by John Roeburt
* * * *
The tangled skein…and could he loom the fabric? The face of Nina Troy looked over his loom…
And the final cloth, Devereaux wondered…would it fit perfectly to her taste?
CHAPTER NINE
Part 1.
The face was small, a child’s size, with petal lips rouged into a Cupid’s bow. It sat perversely upon a great mould of flesh that ballooned her oil-speckled overalls middle and rear. She was Mamie Regan. She spoke with a surge from deep inside like pumping bellows, but the voice outside was thin, with an odd chirping nuance.
Devereaux strained to hear her, and understand. They were close together, as if wedged in a vise front to front, in the cubicle that was the gas station office. Yet her register did not quite carry the distance from tongue to ear.
Outside, the two gasoline pumps stood on a flat of sand and gravel, like an oasis in a desert. Neat ground lines, painted a sunlight white, fenced off Mamie Regan’s business from the outland beyond. This section of the highway was uninhabited and solitary; there were no roadside stands or dwellings, and the macadam ribbon of highway north and south stretched in a gentle roll into a blue infinity of sky.
The detective was staring at her, as if with one eye centered in his forehead, like a boy at a carnival exhibit.
But her look at him was tolerant. As if her disability and freakishness was an ancient pain, as old as birth, and now the scar had healed and the covering over it was hard and tough.
And she smiled, not at herself, but as in some gross and grotesque contentment with her plight as a woman. Her oddity was her identity now, her special and unique personality, and a collateral property, too. It advertised her, raised her to notice. It was a giant outdoor poster on the New Jersey Highway that drew truckdrivers and salesmen and tourists, to stop at her station, to buy gasoline and oil and coca-cola, and to revisit the carnival exhibit.
She said again, “You’re wrong, mister. Your ideas are wrong. Any harm came to Rocky Star, it didn’t come from any Regan.”
Devereaux backed away, to fit himself into a corner of the cubicle like a man at bay. His arms were stiff and severe at his sides, not to jostle the pyramids of sealed oil cans that flanked him now.
The detective said, “The Regans organized a lynching party when Rocky Star killed your husband in the ring.”
He could count the lashes over her eyes. They were straight and standing like bristles, doll-like, with mascara hard and crusted on them. But no sign in the eye, no flame rekindled by his reminder, no remembered emotion. Her round blue eyes were flat; his thrust was a pellet glancing off a sheet of glass.
She shook her head almost vaguely, as if today a stranger to this old chapter of her life. “No Regan laid a hand on Rocky Star.” Now the birdlike speech that made the thinnest sound was suddenly underscored by the massive mould beneath. The body seethed and rose to hold its bulge like a volcano about to break the earth. “One of my brothers did harm Rocky Star, I’d kill him!”
Devereaux frowned in a show of perplexity. The name Rocky Star had been said with a caress. Even more…like the spoken adoration for a Saint. He read her pose again, saw her hands clench in omen against some known or nameless assaulter of Rocky Star, The Tiger Man. If the pose was a true one, it refuted the facts he held against her. The ring death of Kid Coogan, husband to Mamie…and the Regan enmity for Rocky Star, all the Regans. Brett Carter’s report, and Solowey’s. If the pose were a true one…?
Devereaux said, “You talk and act like you’re for Rocky Star…like he counts with you?”
Mamie’s head nodded as if in a fervent and voiceless amen.
The detective said, “You’ll have to make me believe that!”
She nodded again, as if eager to make her case in proof. And then suddenly, with extraordinary agility, she was lost to the cubicle and moving across the flat of sand and gravel.
An automobile Sounding its horn stood before the two gasoline pumps.
Soon she was back in the cubicle, to play the cash register, then to find the stub of a pencil and make some record in an oil-stained notebook.
She turned to resume with Devereaux. “Sorry you had to wait, but I’m here to sell gas. Am I for Rocky Star, you want to know? I’ll kiss his feet in church!”
She waited until the surge from deep inside formed new blades of speech. “My husband Andy, that was Kid Coogan, peace to him, was killed in that fight with The Tiger Man. So he was. And my brothers went after Rocky, so they did. But that was all there ever was to it. I set Father Lennon on my brothers, and they calmed down pretty fast. My husband Andy only took the risks of his trade, and when he died nobody was sorrier than The Tiger Man!”
