Death Wore Gloves

by Ross H. Spencer

  Curtin heaved himself to his feet and Willow said, “By the way, those cigarettes are mine.”

  Curtin said, “Yeah, that’s right—I got my mind on other things.” He lit one of Willow’s cigarettes and dropped the pack onto the coffee table. “One more question.”

  Willow brushed away a yawn. “Yeah?”

  “What’s the name of that old centipede downstairs?”

  “Strotman—Martha Strotman.”

  “She gallops around naked all the time?”

  “Not up here, she doesn’t!”

  “Got her phone number?”

  “No, but she’s in the book. Why?”

  Curtin opened the door and winked. “Like you say, some got it and some don’t.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Curtin, hard-up is one thing but oh, my God!”

  Curtin blew Willow a kiss.

  Willow gave Curtin the finger, locked the door, washed the coffeecups, and went back to bed. Buck Curtin was closing—slowly, but with the grinding certainty of a glacier. He’d sniffed out more than half of it, and when he tumbled to the Wow-Wee Calendar business he’d be in the driver’s seat. Curtin wasn’t a flashy cop, he didn’t possess the sprinter’s early speed, and he wasn’t a spectacular stretch-runner, but you could be sure that he was back there somewhere, poking through the rubble and combing the ashes, and you could bet your last cigar that he’d be along eventually, bearing somebody’s ass on his pike. When Chicago Homicide ran into a tough one, it was always Buck Curtin who came out of the bullpen to wrap it up.

  Curtin hadn’t mentioned Casey Bucknell, and he wouldn’t—not until he’d processed Bucknell through his logic apparatus. Curtin rarely discussed anything until he was reasonably certain of its place in the scenario. He’d held back on Sister Rosetta and he’d hold back on Bucknell until his exact equational value could be determined. But what if Curtin dug up every inch of it—Gladys’s party-girl antics, the Wow-Wee photographs, the half-million in Bucknell’s will, the blackmail, the whole seamy shot? Gladys Hornsby didn’t give a damn now, and neither did Tuthill C. Willow. Curtin would pitch Sister Rosetta’s ass into the nearest booby hatch and the circus could toddle on down the road. Willow stretched and drowsed with a warm feeling of well-being, glad that it was behind him, focusing on the possibility of moving in with Gladys Hornsby. He wondered if Gladys could cook. Probably not, but it really didn’t matter, they’d get by. They deserved each other, two stray dogs, sniffing, frolicking, growling, fighting, fucking—they’d mess it up in due time, but it’d be great fun while it lasted, and who could say that they wouldn’t find something this time around, something that would glue them together for the rest of the way? Willow slept until nearly one o’clock in the afternoon—more than two hours without a nightmare. For Willow that was unusual.

  41

  Thursday

  It was an almost new Tuthill Willow who departed his River Grove apartment at two-thirty in the afternoon. The lines were still in his face, the slight sag still in his jowls, the early gray still tipped his dark hair, but he was freshly showered and shaven, neatly dressed, un-hungover, clear eyed, square shouldered, with spring in his step, and at forty-nine years he couldn’t have looked a great deal newer. He drove south instead of north, then west instead of east, shedding the familiarity of his old haunts, like a youngster clutching his very first one-dollar bill, unwilling to share a penny of the treasure, a forty-nine-year-old kitten in catnip, reveling in his anticipation of awakening in the night to again feel the warm satin of Gladys Hornsby snuggled tight against him. He found a likely-looking spot off the beaten track, just west of York Road in south Elmhurst, Hilda’s Rathskeller, located in the basement of a carryout chop-suey joint. He parked his fractured Buick Regal and went in, straddling a barstool and dropping a ten-dollar bill on the bar. It was a time for quiet reflection, a time to take the whole damned thing apart and put it back together again, this time so it would work.

