by John Roeburt
Devereaux’s eyes were hard on Marco. “Fifty percent of the net, or more, for Marco. And twenty percent say, for Hobie Grimes. And other expenses pared off the balance. The Tiger Man was left with pennies. In a situation like that, a row was inevitable, Marco. A showdown had to come. The Tiger Man had to square off in a big fight to win back possession of himself.”
Marco said, “All right, I won’t insult you with lies. It’s a long time over, and it’s nothing to me now. Rocky came to me to ask for a new deal. I tore up our contract.”
Devereaux said, “Now you are insulting me with lies.”
Marco smiled, “I didn’t finish. I let Rocky go, for a price. One hundred thousand dollars.”
Devereaux said, “A bad bargain for you. You were only surrendering half of the world’s champion! Two bouts, and you’d make that much for yourself.”
Marco shook his head. “It wasn’t as sure as that, Devereaux. Rocky was Champ, but he was going downhill. The crowd didn’t know it, the sportswriters didn’t know it. But I knew it. I kept Rocky under wraps, so it wouldn’t get out. Rocky was a nervous wreck. He wouldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep. He was on the bottle day and night. He wouldn’t work out, he wouldn’t train. Hand him his gloves, he’d scream like a maniac.”
Devereaux said, “Punch-drunk.”
Marco said, “Or he was back with his gold front tooth. I didn’t know, Devereaux. For a time, I thought it was an act. For my benefit. To worry me into freeing him from our contract. Anyhow, the way it looked to me, one hundred thousand dollars was a smart liquidation of a headache. The Tiger Man was taking too much of my time. I was fed up, Devereaux. I had other interests that were more important to me.”
Devereaux said, “Were you paid off?”
Marco said, “People pay me what they owe me.”
The detective said, “How many fights did The Tiger Man have, after he broke with you?”
Marco thought about it. “I can’t be sure. So much time has passed. One fight, two? Or even three? I lost track of Rocky; I lost interest. He was no longer an investment of mine.”
Devereaux said, “What happened to your feeling for boys?”
Marco smiled to it. “Rocky was no longer a boy. I wasn’t so sentimental about a man.”
Devereaux said, “Where is The Tiger Man?”
Marco said, “On that question, I’ll throw you out. You’re in my home, and I want you to behave like you know it.”
The detective said stubbornly, “I’m investigating the disappearance and possible murder of Rocky Star.”
“For that, you came to the wrong place, Devereaux. I told you about Rocky Star, all there is to tell as far as I am concerned. And where I stopped, period, because that was all there was to it. I was frank and open with you. So you wouldn’t be misinformed and confused. So you wouldn’t waste your valuable time in the future…”
Devereaux said, “So I wouldn’t expose Marco to public embarrassment.”
Marco was on his feet. “Another headline more or less, Devereaux. I’m used to headlines. When I don’t make one, the editors invent one. Tin-badge detectives like you invent one. I don’t pay any attention.”
Devereaux said, “The Tiger Man’s life was interwoven with yours. My theory about him is murder. I can’t just thank you for hospitality and good talk, and bow out of your gates. Or cross you off the top of the list of suspects!”
Marco had made a signal in the air. Lou “The Flipper” Kogan was coming toward them.
Marco said, “My apologies, Devereaux. I have a lady coming any minute. A dance teacher, all the way from Camden.” Marco’s smile was just a shade self-conscious. “My wife and me, we’re wallflowers at the Country Club. Every dance is a rhumba or a mambo…”
Devereaux said, “So you’re taking rhumba lessons.” Marco nodded. “So far, I’ve got two wooden legs. My wife, Felice, does better. But we have the best teacher. Estelle Dumont. Like I said, she comes here all the way from Camden. She teaches us right here on the lawn. Twice a week.”
Marco gestured to The Flipper. “Lou here will see you to your car, Devereaux.”
The Flipper started before Devereaux, and Marco came abreast of the detective to touch hands in farewell.
