninth and suddenly he couldn’t remember where he was going, or why he was even out. And he’d just buy the papers and go home until he remembered. Only sometimes he didn’t remember. One of his doctors, a couple of doctors ago, told Vinny he should try writing himself notes.

  And Vinny said, “Yeah, that’s a good one, doc. Except what kind of dumb asshole am 1 gonna feel like when I can’t remember who sent them to me?”

  Maybe that’s what he ought to do with Dream Street, just write him a letter, ask him straight out once and for all, why he didn’t come out for the fifteenth that night at the Garden.

  Vinny’d watched the whole fight the other night, forgetting the last time he’d watched it start to finish, thinking to himself that the black-and-white film seemed to be fading or something, he felt like he was looking through a screen door. Or maybe his eyes were going too, along with everything else, no matter what the doctors said.

  He moved his chair up until it was right on top of the TV when it was time for the fifteenth round, Don Dunphy saying that the fight had been everything people wanted, that it was too close, that it might come down to these last three minutes.

  The close-ups weren’t too good in those days, but they were up on Vinny’s face pretty good now, both eyes nearly closed as he waited for Dream Street in the middle of the ring.

  The ref, Ralphie Iannelli, has his back to Vinny, you can see him pointing.

  What the fuck? Vinny says, plain as day, you didn’t have to be some kind of professional lip reader.

  Now Iannelli is talking again, trying to raise Vinny’s arm, except this is where he went a little nuts, waving his arms like a madman, even as Iannelli was telling him he won the fight.

  Vinny didn’t need the pictures on the ESPN oldies channel telling him what came next, because this was one part he’d never forget, no matter how many brain cells he’d lost taking ten shots to the head waiting to throw one big one himself.

  Ralphie Iannelli grabbed him and leaned over and said, “Dream Street says he’s sorry.”

  Sorry? Vinny turned off the set now, went and stood at the window and stared downtown, at the building where the News used to have its offices, where he’d go sometimes and have coffee with Bill Gallo, the Daily News cartoonist, and a fight guy from even before Vinny’s time. Dream Street says he’s sorry? Vinny was the one who’d always been sorry, more than forty years sorry, that he didn’t get to finish the fucking job.

  Oh, he remembered everything about that night in ’59 like it was yesterday. Of course, remembering yesterday, that was another story. He’d be making an appearance for the beer company upstate someplace, and he’d be talking about some fight he’d seen the week before between a couple of Mexicans with tattoos all over them, up and down their arms and even on their necks and backs, and he’d completely lose his place and have to fall back on schtick.

  “Hey,” he’d say, “I get more confused sometimes than that Holyfield when he hears somebody yell, ’Daddy!’”

  That would get him a laugh, and the
n he’d go with material he knew by heart, stories about him and Dream Street in Boston, because even the young guys in the crowd wanted to hear about it; because it turned out to be one of those sports events people talked about forever. When they started making lists at the end of the century, greatest this, greatest that, it was still Vinny vs. Dream Street in Boston at the top of the boxing list, then the Thrilla in Manila, when Frazier didn’t come out for the fifteenth, and then the rest of them, Hearns vs. Leonard and Louis vs. Conn and Graziano vs. Zale.

  But somehow, all this time later, it was as if they both won. Well, he didn’t win shit, Vinny thought now, staring at the lights all the way down Second, wondering what he was going to do with the rest of the night.

  “I won,” Vinny said in the empty apartment, pounding a fist into his chest.

  So how come he was the one who ended up feeling like a bum?

  How come Dream Street Stone, who quit on his stool, how come he was the one who ended up having the dream life?

  “Your PSA count has gone up a little bit again,” the young doctor said, the chart from Vinny’s annual physical in his hands.

  “We’ll take another one in a few months, but at your age I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

  The doctor was a nice colored kid. Dr. Hudson. Vinny couldn’t remember if he’d asked him his first name and forgotten, or had just never asked. Vinny thought he looked a little bit like Jeter, the Yankee shortstop, light-complected, but Hudson had his head shaved. You could never tell with the coloreds, at least the modern ones, whether they were going bald or just liked the look.