She saw Devereaux’s dubious look, and continued, “It’s not in my imagination, mister. And it’s a side of The Tiger Man nobody knew. The great wonderful heart of the man!”
Her eyes fixed on the detective, and Devereaux sensed a moment of self-debate in her. “I swore never to tell this. The Tiger Man made me swear.” Now a hand described her surroundings. “Everything you see here. Owned by me, Mamie Regan. Mamie Regan, in the records of the County Office, for anybody to see. This station cost five thousand dollars to build and equip. Five thousand dollars…I used to think that much made a millionaire.”
Devereaux said, “You’re not really going to tell me you owe this to Rocky Star?”
Mamie said, “And five thousand more, in the bank. A cash reserve. I’d need a cash reserve, Rocky said. In case this business was slow in building up.”
“Rocky Star gave you ten thousand dollars.”
“In the dark. He didn’t want it broadcast. He didn’t want any publicity on it. A man like that, mister! He’s in the Good Book. His name is Jesus Christ.”
Devereaux said nothing. A brief here, for Rocky Star. A first good mark in the pugilist’s Life-Book. Reverence for the man Rocky Star, from Mamie Regan, widowed by The Tiger Man’s fists. It taxed his credulity…the surprise of it. And the contradiction of it, after the brother Aldo’s testimony…
The small quiet lengthened, then Devereaux edged around the pyramids of sealed oil cans to the door of the cubicle. They were close for a moment, again wedged in the vise front to front. She moved, scraping against him, dead to the sensation so far from the core of her, yet eager for the passing touch of the male.
Devereaux got out the door in a squirming motion. Behind him, he heard her say, “I hang his picture in my parlor, bless him. The frame is hand-rubbed gold. The Tiger Man in his boxing trunks. The beautiful Tiger Man…”
He had crossed the flat, got into his car and started it. He looked once more. The mammoth structure and the incongruously dainty face with the petal mouth rouged into a Cupid’s bow. She stood immobile on the flat, solid on the earth like a rooted growth, and tapering at the neck. As if the head were only the armature, and the sculptor was refusing it clay and completion as a score in his feud against womankind.
Devereaux notched the car in speed, and the Buick raced away. He could see her in his rear-view mirror. Still on the earth and impaled on the sky, but smaller and diminishing now, and soon lost.
Part 2.
The small man was gentle in speech and retiring, with flawless manners. He was scenting a freshly cut rose, holding the long stem with tender touch. The rose was burgundy red, with the look of velvet to its petals.
He passed the flower to Devereaux. “The Winston Churchill,” he said softly. “I named the rose after Winston Churchill.”
“You breed roses,” Devereaux said perfunctorily. As a question, it was superfluous. Two great greenhouses stood prominently on the estate grounds.
They were seated, Devereaux and his host, on iron garden furniture hammered into a Victorian fruit motif. In the shade of a towering umbrella that was gay with yellow stripes and tassels. The grounds were manicured, and everywhere on the periphery of the lawn proper there were vines and beds of flowers; hollyhocks and roses in dazzling variety, petunias and azaleas, pink a
nd white, and esoteric flowerings with neat celluloid name cards set by them.
The big house directly behind the seated pair was Swiss Chalet in its architecture, with leaded glass windows that refracted green and blue in the afternoon sun. A vaulted stained-glass window with ecclesiastical figures gave one wing of the house a cathedral look. The house was very high on a knoll, pressed to the low sky. The overlook was the Hudson River below a sheer cliff. Across the span of water was the Manhattan shoreline. It lay still, its odd cubism of sky towers half in a haze of smoking clouds.
Around the trim estate, girdling it at its farthest edge, was a high stone wall. On the top ledge of this wall, there was barbed-wire in three separate tiers, with lacings of what appeared to be thick coils of black cord. An electric defense this, against peepers, trespassers, and the uninvited. Devereaux had seen the Danger: High Voltage warning signs on the approach to the high gate.
In the farthest reaches of the grounds, where the high stone fence came to a corner, stood an eighteen-foot extension ladder. On it was an elderly man in working clothes, a gardener, presumably. He was poking with a long stick, to dislodge a creature from the web of barbed-wire and coils. A cat, charred to a crisp and unsightly. The cat had been electrocuted the night before. The barricade had its live electric charge only during the time from night to morning.