Devereaux refused the handshake, by ignoring Marco’s outstretched hand. Marco said, “My two sons, Devereaux. Frank’s a sophomore in college, and the older one graduates medical school next month. Frank’s like me. He doesn’t get indigestion because the company at the table is unsociable. But Charles, my oldest, is different. He’s sensitive to things. I have a school psychiatrist working with him…”
Marco pressed his point. “Headlines about Marco, I don’t worry. But it upsets Charles. If I worry, it’s because of Charles. Because headlines about Marco give Charles a bad time. With his teachers, with his girls, with his friends…”
Fingers brushed Devereaux’s arm lightly. “This son I’m crazy about, Devereaux. He’s something. He’s got a surgeon’s hands…all trained and ready for the world to use. It took a hundred years to make him, Devereaux. My grandfather in the old country, and my father, and me.”
Marco’s point was made. The soft tones of a father fondling the image of a son, but it penetrated like a blade. A bad time for Charles Marco, a bad time for Johnny Devereaux. Trust Marco to retaliate… Murder by contact. The butcher with the antiseptic look in the spotless white apron…
Outside the high gates, The Flipper opened Devereaux’s car door. He kept his gaze averted, to hide his jumpiness, but the twitch could be read in his cheek. And the characteristic sniffing that happened in set spaces of time, like spasms, was even louder than before.
A car drove up and stopped. A high-tonneaued sedan of some vintage. The door opened and a lady stepped out. Simply dressed, in a jersey skirt that outlined her bottom, as much as there was, and woefully thin legs. She wore spectacles, which she removed and placed carefully and secretively into a case, before passing through the high gate.
Estelle Dumont, the dance teacher from Camden, New Jersey, Devereaux told himself.
The detective got into his car, and The Flipper moved to close the door and depart. But he stood, transfixed and struck to rigidity, by the sight of the gun pointed at him.
“Ride with me, Flipper,” Devereaux ordered.
The Flipper worked his mouth, but speech didn’t come. His twitch rippled his skin and the prominent veins in his spatulate nose were slithering worms that threatened to break their cover.
Devereaux’s arm swung in an abrupt, measured arc, and the smart whack of metal left the Flipper’s outcry coughing and retching in his throat.
The Flipper climbed meekly into the car, to sit beside Devereaux.
Going down the incline, at that point where a fork in the private road connected with a Jersey State Road, the blood began to show on The Flipper’s cheek and jaw where the gun had broken the skin. It oozed, as if the skin were a porous sponge.
CHAPTER TEN
Part 1.
They stood apart, the man and the woman only a foot, but a world. She spoke as if her faculties were asunder.
“And the money…the other people’s money?”
The man in the mariner’s cap who was blanketed with sweat said, “I can’t worry about the morality of it. Not any more. Too much has happened! It’s stealing, sure…but without the money, I’m no good. I’ve got nowhere to go. Without money, freedom is a joke.”
She shook her head, as to an alien tongue. He continued, now with a flame in his voice, to relight fires that had cooled, to image Hope and seize it.
“We’ll travel light. No baggage. Just what’s on our backs. A slow trip away from here…to anywhere. Just away! No panic, nothing hurried. A bus, to wherever it goes. Then another bus. And later a train. And wherever we stop, a slow meal, a quiet hotel, a walk in the sun. We’ll let life flow back into us, slow and easy.”
She shook her head. Not to his speech now, because she hadn’t heard it. She moved trancelike, in the begi
nnings of suffocation and panic, in a room without doors or windows from which there was no exit.
* * * *
The Number Two Camera dollied in close to frame her face like a postage stamp. A brief emphasis, and then there was a quick teasing dissolve.
Now the monitoring screen showed another face. First full and close, and then smaller as the Number One Camera pulled back to show the rest of him. The Host, Tough Cop Johnny Devereaux, smiled stonily and made his short memorized recitation. Words that enticed, words of heraldic promise, they were.
The quick, suspended scene had been a television trailer, advertising the next week’s drama. Its title: Twist of Fate.
Soon a red button flashed, and the melee of grips and electricians commenced.