  Vinny could remember the first colored guy he ever fought with a shaved head, way before guys like Zora Folley did it. Parker Gillespie. Vinny got ahead of him on points early and then tried to see after that if he could hit him enough shots on top of his head to make it bleed, see if the blood came spurting out like it would from a water fountain.

  God, he was a crazy bastard in those days.

  What year was that?

  “PSA,” Vinny said. “How great is this, having to worry all the time about something that sounds like an airline out West?”

  “If you were thirty years younger, the number might worry me,” Hudson said, “but frankly at your age, it’s pretty normal.”

  “You say.”

  “Mr. Tavernese.” No matter how many times Vinny corrected him, he’d still sound out the “e” at the end sometimes. “You worry too much.”

  “I still get these goddamn headaches.”

  Hudson sighed now. It always felt like a body shot to Vinny. “We’ve done an MRI. We’ve done a CAT scan. There is nothing. The only thing wrong with your head that I can see is all the scar tissue around the eyes.”

  “You’re tellin’ me I’m just supposed to forget what I can’t remember?”

  “Memory loss is a part of aging. For you. For me. For the world, Mr. Tavernese.” Again with the loud “e.”

  “Call me Vinny,” he said.

  The kid looked over his shoulder at the clock behind Vinny, trying to look casual, like he was looking out the window, so he didn’t have to look at his watch.

  Vinny said, “I’m more worried about my memory than my prostate, okay? Hell, you want my prostate, I’ll bend over right here, take it, I don’t need it anymore.”

  “Mr. Tav...Vinny,” he said. “I told you. We’ve run all the tests we can run, there’s none of the markers we usually get for Alzheimer’s. It’s just a product of age and, well, what you used to do for a living.” He cleared his throat, like it was something he’d learned in medical school. “Having seen what’s happened to others from your line of work, I think you should stop worrying and consider yourself quite lucky, at least in that area.”

  “Lucky,” Vinny said. “Yeah, that’s me, Mr. Lucky. You ever see that one? Cary Grant and Laraine Day. You ever hear of her? She was married to my friend Leo Durocher.”

  He knew the kid wasn’t listening anymore. There was always a point where Vinny got talking about something and he knew he’d lost him.

  “Don’t worry so much about the forgetting,” Dr. Hudson said now, standing up behind his desk, officially letting Vinny know they were through. “It happens to all of us. The other night, I was on my way out to a date and spent twenty minutes looking for my apartment key.” He smiled, though the smile didn’t seem to have a hell of a lot to it. “You’re a great storyteller, Mr. ...Vinny. When I’ve got more time, and I certainly wish I did today, you have a wonderful memory about scenes and events and even conversations that happened in what is almost another life for you.”

  “The one I liked,” Vinny said.

  “You are not losing your mind. Trust me.”

  “That was what my last accountant told me,” Vinny said. Hudson came around the desk now, put a hand on Vinny’s shoulder. “Besides,” he said, “as long as you’ve been around, there must be a few things you’re happy you can’t remember.”

  “That part you got right, doc,” Vinny said. “Life’s a son-of-a-bitch, ain’t it? Sometimes the stuff that drives you goddam crazy is the stuff you can’t forget.”

  The sportswriters called him and Dream Street “Beauty and the Beast.”

  Vinny was about five-foot-seven in those days, before he started to shrink, built like one of those old Checker cabs, with a nose that had gotten mashed young, and the scar tissue that always fascinated the docs already lumping up around his eyes, making him look older than he was. But he didn’t think he was a bad-looking guy. It’s why he hated that Beast shit. “How come,” he’d say to the writers when they’d be sitting around with him up in the Catskills, after watching him train, “how come if I’m such a beast I got so many good-looking broads throwing theirselves at me?”

  “It’s your charm and way with words,” Jimmy Cannon told him once. “Not to mention your bank account.”

  Vinny said, “You’re tellin’ me I get as much as I do on account of I’m rich?”

  Cannon said, “No, I’m just telling you you get more than you should.”

