Winner's Loss

by Mel Bradshaw

  Copyright © 2017 Mel Bradshaw

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5S 2R4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Publisher: Mary Ann J. Blair

  Editor: Jen R. Albert

  Front cover image: National Gallery

  Front cover design: Daniella Postavsky

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bradshaw, Mel, 1947-, author

  Winner’s loss / Mel Bradshaw.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-219-2 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-77180-221-5 (EPUB)

  ISBN 978-1-77180-220-8 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.R332W56 2017 C813’.6 C2017-904659-4

  C2017-904660-8

  This is an original print edition of Winner’s Loss.

  For Carol Jackson, my love

  I cannot hold to home life being the incentive to creative work — the quiet home lover is not an artist.

  — Frederick Varley

  Chapter 1

  “Who’s winning?” said Ruth after Round 1.

  Our seats were good and close, just out of spitting range, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her startling green eyes, but it was her first boxing match.

  Not her first time in the CNE Coliseum. Built five years earlier, in 1922, this palatial shed had hosted concerts, religious meetings, horse shows, and bazaars; Ruth Stone had written up a goodly portion of such female-welcoming events for the back pages of the Daily Dispatch. Tonight, the arena, set up for prizefighting, was maybe two-thirds full, and of those eight thousand spectators a small minority were women — women not allergic to the smell of cigars and the sound of men screaming for blood to be spilled. Here tonight at my invitation and not on assignment, Ruth was on the edge of her chair.

  “Paul?” Patience wasn’t her long suit.

  “Lucan, in the black shorts there, has the more powerful punch. ‘Lights-out’ Lucan, they call him.”

  “But I haven’t seen him land a punch.”

  “Exactly — because Wellington has faster reflexes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Every move Lucan makes looks slower to Jack. Danny also tends to cock his fist — pull it back before he punches. It’s as bad as a roundhouse swing for sending your opponent a telegram.”

  “So,” said Ruth, “even though Mr. Blue Shorts only seems to be patting Black Shorts with his gloves, nothing heavy at all, he’s making contact — and making points?” She squinted her emeralds as she worked this out and with a freckled hand held back off her forehead a wad of frizzy red hair.

  Quick and cute. I’d never thought a police detective could have this sweet an evening in the company of a newspaper woman.

  “The odds were already in Jack’s favour, but they’ll be longer against Lucan now.”

  “You betting, Paul?”

  I shook my head. The bell for the start of Round 2 rang before she could ask me why not. The truth was I had no quarrel with someone making a buck, albeit an illegal buck, on a clean fight. I just preferred to save my slender pay for rye and, for example, redheads.

  By Round 9, the second last, Jack Wellington had extended his lead on points and appeared to have a lock on the Ontario middleweight championship. Without breaking a sweat, he was still dancing away from every punch Lucan threw. The crowd was growing restive. More than a few, both office workers in suits and labourers in overalls, were already making for the exits. Many that remained raised to the naked steel girders overhead cries of “Nuts to this sissy stuff!” and “Paste him, Jack. Knock him cold!”

  Ruth’s attention too had started to wander. When I’d first suggested an evening of boxing to her, she’d curled a neatly rouged lip and cleared her throat. To get her here, I’d had to make a deal I expected to regret. But then, once the title bout had started, she seemed caught up in it. After her initial fear of being forced to witness maiming and butchery, I wondered if she was now disappointed not to see so much as a split lip.

  The referee seemed to be having trouble keeping his attention on the match. He was Roly Hardcastle, a former boxer himself, rumoured to have lost the sight in his left eye to a thumb gouge. Not a fatal handicap if he’d kept his agility, but he was paunchy and stiffer in the joints than a man his age should have been. Physically he resembled Dave Barry, famous as the ref of the recent Tunney–Dempsey rematch.