Devereaux fell in beside the actress, Nina Troy, to stare at her curiously. Her eyes looked burned out, and she was still asunder. As if the unreal and her own reality were one mixture. As if she could simulate pain only by stern requisition from deep remembered layers in herself.
The detective turned away, to find his own dressing room. He was feeling an irritation he could not smother. Actors and acting confounded him. They made reality a spoof—a canard. He preferred things categorical, hard and true, and clearly indexed…life in one great rational file. A fact was so, and fiction derided truth. The school for drama was a school for liars.
In his policeman’s book anyhow, he told himself.
In his dressing room, his irritation fixed individually on Nina Troy. Who was she, he wondered, and would he ever really know? Could the woman and the actress be separated, and by what miracle of fission?
He filled his fingers with cold cream and stood before the square mirror set with electric bulbs.
And suddenly now, he felt foolish and disordered, and naive, shorn of his ingenuity, as if in this rare moment of self-sight, he felt the limits to himself…the narrow compression of it… Devereaux, the mechanical man, in a solitary and obsessive game called True Or False, in a world without players.
He’d quit this business, he promised himself. And soon, before Devereaux the detective was lost to Devereaux the actor.
Part 2.
The Buick completed a pattern of turns, left, right, then left again, as if finding the center to a jigsaw. The swirling dust in its wake hung in the air like a smokescreen. Soon the car stopped hard on its brakes in the rubble of a driveway.
Devereaux quit the car, to stand at the bottom of a hollow. On a rise, sheerly vertical as if on top of him, was a house. A detached red-brick, with vines of ivy everywhere on its face.
He began to ascend the high stone stoop. Thirty-six steps; he’d counted them another day. The day before it had been, when he had brought his captive to Coventry.
All around the house, as far as the eye’s scope, were weedy plots and the hulks of buildings that had gone, and the signs that promised new buildings to come. In the rear of the house, in its own hollow, were the New York Central Railroad tracks. A vacuum where sounds could collect, later to fuse with the hooting whistle of passing trains.
A vacuum into which The Flipper could pour his travail. The Flipper was in a back room, with sealed windows that looked down to the tracks.
On the wide porch that stood over the thirty-six steps, a familiar figure awaited Devereaux. The latter’s surprise was quick, and then reading Sam Solowey’s face, the storm in it, Devereaux set his jaws in preparation for the wrangle to come.
Solowey said, “I arrived here a half-hour ago. By taxi.”
Devereaux said, “You weren’t personally to come here. I made that point expressly. I didn’t want this moralistic hassle with you, Solowey.”
Solowey said, “Abduction. You’ve forgotten your law, Devereaux!”
“A rat in a trap. I’m expecting results. Answers there’s no other way to get, Solowey. Information about Marco, and The Tiger Man.”
“The Flipper can tell you nothing.”
“He stands close to Marco. Inside the high gate, and a room over the garage. Don’t ask me why. It’s a quirk in Marco. The Flipper of all people, close to the King. And the Flipper knows plenty…his head’s a warehouse of secrets.”
Solowey said, “He’ll kill himself, before he informs on Marco.”
Devereaux shook his head. “He’s not up to such loyalty. A drug-eater never can be. Marco should know that!”
Devereaux produced a fountain pen. “I confiscated this from him. Heroin in the barrel of the pen. Not clever, Solowey. Every cop unscrews fountain pens found on suspected drug addicts.”
Now Devereaux said pointedly, “The craving starts up… The Flipper’s my pigeon. I’ve got the stuff for him. In my pocket, under his nose. He’ll talk. He’ll run at the mouth.”
Solowey said, “Bestiality, Devereaux. I cannot condone it. The degradation of one human being degrades us too.”
Devereaux said, “We’ll go into it some other time.”
Solowey said urgently. “A formal arrest, please Devereaux. On our friendship!”
There was the smallest hesitation in Devereaux. But he said, “We’re looking at the Law from different sights. But it’s as beautiful to me as it is to you. And I’ll serve it, but in my own way.”