  “You ain’t no leading man yourself,” Vinny said, “even if you did go out with Betty Hutton.”

  “Joan Blondell,” Cannon said.

  “You still ain’t much better lookin’ them me,” Vinny said.

  “Yeah, I am,” Cannon said. “Know why, kid? When I punch my typewriter, it doesn’t punch back.”

  Cannon liked him. So did Red Smith and Bill Heinz. They just seemed to love Augusta (Dream Street) Stone more, just about all of them saying he was the most beautiful boxer they’d ever seen, writing him up in the papers as if they were queer for him. Nothing against Vinny. He was tough. He could hit and take a punch and kept coming. They didn’t call him dumb, think of him as just another dumb Wop fighter, but they didn’t have to, Vinny could read between the lines, sometimes better than he could read the lines themselves.

  Dream Street, though, he was the artist, he was the thinking man’s fighter, he was poetry in motion. Vinny Tavernese, that dumb Wop bastard, he’d keep coming, no matter how much punishment he took, how much the other guy rearranged his face, as long as he won the fight. It was different with Dream Street. Even when he was young, he talked about being in the movies when he was through boxing, that’s why he had to protect that pretty mug of his.

  “I did get hit in the head once or twice,” Dream Street would say in that snooty way he had. “Didn’t like it at all.”

  He was a handsome bastard, even Vinny had to admit that, with smooth skin the color of a light coffee, almost light enough to pass, maybe that’s why he dated so many white women, even in the old days. Dream Street, even after the second fight, was the one who did the cigarette commercials. He was the one to open the restaurant in Harlem, a couple of blocks from the Apollo. Dream Street was the one who drove around New York City in a cream-colored Caddy with the top down, just waiting for somebody to snap his picture, and sat with Jack Paar on the old Tonight Show.

  They spent
a little time together, promoting both fights, but Vinny never felt like he got to know him. It was like Dream Street couldn’t bring himself to drop his guard even when the two of them were alone.

  “Vincenzo,” he’d say, pronouncing it perfectly, Vin-chien-zo, “I do believe if we weren’t trying to beat each other’s brains out, we could have some laughs together.”

  Only they never did.

  Afterward, after both of them were retired, people’d say to Vinny, “What was Dream Street really like?”

  Vinny’d say, “He hit hard and wouldn’t go down.”

  And they’d say, “No, away from the ring.”

  “There wasn’t no away from the ring for us,” Vinny told them.

  He’d gone forty years telling himself the thing had to be on the square, that nobody could have bought Dream Street Stone, that if they had, you couldn’t keep something like that a secret, somebody would’ve gave it up. That’s what he’d tell himself. Only now he couldn’t get it out of his head how Dream Street came on at the end of the fourteenth.

  Now Vinny, who lived inside his own head more and more, as cluttered as it was, had convinced himself Dream Street had one more round in him in Boston.

  Problem was, no one seemed to know where the hell Dream Street was, or what had happened to him the last few years.

  “Maybe it was at Graziano’s funeral I saw him the last time,” Bill Gallo was saying in the back room of P.J. Clarke’s. “How long ago was that? Five years? I’d have to look it up.”

  “You talk to him?” Vinny said.

  “I don’t think so,” Gallo said. “I just remember that he still had that smile. Now that I think of it, him and May came in late. The only time I saw them was when they were coming up the aisle, then I never saw them again, I figured they must’ve slipped out the side during Communion.”

  May Stone, the former May York, had been a singer at the Apollo in the fifties, another light-skinned colored the way Dream Street was, as pretty to look at as anybody Vinny’d ever seen. Almost as pretty as Dream Street thinks he is, that’s what the boys at the gym used to say. They’d gotten married after he retired, not too long after the second fight with Vinny, and had been together ever since. There was a famous line May got credit for, when she and Dream Street were packing up their Los Angeles house to go live in Italy, when Dream Street was about to hit it big making Westerns ever there. They were in what he called his Trophy Room, boxing up trophies and photographs and the rest of the shit you accumulate, and May was looking at the famous white robe Dream Street always wore into the ring.