This sanctuary in the New Jersey Palisades had long lost its secret. Every policeman, and every reader of tabloids, knew its location, its quarter-million dollar cost, and its tenant. The tenant was Damon Marco, his wife Felice, and his retinue.
A man in a white steward’s coat, with Pickwickian tufts of hair on the sides of his skull, came up with a tray of tall iced drinks. His nose was large and bulbous, with varicose veins in the spatulate spread of the nostrils. The veins were red and they slithered under the skin like live worms with the man’s steady and characteristic sniffing. His eyes were downcast, in servility and shyness, but too patently, as he set the drinks down on separate rests pinned to the earth by a long steel rod. His chore done, he hurried away lightly and rapidly, in a stealth come of long practice and custom.
Devereaux smiled to himself. He well knew the houseman, and could interpret the fellow’s facial twitch and general jumpiness. It was the unnerving shock of Devereaux; the sight of the detective, inside the high gate, sunning on the lawn. Lou “The Flipper” Kogan was not kind or specie to his master, Damon Marco. The Flipper did not have Marco’s deep reserves of strength, the curious fatalism of the gambler who must win. But even more than win, or lose, who must play. The Flipper lacked the iron, the imagination, the ice, and the happy biology. Marco was sound of body, with no illnesses or infirmities of record, an early riser and a good sleeper, and a hearty eater whose ingestion, digestion and elimination had on occasions provoked amused-unamused newspaper editorials.
The Flipper enjoyed none of these fine natural blessings. His strength, when force was required, was his pistol. His calm, that measure of inner equilibrium men must have to stimulate balance and sanity, was heroin. The Flipper was a drug eater, with a long police history of unsustaining cures.
Marco raised his glass and sipped the beverage. “Fruit punch,” he said.
Devereaux said, “I’m waiting for answers.”
Marco said pleasantly, “I welcomed you first as a guest, Devereaux. This is my home. I have a high opinion of you, I enjoy your company. I read your book: Twenty Years A Cop. I have it in my permanent library, with a morocco cover with gold tooling made specially for it. Come inside and see for yourself. I listen to you on the TV. “Crack-Up,” with Tough Cop Johnny Devereaux the Host of the show. I never miss a date. I’m a fan. I admire you.”
The diction was good, pleasant on the ear, with only the barest trace of an earlier semi-literate Marco. Marco had studied phonetics in latter years; had striven mightily to secrete or lose the gross, gruff and unseemly earlier man.
Devereaux watched a woman cross the wide flagstone patio, then move in an arc remote from Marco and the detective. Middle-aged, with gray hair tinted to purple, and nicely braided into a crown. She walked loosely, in a free stride that was young and supple. In the shade of a willow tree, she sat down, to resume with a petit-point needle and a piece of cloth set tightly into a steel ring.
She was Felice Marco, wife of Damon, mother of grown sons, the suburban matron, and lady of grace. Marco’s principled home living, his pride in Felice and his sons, was widely understood, even admired. His paterfamilias, as much as his notorious side, was parcel to his legend. The gun moll or the brightly plumed wench; the ladies in silks and lingerie, with pouting mouths and stenciled faces, with rouged nipples and the thrusting pelvis, the ivory nudes on platform heels; were never Marco’s. Murder, yes; murder by torch and ice-pick. But always the fine moralistic boundary that excluded sex and promiscuity.
A gangland joke, in the time of the earlier, younger Marco, remarked on his manhood. What licks Marco is no balls, so the joke went. But soon after that, the carpers and the scoffers and the jokers were silenced. Thirty-seven murders, all attributed to Marco. Marco had forever scotched the bawdy rumor by this stunning exhibition of himself. He stood raised on a pedestal, nude to the idolater’s inspection. Marco had balls; there was never any question of it.
Devereaux looked Marco over critically. The squat, composed little man was immaculate in white linen trousers, white shirt that fell in fine adjustment to his white-braid trouser belt, and white canvas shoes. There was a scrubbed look to Marco, an antiseptic look. Thirty-seven murders, the detective thought to himself. A butcher in a spotless white apron. Where were the splashings of blood, and how did Marco remove them. By what alchemy…?