  Then in the ring something changed. It happened fast; distracted spectators could well have missed it. For no apparent reason, Wellington’s right foot slid forward when it should have stepped back. I touched Ruth’s arm and directed her attention back to the two fighters in time for her to see the consequence of this — frankly unconvincing — stumble. Lucan landed a left square in the middle of Jack’s chest. Not with full force: Jack pulled back too far for that. But Lucan at last had something to show for nearly nine scoreless rounds.

  I couldn’t yet see what Jack was playing at. In the one remaining round, he couldn’t walk into enough punches to hand the match to Lucan and make it look real. Perhaps someone had a side bet as to whether Danny would get a glove on Jack, and Jack would get his share if he let it happen. But more drama was in store.

  An exaggerated frown settled on Jack’s handsome face. He rushed in on Lucan as if that tap on the chest had been a mortal insult. Punches rained down on Danny, above and below the belt. Lucan could take the punishment, blow after blow, but was too slow to retaliate. There was new energy in the Coliseum, and the fans got it now all right. Those on their way out the doors stopped dead in their tracks, mostly to cheer Jack on.

  Roly surprised me too. Habitually permissive, he now lost no time moving in to warn Jack about the kidney punches. When the round-ending bell rang, Jack retired scowling to his corner.

  “What a temper!” said Ruth. “You’d think Blue Shorts would have himself in hand. He’s not a kid, after all.”

  “Done any theatre reviews?” I asked her.

  “Garden fêtes and charity balls — that’s all they think girl reporters are good for. Are you saying that his anger’s all ham acting?”

  “Someone’s convinced him he can do better throwing this fight than winning it.” If I sounded like I knew the score, that it was all old hat for me, I can tell you that was far from true. I’d never have picked nimble Jack Wellington for a cheat.

  “Throw it how?”

  “Jack’s not going to let himself be kayoed. He doesn’t have time in one more round to get hit enough to lose it on points, so watch him lose it on fouls.”

  Round 10 was anticlimax. Wellington had had his warning about not hitting south of Lucan’s navel. He did it again and again and Roly disqualified him. To resounding boos, Hardcastle held a grinning Danny “Lights-out” Lucan’s hand aloft. Many spectators pelted Roly with apple cores and cigar butts. Someone even threw a chair at him as he was climbing out of the ring.

  Jack Wellington meanwhile was spared the crowd’s anger. No boos were hurled his way. I watched him slip out flanked by broad-shouldered men with suit jackets buttoned up to hide, I presumed, pistols in shoulder holsters.

  Ruth wanted to know if the referee had done anything wrong.

  “Nothing,” I said. “He was just enforcing the rules. The thing is,
that referee usually doesn’t. At least, not that quick.”

  “He’s been bought,” said Ruth. It wasn’t a question, for her or me.

  I’d never seen or heard of Ruth Stone before she’d buttonholed me on the steps of City Hall last Friday evening. I noticed a particularly well-shaped pair of legs below her navy pea jacket, but October showers were blowing up from the lake, and I was already late for a dinner invitation to Ned Cruickshank’s. I hadn’t felt like stopping. Even less so when I saw the notepad in her hand. I don’t begrudge journalists a living, but anything I say to one of them always seems to result in nuisance of one sort or another. Here was a case in point: I’d confirmed to a man from the Toronto Examiner that I’d won a pistol shoot at the 1927 edition of the Police Games in August. As a result, this girl reporter had clearly settled on me to be the cop that would give her inside guff on the Toronto crime scene. I was to be her ticket up out of the women’s columns — columns buried under opaque layers of sports, finance, and political news. She’d been toiling in those inky depths seven long years, she’d have me know. It was time, and then some, to burst into the sunlight of the front page.

  I rarely glanced at the Daily Dispatch, a rag that couldn’t stop crabbing about “undesirable aliens,” labour agitators, and the eight-hour day. If I had two cents to throw away on a paper, it was usually the Toronto Examiner. Not because of its politics — it favoured restricting the sale of alcohol and lowering the taxes on cigarettes — but because the publisher was related to the detective inspector’s wife. In consequence, this was the daily that Sanderson most needed his sleuths to look good in.