  Hilda’s Rathskeller was dim and cool and the bar was under the sharp-eyed supervision of a stout elderly lady who was just busting at the seams to discuss baseball, and Willow’s alarm systems began to go off like popcorn. There aren’t a great many female dyed-in-the-wool baseball addicts, but when you’ve met one, and when you’ve indicated that you know a left-field foul pole from a bottle of liniment, you are in more trouble than Jimmy Carter ever dreamed of. This one owned the place. Her name was Hilda, Hilda Schluppermann, two p ’s, two n’s, she told him, and she’d followed the Chicago Cubs since she’d been potty-trained. Hilda Schluppermann rattled off batting averages, slugging aver-ages, fielding averages, reach percentages, and runs-batted-in totals with a delivery as rapid as a tobacco auctioneer’s. She knew seating capacities, attendance figures, and fence distances. She knew the Cub farm system inside out—the kids who were ready for a whack at the big show, and those who’d never get into Wrigley Field without tickets. Hilda remembered Riggs Stephenson and Kiki Cuyler and Billy Herman and Charlie Grimm and Woody English and Pat Malone and Guy Bush, to mention just a few, and when she’d been eighteen she’d gone to bed with Cyclone Higgenbottom—at the Melbourne Hotel on Racine Avenue, she said, third floor, east side of the hall. Willow noted that he’d never heard of Cyclone Higgenbottom and Hilda said, “No, Cy wasn’t around long, but if he could of hit like he could eat pussy, he’d of been in the Hall of Fame forty years ago.”

  Willow nodded one of those faraway nods and attempted to discourage her by paging through a Chicago Sun-Times he’d found on the bar, but discouraging Hilda Schluppermann was like trying to discourage the Colorado River, and she’d continued, waxing eloquent, reciting that old Tinker to Evers to Chance poem, rhapsodizing about those dear dead days beyond recall when the Chicago Cubs had tom the National League to pieces, and when Willow spotted a tear glistening on Hilda’s leathery cheek he’d been on the verge of checking out to seek surroundings more in keeping with his mood. That was when Ike walked in. Good old Ike. Ike to the rescue. Ike was a scrawny, bespectacled man, the professorial type, and Willow didn’t know Ike from a bag of busted bagels, but he was overjoyed to see him because Ike was a regular at Hilda’s Rathskeller, apparently, and he knew something of baseball, which took the pressure off of Willow. Before Willow could have said Gabby Hartnett, Hilda Schluppermann and Ike were into it. Hilda kicked it off by casually mentioning that the Cubs’ Ryne Sandberg was destined to become the greatest second-baseman in baseball history. Ike pondered Hilda’s remark for one-tenth of a second and said, “Mule shit!”

  Hilda bristled. “Whaddaya mean, ‘Mule shit’?”

  Ike said, “I mean look up Charlie Gehringer sometime! I mean look up Eddie Collins! I mean look up Lajoie! I mean look up—”

  Hilda yelled, “Look up my ass! It took Gehringer nineteen years to steal a hunnert and eighty-four fucking bases! How many Sandberg gonna steal in nineteen years—five hunnert?”

  Ike said, “Yeah, well, back when Gehringer stole a base, it meant something. Nowadays they steal in the ninth when they’re parked on a twelve-run lead. That ain’t baseball, that’s fucking frivolity!”

  Hilda said, “Eddie Collins hit forty-seven home runs in twenty-five years! How many Sandberg gonna hit?”

  Ike said, “Sandberg’s hitting a rabbit-ball! Collins was swinging at a lump of coal! They’ve lowered the pitcher’s mound, they’ve shrunk the strike zone—Hilda, you oughta try talking sense for a change!”

  Hilda said this and Ike said that and Hilda said something else and they droned on and on and on while Willow sat at the bar, losing track of the argument, staring at the Chicago Sun-Times spread open before him, four words leaping at him from the dense jungle of print on page two of the movie section—Becky Johnson Comes Home.

  Becky Johnson Comes Home was running at the Sweetwater Theater in the thirty-seven hundred block of South Harlem Avenue, along with something called Lesbian Capers. Willow ducked the idea, let it go by, chased it, caught it, and wrestled with it. He was no more than a half-hour’s driv
e from the Sweetwater Theater and he had absolutely nothing to do with the remainder of his day. Why not? Becky Johnson Comes Home would provide him with a wealth of ribbing material. If he knew more about the movie, he’d really be able to hang it on Gladys, he’d be able to say, “Hey, Becky, show me how you did it in the picture!” Willow grinned, watching it unfold on the screen of his mind—Gladys would feign anger and she’d throw her pillow at him, and he’d throw it back, and Gladys would cuss, and he’d whack her on her naked ass, and she’d show him how she’d done it in the picture, and he’d leer and make a remark about what a privilege it was, living with an honest-to-God fucking movie star. That had been one of the mainstays of their relationship—Willow teasing her, probing for a nerve, Gladys pretending that he’d hit one and attacking him with false ferocity. Nine times out of ten these mock confrontations had wound down in the bedroom, but there’d been occasions when they’d run their course on the living-room couch or on the kitchen floor, and once it had happened on the Belmont Avenue elevated platform. He knew her like he knew his own license number, he knew to the inch just how far he could push her before she really took offense, and she knew that he knew, and they’d always gotten along like a pair of cattle thieves.