The detective said, “I’ve been cozened nicely. Now let’s settle down to my reason for coming. I’m here as a cop.”
Marco said, “I don’t open the gates to cops.”
Devereaux said, “If we’re going to be technical…” He half-rose from his seat. “I’ll go, and then I’ll come back.”
Marco said patiently, “You can bother me with a warrant, or a subpoena. But you’ll bother yourself more.” A hand motioned, and there was a bare smile in his eyes. “Sit down, Devereaux. Anybody but you, I’d throw out. But I’ll talk to you. You can be a cop with me.”
Devereaux pressed his lips into a tight line. It was goading to be patronized. And humiliating. But this was Marco, a superior and insulated man who let paper storms subside outside his gates. Schooled in politics, and bedfellow with politicians, Marco was also a student of law, a supreme tactician in the legal counterblow.
Devereaux said, “Rocky Star. Please stay on the one-track now. Rocky Star, and you.”
Marco said, “How much do you know?”
The detective lifted his brows slightly. There were always surprises to a crossfire with Marco. Marco’s style of battle was never formular.
Devereaux said, “You owned The Tiger Man, by some secret arrangement between you. Hobie Grimes was manager of record, but only a paper front.”
Marco’s look was bemused and reminiscent now. “I saw him fight, a snot-nosed kid in rags. A street fight, Devereaux, down on Cherry Street under the bridge. Four toughs against Rocco. Rocco was knocked cold, but the kid impressed me. You had to kill him, to keep him down.
“I had two boys home, Devereaux. I got a feeling for boys. I had one of my people carry Rocco to a drugstore, to get patched up.” A smile crossed Marco’s face. “I asked Rocco why he fought out on the street. And four against one. He showed me a big gold tooth. Right in front, where it spoiled his smile. A gold tooth, mind you, like this was fifty years ago.”
Marco’s face creased seriously, “A gold tooth like that is bad for an adolescent boy. There’s no aesthetics, he’s a freak. Some lousy dental mechanic had put it into Rocco’s mouth. Not a dentist mind you, but a dental mechanic…”
Devereaux said impatiently, “You’re not telling me a thing.”
Marco said, “It gripes me how cops are unsocial. A
tin-badge detective like you who can’t enjoy a good human story.”
Devereaux said, “I’ve been here over an hour. I’ve had all the rides on the carousel I want.”
Marco said, “I made something of Rocco Starziani. But not right away. It wasn’t even in my mind that day. I wasn’t down on Cherry Street shopping for street fighters I could develop into pugilists. I wasn’t even interested in the fight game. I was down to a reunion. Spaghetti Veneziana and good dago wine, to celebrate the old days. I gave Rocco fifty dollars, to buy himself a porcelain tooth. I gave him my private telephone number. He could call up sometime, if he liked. I left it up to him.”
Marco continued, “Rocco telephoned me a week later. He wanted to be a fighter, and would Marco please help him.” There was a small pause, then Marco’s stare fixed solemnly on Devereaux. “He had the stuff, but I don’t have to tell you. It’s in the books. On his way up, I was his Father. He sat at my knee, and took advice. All right, I owned him, and it paid off for me. But it paid off for Rocco too. The crowd followed him, he was Mister Big. He drove a Cadillac, and shook hands with the President of the United States.”
Devereaux said, “Your ownership of Rocky Star was a secret.”
Marco said, “So as not to embarrass good friends of mine.”
Devereaux said, “Meaning the Boxing Commission has regulations against Undesirables in the Prize Game. That’s why you hired Hobie Grimes. He was your screen, your cover.”
Marco shrugged indifferently. The detective said, “When did the row between you and Rocky begin?”
Marco shook his head. “There was never any row.”
Devereaux said, “I won’t believe that, Marco.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too improbable. The purses grew into important money. Gross gate receipts totaling a quarter-million dollars, when The Tiger Man became Champion. Plus that, the other monies that pour in. Testimonials, paid public appearances, and stuff. Money like that breeds dissatisfaction and conflict. And Rocky was a long way from your ragged adolescent with the gold front tooth. He now had an ego as developed as his fists. He could think for himself; he could analyze a column of figures and see where he was being short-changed.”