  I didn’t want a nosy newshound underfoot at the crowded detective office in City Hall and had been glad to be able to tell Ruth I had at present no big investigation underway. I found my work boring and was sure she would too. I lifted my hand in something between a salute and a wave and took my leave.

  But then I turned and asked her to wait. What had I been thinking? I must have forgotten how fed up I was with the small change of corner-store shoplifters and schoolboy arsonists. It must have slipped my routine-numbed mind that my evenings just now were nothing to look forward to either. And here was a pretty girl offering me some of her time.

  She did wait. Pressing her hat down on her head when a gust tried to lift it off, she asked what the ham sandwich I wanted. I asked for her office phone number. She said it was in the book. Instead of looking, I called on her in person the next Monday.

  When I told her about the Lucan–Wellington fight, she said that was the worst idea for a date she’d ever heard, but that she’d go if I would subsequently visit an art gallery with her. I gave her credit for finding an equivalent torment.

  I’d intended to show her that boxing wasn’t all butchery — that, as practised by nimble Jack Wellington, it could be elegant as dance. Now all I could do was make sure she learned as much as possible from this rigged match. She said she wanted to write about crooks, after all.

  “Roly’s been bought,” I said, “but so has Jack.”

  “You sound disappointed. Jeepers creepers, Paul, you didn’t think boxing was pure and perfect, did you? Poor baby.” She gave my sleeve a pat.

  “I don’t know everything about boxing, Miss Stone, but up till now if you wanted to rig a fight, you just bribed the ref. Payoffs to boxers never happen — not in the seven years that fights have been legal in this province. Sure I thought Jack Wellington was straight; that’s why I wanted you to see him. He wins his matches without murder and without fouls. So I’m sore enough now to want a word with him. The referee? Forget him. I never had any illusions about Roly; he has no big purses to look forward to and I’m guessing nothing saved for retirement. It’ll be hard to pin anything on him anyway. He only did what he should have been doing ever since he traded the gloves for a bow tie. But Jack will have to explain moves both illegal and out of character.”

  I could hear I was pretty wound up; I didn’t mind when a gruff voice broke in.

  “I’m with you, Paul. This house of chumps can’t see it.”

  The tall man standing in the aisle beside our seats had a neck as wide as his head. His black eyebrows and moustache bristled fiercely, but curling dark hair and sad, hazel eyes domesticated his looks somewhat. I knew him only as a boxing fan named Oscar. We’d been to a dozen or more of the same fights, and we both liked to sit near the action, so we’d got to trading gossip. He seemed to have no trouble appealing to women. I’d never seen him with the same one twice. This evening, for the first time, he appeared to be alone.

  “Who do you think pieced the two of them off?” I named a couple of notorious gamblers. “Pork Chops Lariviere? Duke Abernathy?”

  “More Lariviere’s style. Complicated, innovative. How you doing, Ruthie?”

  “Quite well thank you, Mr. Craig,” Ruth drawled. “Broadening my horizons, improving my mind. Close your mouth, Paul. Oscar Craig knows all the females in this town.”

  “All quarter million of them,” I said pleasantly, “not counting pets and insects — and yet he doesn’t appear to have a date tonight.”

  “Tonight I came to paint.” Oscar hefted a worn wooden box smudged with traces of various colours.

  “And did you?” I was surprised to hear about Oscar’s painting. He fit my image of the underfed, tubercular artist so little that I was curious to see his work.

  “Nothing on show tonight worth setting up for.”

  “Put money on Wellington?” I asked.

  From Oscar’s pained expression, I gathered he had — quite a bit. “Actually,” he said, “the picture I wanted was of Lucan knocking that lily out of the ring. Some washout!”

  “Not my evening,” Ruth bragged. “Mr. Shenstone’s going to make an arrest. I’ve never seen one before.”

