She slept only fitfully. Every time she fell asleep, it was into a dream wherein she saw herself crouching, naked, on all fours, in some hall of a thousand mirrors. She would wake up, gasping, beside him. Once she switched on the lamp to see if he were faking that steady, rasping snore. No, it was real. She switched off the lamp.
When he woke, in the nine A.M. light, she was dressed and waiting.
He rose sleepily, mumbled something about something or somebody and went into the bathroom. She heard the shower running.
“I hope you slept well,” she said when he came out, with a towel around his middle, looking refreshed.
“I did. I always do. How about you?”
“How I slept makes no difference. That isn’t the point.”
He kept on drying himself. “What is the point, baby?”
“The point is this. What do you intend to do?”
He glanced up. “Do about what, baby?”
What was so infuriating to her, about this man, was that she had absolutely no way of telling whether he were putting on an act or actually did not perceive anything to have gone wrong.
“About us.”
“Ain’t nothing to do about us, baby. We wanted it. Both of us wanted it. We had it. Both of us. Now it’s over.” He looked at her steadily: “Done. Finished. Kaput.”
“You can’t mean that.”
He sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on his pants. He appeared to be oblivious of her. Calhoun was just as good at shutting other people out as he was at shutting himself in.
“You going somewhere, Ruby?”
He finished buttoning his shirt before he replied.
“Of course I’m going somewhere. Home. To my wife and kid. Where else?”
“I took it for granted you weren’t going back to them.”
“You took an awful lot for granted then.”
“The way you come on, I had a right to take a lot for granted.”
He didn’t answer that. He merely recalled, in his mind, the passion with which she had confronted him before he had thought of reaching for her. The faint smile of recollection, on his lips, was more infuriating to her than any open protest could have been. She bit her lip to quiet her growing anger.
“No more race track, Adeline,” he told her quietly, “no more restaurants. No more cocktail lounges. Back to the old lady. Pick up where I left off ten years ago. That’s it.”
She shook her head slightly, but he didn’t see that. He didn’t notice her hand reaching for her handbag, nor did he see her open it. Nor did he see the ivory-handled springblade in it.
“It ain’t your wife,” she told him, keeping her voice steady. “That’s a lie. It’s that little country whore.”
When he was fully dressed he turned to face her.
“You’re an uptown up-tempo woman,” he assured her, “I’m a downtown down-beat guy.” He extended his hand and she came at him with the springblade.
He stepped inside it as he would step inside any wild-swinging blow and clipped her solidly on the point of her chin. The blade flew out of her hand and she sat down, sprawling ridiculously, eyes goggling in astonishment. He picked up the knife, pocketed it and closed the door behind him quietly.
On Forty-fifth Street a teenage girl caught his eye. She was standing under the traffic light, across the street, waiting to cross. He didn’t smile back, but as she came toward him she spoke. He turned his head and asked, “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Jesus loves you,’” she told him.
“He decided to do that too late,” Calhoun called after her, and walked on toward his Port Authority bus.
When Calhoun got off the bus in Jersey City he walked directly to Lowry’s gym.
Lowry had fought, in the decade before Calhoun, as both a middle and a light-heavy. He’d been the kind of fighter who got his feelings hurt if you didn’t bust his nose in the first round. It made him think you weren’t taking him seriously.
He’d whipped the heavy punchers and lost to all the boys who could move, stick and jab. Now he’d put on forty pounds, yet moved lightly. He was a direct sort of man, open, friendly and without pretentions.
“Glad to see you on the street, Ruby,” he congratulated Calhoun, “you did a hard stretch. You plan to stay out a while?”
“If the new trial goes my way I’m home free, doc,” he told Lowry. “You doing yourself any good?”
“This new boy looks like a winner, Ruby,” Lowry lowered his voice while indicating the big-shouldered youth skipping rope in a corner. “Whipped everybody in Dublin.”