  He found the telephone booth, called the Sweetwater Theater, and got a recording, a woman’s voice—“The Sweetwater Theater’s box office opens at six o’clock. Becky Johnson Comes Home will be shown at six-fifteen, at eight-forty, and at eleven-oh-five. Lesbian Capers will be shown at seven twenty-five, at—” Willow hung up. To hell with Lesbian Capers. He checked his watch. Going on four o’clock—plenty of time for a few cool ones. He returned to his barstool as Hilda Schluppermann spun away from Ike, her face red with frustration. She looked at Willow. “You there! Whadda you think of Ryne Sandberg?”

  Willow didn’t hesitate. He said, “Undoubtedly destined to become the greatest second-baseman in baseball history!”

  Ike said, “Mule shit!”

  Willow said, “Whaddaya mean, ‘Mule shit’?”

  Ike said, “I mean look up Charlie Gehringer sometime! I mean look up Eddie Collins! I mean look up Lajoie! Christ, Nap Lajoie was in the Hall of Fame before they turned on the water! Only way Sandberg gonna get in the Hall of Fame is on a guided tour! Why, Sandberg couldn’t carry Lajoie’s jock—”

  Hilda Schluppermann was smiling at Willow. She banged a Kennessy’s Light Lager onto the bar. “This one’s on the house, sweetheart, drink hearty! One meets so few men who know the first damn thing about baseball!”

  42

  Thursday

  The Sweetwater Theater had been named in honor of the chain-store magnate who’d put it up back in ’33, white-haired, sombrero-wearing, six-gun-toting old Benjamin R. Sweetwater. The structure had been patterned along the lines of an adobe bunkhouse and in Ben Sweetwater’s heyday it had scheduled nothing but western double features starring Tim McCoy, Johnny Mack Brown, Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, and the like. Ben Sweetwater had been an incurable cowboy buff who’d made no secret of the fact that he’d built his theater to provide himself with a constant source of western shoot-’em-ups, and he’d been known to spend twelve-hour days in the Sweetwater’s projection booth, watching western feature couplings four and five times running. He’d dropped dead in late ’38 during the closing chase scene of Warriors of Sundown Canyon and with his sudden demise had begun the Sweetwater Theater’s long process of deterioration. The traditional solid-western bill of fare had been abandoned, the Sweetwater had ditched its weekly Bank Nite, it’d stopped passing out chinaware to its female patrons, Screeno had been canceled, and people had stayed away by the thousands. Willow remembered the Sweetwater well. He’d seen his alltime favorite motion picture there, just before he’d been shipped to Korea. He’d watched The Third Man in Saturday-afternoon solitude, and he’d walked out on the accompanying Charlie Chan film just to return to the sidewalk where he could associate with other human beings. The Sweetwater had been on the skids then, from there it had slid into X-rated slime, and now it was just a cut above a pigsty and not a very thick cut at that. A portly woman with hairy ears and a goiter punched out Willow’s six-dollar ticket, and a skinny, drooling man with a whiskey nose accepted it and grunted, “Have gool even.”

  There was a mossy mausoleum scent about the Sweetwater, the kind that takes years to arrive and never goes away. The floor of the tiny lobby was cluttered with plastic soft-drink cups, the beige stucco walls were chipped, chocolate-smeared, and covered with four-letter-word graffiti, the candy showcase was barren, and the glass of the inoperative popcorn machine was clouded with grease. Willow watched a mammoth cockroach attempting to negotiate a pile of dusty popcorn and for just a moment he was reminded of Lawrence of Arabia, not knowing exactly why. He took a seat next to the south wall in the back row and he glanced around to take inventory of his fellow lechers, seeing precisely what he’d expected to see—seedy, yawning, rheumy-eyed older men, a few fidgeting, giggling kids, and a gaunt, long-haired character who studied Willow with a wistful smile and soulful, starving eyes. Then the houselights dimmed and Becky Johnson came home.