  “And you won’t be seeing one tonight,” I said.

  All humanity went out of Oscar’s eyes. His cheek muscles tightened. I was used to bad reactions to the news I’m a cop. Maybe Craig’s was more extreme because he’d been unlawfully gambling on a fight. To do him credit, he recovered his balance quicker than most people do.

  “I could drive Ruth home if you want to chase after the bad guys,” he said.

  I told him that wouldn’t be necessary. Minutes later we saw Oscar speed out of the parking lot behind the wheel of a battle-scarred black roadster while we stood in line outside the Coliseum waiting for a taxi. I was torn between, on the one hand, taking Ruth straight back to her parents’ house in Forest Hill so I could go looking for Wellington and Lariviere and, on the other, inviting her to a speak. Sale of alcohol for home consumption had been legal since the end of March, but there were still no licensed bars or restaurants.

  Sticking with Ruth had the edge. I was still thinking of the mocking yet familiar way she’d caressed my arm — my jacket at least — after the fight; I wanted to see what next.

  “Would you like to go —”

  “My Blue Heaven,” she blurted out.

  “Somewhere quiet, for a drink.”

  “I don’t drink,” she said, “but I’m sure Pork Chops Lariviere would serve you.”

  “I’m not taking you to his club.”

  “Phooey to that. I can look after myself.”

  “Odds are you can — but I’m not going to risk it.”

  I could almost hear her teeth grinding.

  “Then take me to the Dispatch building, King and Bay.”

  I hadn’t got her to change her tune by the time all the people ahead of us had left and a big, square-backed cab was waiting for us to climb in. She gave the address even before we were settled onto the cracked leather back seat. I debated with her a bit more, but couldn’t shake her. She was determined to get back to her typewriter.

  “Won’t your sports reporter be filing the story of the fight?” I asked at last.

  “My story will be better. Buy tomorrow’s paper and see whose they publish.”

  “I like your spunk, Ruth. Just don’t go making accusa
tions you can’t prove — and whatever you do, keep me out of it.”

  I was sure I was going to regret telling her anything about boxing.

  “You’ll be ‘a source who asked not to be identified.’”

  This didn’t sound like the cue for a good-night kiss. I took one anyway. She didn’t fight it, but kept it brief. I asked when I could see her again.

  “As soon as you have a juicy murder case to tell me about. Or when you’re ready to keep your end of our bargain.”

  “I’d rather look at you than a flat bunch of pictures.”

  “That’s because you can’t look without tasting.”

  The cab jolted to a stop with a squeak from the brakes. I got out and opened her door. Then I held open one of the brass-bound glass doors of her building. Ruth brushed my cheek with the back of her hand as she went through. I watched the swaying back of her knee-length navy skirt all the way across the lobby until it and she disappeared into an elevator.

  Lariviere had built his joint just out of town, beyond a Toronto detective’s jurisdiction. He’d picked a lot on the east bank of the Don River, near a street that happened to be called Gamble Avenue. Public transportation was sparse. I kept the taxi, even though it would mean living on stale bread and Klim powdered milk the rest of the week. At least it wasn’t one of those clubs that charged a membership fee.

  As it turned out, all I got for my money and time was support for Oscar’s hunch that Pork Chops was behind the rigged fight. In the large brick house, I found neither club owner nor crooked boxer, but I did see Roly Hardcastle gambling away a wad of money I fancied could only be his share of the payoff. Inquiries after Wellington got me nowhere. I borrowed a phone book. He wasn’t in there either.

  I had the cab drop me at City Hall. I could get a Queen streetcar home from here. And I wanted to poke my nose into police headquarters to see if one of the other detective sergeants could spot me five dollars till payday. Howarth was the softest touch, but Parsons or Nichol would likely also oblige. Unluckily, Rudy Crate was the only one on duty — a tall, well-fed, rosy-complexioned Englishman, who in his four decades on earth had absorbed the wrong half of “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”