Irish Eddie Sykes was a nineteen-year-old middle weight with slender legs and that breadth of shoulder which indicated he’d soon be fighting light-heavies.
“We’re not going to hurry this boy,” Lowry assured Calhoun, “he ain’t yet twenty. He ain’t ready in his head. He don’t feel yet he has to hurt an opponent. He’ll learn.”
Between the good gymnasium fighters and fighters who possessed street savagery, the gym fighters always lost.
“What I came up here to tell you, doc,” Calhoun explained, “is I’d like to work with you.”
“More than welcome as you know. But I can’t promise you money right off, Ruby. You help bring along Irish Eddie, we’ll talk money when he begins to make it.”
Calhoun offered his hand.
“It’s a deal,” Lowry assured him.
Jennifer did not appear surprised to see him standing in her doorway.
“How you feeling, Ruby?” she asked without embracing him.
Once inside, she came to him. When their long embrace was done, there was nothing more to be said.
Ruby Calhoun had come home.
Every time Calhoun watched Irish Eddie Sykes work out, the boy looked better. He appeared, even in the brief weeks since Calhoun had first seen him, to have grown. He was going to be a full-size light-heavy.
“We’re taking our time with Eddie,” Doc Lowry assured Calhoun, “putting him on the first time, four rounds, in Paterson. Can you get down to watch him? He says you’ve taught him a lot.”
“I’d like to bring my old lady along. Who you putting Eddie against?”
“Just an opponent. Maybe he’ll pick up a trick or two against an older hand. That’ll give him confidence. He needs confidence. Winning big, his first time out, that’ll give him confidence.”
Sitting ringside, between Jennifer and Lowry, with Irish Eddie already in the ring, Ruby saw the opponent coming down the aisle in a green silk robe. He was wearing a dark cap, for some reason, over his eyes, leaving only half his face showing. On either side two corner men, each half a head taller than the opponent, were keeping him straight on toward the ring. Ruby had the impression that, were it not for the two heavies, one black and one white, the opponent would be wavering on his way. Something about him struck Calhoun as vaguely familiar. A corner man gave his man a steadying hand as he climbed through the ropes. Then he took off his cap, and he was wearing hyperoptic lenses. For a moment Ruby got a flash of the man’s eyeballs, behind the glasses. Then he took them off and Ruby heard the snap of the glass case as he pocketed the glasses in his robe.
“I didn’t know the man was blind, for God’s sake,” Doc Lowry said aloud to nobody in particular.
“Poor man,” Jennifer whispered to Ruby, “he don’t have a tooth left in his head. He’s gone bald, too.”
The man’s skull wasn’t shaven, that was true: it was bald as a billiard ball. Blind, bald and toothless—but who was he? Jennifer sounded as though she knew.
When the man came to the center of the ring Ruby perceived, just by the way he was standing, that he wasn’t hearing the referee’s instructions.
“I’ve seen this turkey before,” Ruby stroked his chin, trying to recall this battered forty-year-old.
“Salazar,” she told him.
“Oh, for God’s sake, it really is. ’’Ruby realized that this was the same rough kid who’d cut him up so badly at Madison Square that the
fight had had to be stopped. Well, he realized, sitting back, there’s a man who’s had a harder life than I’ve had.
It was particularly pitiful because, it was obvious, Salazar was going to take another beating tonight. Salazar’s name, on his program, Ruby saw, was simply, “V. Jones.” It was plain that Salazar had been barred by the Boxing Commission medics.
Lowry claimed to have no memory of a fighter named Salazar, though he had a good memory. Ruby’s conjecture was that he’d known all along who Irish Eddie’s opponent would be. It came to Ruby now that Lowry had been looking for an opponent who would test his young fighter for him; that that was what Lowry had meant when he’d spoken of his boy “picking up a few tricks.”
Salazar, shoved out of his corner by a handler, raced across the ring and landed a corking left to Eddie’s jaw, buried his chin in Eddie’s shoulder, cracked a right and a left to Eddie’s head, came up with the point of his skull into Eddie’s face then held. Eddie was bleeding from a cut above his right eye and there was still two minutes to go in the round. They swung about the ring, holding each other. Eddie couldn’t get loose and his right eye began flooding with blood.