  Willow had seen one X-rated moving picture in his life, a classic entitled Descent into Ecstasy in which an airplane pilot had bailed out of a burning Piper Cub to parachute into a swimming pool surrounded by a bevy of unclothed young damsels who’d hauled him out of the water, stripped him, and taken a great many liberties with his body. Willow had fallen asleep during the first reel. Becky Johnson Comes Home was technically better than Descent into Ecstasy—the sound was full and undistorted, the photography was excellent, but the plot was a beagle. Dog or not, when Gladys Hornsby appeared on the screen, Willow was dumbfounded. Gladys was dark-haired, not blonde; her eyes were brown, not smoky-blue; she was forty, not thirty; and Willow would never have recognized her if she hadn’t taken off her clothing. It developed that Becky Johnson was a middle-aging New York City school teacher who’d returned to her old crossroads home town to take the position of principal at Kelly’s Corners High School, and barely in the nick of time, because the big football game was just around the corner and Kelly’s Corners hadn’t beaten arch-rival Poplar Junction since the crucifixion of Christ. Poplar Junction was heavily favored but Becky Johnson hadn’t spent twenty years in the big city for nothing. Becky appraised the situation with a canny eye before driving over to the Poplar Junction pool hall, where she was seduced on a billiards table by the local hustler before she planked down five thousand dollars on Kelly’s Corners to win. Immediately prior to game time, Becky stepped into the Kelly’s Corners dressing room, waved the coaches into the hall, locked the door behind her, and engaged in a heart-to-heart with her teenage gladiators. Five minutes later the locker-room doors came off their hinges and a horde of slavering young beasts stormed onto the playing field to whomp the Mother Machree out of Poplar Junction, 88–0. So much for the preliminaries. The victorious Kelly’s Corners athletes dressed hurriedly to head for Becky Johnson’s house, there to savor the promised fruits of triumph. Whatever Becky Johnson may have been, she was no welsher, and she peeled to the skin to handle her winners on an individual basis, rewarding each fuzzy-cheeked hero with a dazzling assortment of sexual changeups that sent him reeling dazedly into the Kelly’s Corners night. The coup-de-grace was yet to come—Becky Johnson had saved the Kelly’s Corners quarterback for dessert because she’d had an eye on this kid from the beginning, and the things Becky didn’t do to the goggle-eyed youngster were unworthy of mention. So ended Becky Johnson Comes Home and Willow took note of the graphics, his throat gorged with sickness, his hands clenching the arms of his seat. He got up, went to the men’s room, vomited, and walked the two blocks to his automobile, remembering a better day when the whole damned world hadn’t been on the auction block, and when stag films had been shown in somebody’s basement, but only after newspapers had been taped to the windows.

  43

  Thursday

  He drove back to River Grove, his mind stumbling
, his stomach doing somersaults. He parked in front of his blacked-out apartment building, coming listlessly up the walk, then stopping to listen to the shrill din emanating from the first floor—Martha Strotman’s voice, hoarse, pleading, “Come back, please, come back! Plunder my naked body, cast me into the foul depths of perdition, but come back, I beseech you—!” The vestibule door burst open and a man emerged, traveling at an extremely high rate of speed. The poor fellow’s eyes were bulging and sheer terror was stamped across his features. His shirttail snapped and crackled behind him, his pants were unzipped, he wore no socks, and his shoes were unlaced. He was bearing down on Willow like a runaway gravel truck and Willow attempted to get out of his way, but Willow’s reflexes weren’t what they’d once been. The impact was tremendous and Willow went down, flat on his back. The man crashed to the ground, rolled over, struggled to his knees, and gasped, “Out of my way, fool, you’re impeding a fucking officer of the law!”

  Willow yelled, “Curtin, wait a goddam minute, this is important!” He watched Lieutenant Buck Curtin fling himself into his black Ford sedan, he heard the engine spin, cough, and roar, he saw the Ford blast away from the curb like a Saturn rocket departing Planet Earth, its taillights rapidly fading to twin red pinpoints in the distance. Willow got to his feet and looked for his hat. He found two, his own and Buck Curtin’s. He didn’t hear her coming and she blindsided him at the belt line, driving him headlong into a clump of Japanese yews. She was on top of him like a beast of prey, her breath coming in heated short bursts, her eyes glowing like fox fire. Martha Strotman said, “Mr. Willow, how would you like to have a sizable reduction in rent?”