Solowey looked intently into Devereaux’s face, then shook his head gloomily. “The Operative in there with The Flipper,” the portly detective said. “I assigned him yesterday, without full knowledge of the situation. Now I want him dismissed.”
Devereaux said, “I’ll send him out to you.”
The Operative closed the door of the cage, and stood in the vestibule to make his report to Devereaux. He was a spare man of ordinary countenance, with no striking look to him. A face the eye could not photograph for future refurbishing.
He said, “The Flipper’s gone crazy. He tried suicide during the night.”
Devereaux said frowningly, “You confiscated his tie and belt.”
The Operative nodded. “And his shoe laces. But he found another way. He shoved an arm through the bars on the back window and began sawing his wrists on the broken glass. I came in, stopped his bleeding, and tied him up. From then on, I kept with him, right in the room.”
The Operative moved a pace toward the corridor. “Nobody slept the night. The Flipper kept banging his head against the wall. Hard, like he was trying to give himself a concussion. After that, he began chewing at the walls. Scraping the paint with his teeth, and swallowing it. I had a time of it! He’s sick in there now. He’s been vomiting all morning.”
Devereaux nodded, saying nothing, and the Operative left to join Solowey on the porch.
Part 3.
Devereaux stood austerely in the frame of the window that looked over the railroad tracks. His silhouette lay on the floor before him, grotesquely misshapen.
The man on the bed was staring down at the silhouette. He was stark naked, covered only by strips of bed-sheet muslin around both his wrists. These rags, once unbleached, were now colored with a red dye that lay on them like a paste.
The Flipper was mumbling, in a gibberish and music that was the after-cry of a descent into Hell.
A long time later, when a train had passed and the room stood still again, The Flipper refined words from his tongue of Christ.
“I’m sick,” he said like a child. “Awfully sick.”
The detective left the frame of the broken window, to stand against a well. Now his silhouette fell across the man on the bed.
The Flipper said, “This big eye in the pitch dark. It flew around the room. I had a paper bag tacked to the end of a broom handle. I caught it on the ceiling, and then I couldn’t get off the bureau. I set up a holler for my father to come get me off the bureau so I could go back to sleep…”
Devereaux wordlessly found The Flipper’s trousers and dropped them on his lap.
The Flipper looked up at Devereaux waveringly, and then his head slowly spun in a half-circle right and a half-circle left, in an examination of the room. He had been out of the room, in some
time and event other than here, but now he was back.
Devereaux placed a fountain pen on the flat of a straight chair some feet away. The Flipper stopped the spin of his head to fix on the pen.
Devereaux said, “You can get up and take it. I’ll be looking out the window, watching for trains. Talk to me, and then get up and take it.”
A moment later the detective said, “When we’re all through, I’ll call an ambulance.”
The Flipper fumbled with his trousers, but didn’t put them on. He drew them around his middle, huddling and shivering.
When he began to speak, he showed remarkable retention for the condition he was in. His recollection of Devereaux’s questions of the day before was total.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Part 1.
Devereaux stood to one side of the huge garage, watching the movement of cars and men. He was dressed in a trenchcoat, with the upraised collar stiff against his cheeks. The hat was comfortably battered and damp with the weather, and the angle of the brim shadowed his face.
A big sign behind him on the calcimined wall read: Obscenity Strictly Not Tolerated. Before him, was a line of taxi-cabs, in a single file that spilled into the side street and far down to the corner intersection. They were moving slowly, each in turn, to a gasoline pump. As each taxi-cab was refueled, and the net gallon replenished noted on the individual’s trip card, the car roared into the interior depths. Now a checker made his close physical inspection of the vehicle’s surface, looking for scratches on the paint and broken glass; for fender and body dents, plain to the eye or shrewdly camouflaged, while the driver standing beside him chafed uneasily, in innocence or in guile. This over, the driver was freed, to join the line at the Cashier’s Window, and submit his accounting of passenger receipts on his day shift.
A second line of men, the night shift, stood before a Dispatcher’s Window. These men were fresher in look than the incoming phalanx; their hair brushed and faces firmer, cigars long to the tip and fuming, their epithets sharper and lustier.