Lowry got the bleeding stopped between rounds, but, a moment after the bell rang, Salazar opened it again with a butt. “What has he got in his gloves?” Eddie asked Lowry at the end of the round.
“You got him, Eddie!” someone hollered from ringside. “You’re gettin’ your blood all over him!”
“He can’t even see you, Eddie,” the corner man assured Eddie.
“How come then he’s knockin’ my brains out?” Eddie wanted to know.
“He’s listenin’, Eddie, he’s catchin’ vibrations off your feet. Get up on your toes and he won’t be able to find you.”
Eddie came out for the third on his toes and, for a moment, Salazar was bemused, boggling his head about in search of the blurred shadow he’d been pursuing.
“To your left, José! To your left!” the corner man instructed the old fighter. “In the corner!” Salazar went directly to Eddie then but this time Eddie was ready. He got his glove firmly about Salazar’s Adam’s apple, which not only kept him from butting but stopped him from breathing as well. Salazar banged both gloves, wide open, against Eddie’s ears but Eddie held the Adam’s apple as if his life depended upon his grasp of it.
It began to appear as if it did. Between rounds Salazar didn’t sit down, but just stood boggling his head, wondering where his opponent had gone.
“I hope he doesn’t put his glasses on,” Eddie told Lowry.
“If this is how you men want to fight, it’s all right with me,” the referee told Lowry’s corner man.
For the remainder of the fight Eddie’s defense was to dig his head under Salazar’s armpit and whack away with both hands, blind, in hope of hitting something. Eddie Sykes kept his feet but he took a terrible beating. At the end of the fight the referee waved his hands above both fighters’ heads: draw.
Calhoun thought Salazar had won. If what he’d won could be called a fight. He felt badly on the accounts of both fighters: for Salazar, for being still in there taking merciless beatings; for Sykes for having taken a beating which had done him no good whatsoever.
Had Vincent De Vivani looked up from his deck to see the President of the United States standing, his hand extended in greeting, he would have been hardly more astonished as he was to see Adeline Kelsey, furs and all, smiling sweetly down.
He shook her hand mechanically and motioned her into a chair.
“I’m Adeline Kelsey.”
“I know. I know.”
“How do you know?” Still smiling sweetly.
“The papers. Your photograph. I saw you several times at the trial.” He was regaining control now. “How is your client?”
“I have no client, lieutenant. I’m not an attorney. I’m a bailbond woman.”
“I know. I know.”
“So far as I know, Ruby Calhoun is alive and well and living in Jersey City, New Jersey.”
De Vivani merely sat there, waiting. It wasn’t up to him to ask the questions. She had come to see him. Let her explain herself.
“I came here to let you know you arrested the right man, lieutenant.”
“If I was the cause of a man spending one night in jail,” he assured her, “for a crime he had not committed, I would feel terrible.”
“I thought he was innocent. I no longer think so.”
De Vivani scented danger. She may have been sent by Nedwick. He waited.
“The man who did the shooting at the Melody Bar and Grill was Ruby Calhoun.”
“The court will decide that, madam.”
“They will decide it—but will they decide it right?”
“I believe in the jury system, madam. What the jury decides I will abide by.”
Adeline had assumed that she could, by surprising him, throw a small scare into this big cop. She perceived now that she may have frightened him more than that. He was backing from her, trying to get away from every question.
“I want to talk to Nick Iello and Dexter Baxter, lieutenant.”
“Madam, I cannot help you. For one thing, I have no idea where either of these men may be. Secondly, if I did, it would not be ethical for me to lead you to them.”
“Then the state’s attorney will do.”
“Will do what?” He was unable to follow her.
“I’ll talk to the state’s attorney.”
She felt his deep sense of relief, at the chance she now offered him, of passing the buck higher up.
“This is De Vivani,” he told the prosecutor’s office, “have Mr. Scott phone me as soon as he returns.”
“He’ll be back within the hour,” De Vivani told her.
“I’ll wait.”
He fumbled among his papers, unable to concentrate, while she waited. Every time he looked up, she smiled sweetly.
He didn’t smile in return. When Scott phoned back he handed the phone to Adeline and heard her make an appointment for the following morning.
“Thank you, lieutenant,” she thanked him when she had risen to leave, “you’ve been most helpful.”
De Vivani sat back and closed his eyes for a full minute after she had left. He felt as if he’d been fanned by the wings of death. Then he grinned to himself. Old Hump Scott was going to have his hands full tomorrow morning.
Hump Scott never gave the lady time enough to make a handful.
He received her courteously, but in the manner of a man whose time is limited. When she said, “I’ve been badly mistaken about Ruby Calhoun,” he showed so little indication of shock that it was almost as though that was what he’d expected her to say.
“He is a dangerous, dangerous man,” she assured the state’s attorney, somewhat taken aback at his indifference. “It is possible that he does not know, even now, that he murdered those people. Ruby Calhoun in subject to ungovernable rages.”
“That will be a matter for the jury to decide, madam,” he repeated De Vivani’s advice.
“I believe that the recantations were gotten by fraud and threats of force. I want to talk to both witnesses.”
Scott shook his head sorrowfully. “Madam, for one thing, Dexter Baxter has done a complete disappearing act. My conjecture is that he has left the state and will not reappear until after the trial. I have had no contact with this young man and I doubt the defense will be able to find him. Dexter Baxter had had considerable experience in disappearing himself. I can be of no use to you there at all, madam.”
“And Iello?”
“Madam, you are in the wrong office to get information from a recanting witness. Iello is going to testify for Mr. Epstein. The man you want to see is Epstein.”
“No, Mr. Scott, the man I want to see is yourself. Because Nick Iello is not going to testify for Mr. Epstein. He is going to testify for the state. He is going to recant his recantation.”
“Madam,” Scott asked, eyeing her more closely, “what put that idea into
your head?”
“I know he has already been pressured by your people. I know he is a man who can be made to change his story back to his original one as easily as he was talked out of it by Mr. Kerrigan. All I want you to tell me is where Nick Iello is.”
“Madam, I have not the faintest flash notion of where Mr. Iello is. And, if I did, it would not be ethical for me to advise you of his present address.”
If this witness recanted his recantation, Scott began thinking to himself, it would be the biggest break of anything that had ever happened to him in his whole career in the courts.
“I’m sorry, madam,” he told Adeline, rising to excuse himself, “I can do nothing for you.”
Late that night Adeline Kelsey received a phone call from a woman whose voice she did not recognize:
“Go to the Chicken Shack, nineteen-hundred-nineteen Hamilton Concourse, right before you reach the tollway. Repeat: nineteen-hundred-nineteen Hamilton Concourse, right before you reach the highway.”
And hung up.
Adeline came into the Chicken Shack wearing shades, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a dark, open-collared shirt. Behind those shades she could have been anywhere between twenty-one and thirty.
“How’s the chicken?” she asked the little round man wearing an unclean apron.
“He dropped dead not an hour ago. The end was sudden. How about a duck?”
“Is duck on the menu?”
“Didn’t have any when we had that printed. One came in right after the chicken died. Said he wanted to give hisself up.”
She knew by his grin that all this was very funny. She smiled.
“Give me the half-chicken.”
He held himself back from asking, “Which half?”
Waiting on other customers, after he had served her, he appeared to be forgetting her presence.
“Coffee, please,” she reminded him. And, after he’d brought it, she sat stirring the cup thoughtfully until she caught his eye. Then flicked her tongue meaningfully into her spoon. He blinked.
He came to her again after the other customers had left, and his manner had changed.
“Anything else, madam?” he inquired politely.
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