by Ed Gorman
“I’m sure he’s been ruined before. He’ll come back somehow.”
“Not at his age.” Stephen made a sour face. “There’s just no way Victor should be losing.”
“Maybe Rooney’s a better boxer than we gave him credit for.”
Stephen shook his head. “We watched him in three different towns, just to make sure he was the man we wanted. We figured he could give Victor a decent fight but he’d never win.” He shook his head again. “Now look.”
Guild sipped his lemonade and lighted a cigarette. He felt, as usual, pity for the kid and an inability to do anything about his pity. Maybe it would be for the best if the old man lost all his money. Maybe in doing so he’d have to cut the kid free.
Stephen said, “I told you about my mother.”
Guild nodded.
“What I didn’t tell you is that I hired this ex-Pinkerton to find her for me.”
“Why now? After all these years?”
Stephen shrugged. “I suppose it’s like a bad tooth, Leo. You never quit worrying about it.”
“So did this ex-Pinkerton find her?”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Living her new life. Pretty happily, from what the detective said.” He paused. Sorrow filled his eyes. “She’s got a lot of new kids.”
Guild sighed. “Makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it? Knowing she started a new family and forgot about you?”
“Yes. Makes me wonder if she ever thinks about me or Dad at all.”
“Maybe you should try to look her up sometime.”
“She wrote me a letter.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
“What’d it say?”
“I haven’t read it yet.”
“Why not?”
“Scared to, I guess.”
“Probably be better if you’d read it, don’t you think?”
“Maybe that’s why I came back here.”
“Why?”
“So I could read it in front of you. Maybe you could help me with it. Afterward, I mean. If I get real bad or something.”
“Sure, kid.”
“I don’t want to hate her anymore, Leo. I’m tired of hating her. It takes too much out of me after all these years.” He stared out the window. “Maybe she had a reason.”
“Maybe she did.” Gently, he said, “Why don’t you open up the envelope?”
Stephen looked down at his hands and then brought his right hand to the inside of his coat. He took a plain white envelope from the pocket and set it on his knee.
“I’m kind of scared, Leo. I really am.”
“You want me to read it to you?”
“Would you, Leo? Would you?”
Stephen sounded no more than eight.
“Sure.” Guild reached out to take the envelope, and it was then he smelled the smoke.
This time Reynolds had gotten it going nicely. The smoke was an oily black snake slithering beneath the door.
On one knee now, his weapon aimed directly at the door, he waited for Guild to appear.
Leo Guild said, “Sit right there, Stephen, and don’t move.” Guild handed him back the envelope unopened. “Afraid that’s going to have to wait.”
Guild took out his .44 and eased up to the door.
“What’s the smell, Leo?”
“Kerosene smoke. Somebody wants to play a little trick on us.”
“What kind of trick?”
All this time Guild was easing up to the door, flattening himself on one side of it so he could get a clean shot off when he opened it up.
“They want us to think there’s a fire in the hallway. This gets me to open up the door, and then they come running in and take the money.”
“Don’t give them the money, Leo. Please.”
“Just sit there, and let me handle it.”
Guild was now up to the door. He dropped to his haunches and put a hand on the knob.
He flung the door open in a single motion, and that’s when the firing started, as he had assumed it would. The bullets came at chest height, where he would normally have been if he hadn’t ducked down.
The smoke was so thick Reynolds couldn’t see anything. When the door opened, he fired by impulse.
Moments later he heard a harsh cry and then listened as a body slumped to the floor somewhere on the other side of the smoke.
Leo Guild turned just in time to see Stephen Stoddard fall from his chair to the floor. The bullets had gone so wild they’d taken the kid by accident.
Expecting more gunfire but hearing none, Guild crawled back along the floor to Stephen.
Even from here he could see there wasn’t anything he could do for the kid. One of the bullets had entered through the forehead. The back of Stephen’s head would look like a terrible purple flower suddenly in bloom.
Behind him he heard footsteps.
From the smoke emerged a short, slight man with a gun in his hand. He was coughing from the greasy smoke, and Guild saw no reason not to shoot him just because he was indisposed at the moment.
He shot him in the chest and the groin, and then he moved back up to the man’s face. Just as the man began to crumple, he shot him in the forehead, right where the man had shot Stephen.
Standing, he walked to the front of the office and down into the smoke. Coughing himself now, he went down to the basement, where he found two water buckets. He filled them and carried them back upstairs. Putting out the fire was no problem. He put the smoldering rags and newspapers in one of the empty buckets and took everything back downstairs.
Back in the office, he got the kid propped up against a desk. He was still dead, but somehow he didn’t look quite so vulnerable in this position.
He went back to the robber. He kicked the man twice hard in the ribs. He could hear bone cracking. The sound did not displease him.
Just then the crowd roared, and he realized that nobody had come running after the gunshots because most likely nobody had heard the shots. Not above the noise of the crowd.
He saw the white envelope on the floor near where Stephen had fallen from the chair.
He went over and picked it up. Red spatters of blood covered the front of it.
He wondered why she had left them. It seemed a terrible and incomprehensible thing to do. Maybe not to leave some son of a bitch as mean as John T. Stoddard but to leave the boy they’d raised together.
He folded the envelope twice and slid it down the back pocket of his black trousers.
He went back to the dead robber. He went through his coat and then his pants. For a time he was afraid he was not going to find what he was looking for.
But it was there, all right.
Oh, it was there.
He hunched there looking at the man’s bad complexion. He stared at where the bullet had gone in the man’s forehead.
He tried to tell himself the kid hadn’t been happy alive, that maybe he would be happy dead.
He stood up and went over to the door and locked it securely behind him. Then he went looking for John T. Stoddard.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Victor Sovich went down for the first time midway through the eleventh round. What was so surprising for the crowd was that he was scarcely hit. Rooney had thrown a right hand, but it had glanced off Sovich’s shoulder. It was not the sort of punch that could put a man down, but Sovich went to one knee, where he remained for a time while the referee counted off the seconds. Sovich, obviously dizzy, looked with dismay at his comer. What was going on here?
When he regained his feet and the fight went on, Sovich obviously made a decision—to throw his strongest punches against Rooney. The roundhouse, for example, was exactly the kind of punch that had killed people in the past, and probably would have this time—if it had landed. Still suffering from dizziness, Sovich threw three roundhouses during the remaining minutes of the round—but none connected, each missing Rooney’s jaw by an inch or so.
The rou
nd concluded with Sovich wobbling his way back to his comer.
His trainer, trying to make some sense of what he was seeing, said, “You’re letting him beat you, Victor.”
“I don’t feel well.”
The trainer got angry. “Too much partying. Too many Mex women.”
Sovich shook his head belligerently. “That water you gave me.” He looked around for the water bottle. “It tasted funny.”
“It isn’t the water you should be worrying about. It’s the partying you did last night.”
Sovich scowled. “We’ll settle this after the fight, you son of a bitch.”
The bell rang.
“You’d better finish him this round, Victor. He’s getting stronger and you’re getting weaker.”
Victor Sovich stood up on trembling legs and moved ponderously back into the ring.
The doc checked for vitals. He glanced up at Guild. Nothing. The doc was a hefty man in a white boater and a yellow shirt and white trousers. He had come out here for a good time, and now he was spending his afternoon with a corpse. The doc, whose name was Fitzgerald, shook his head and got to his feet, his knees cracking as he did so.
He was about to say something to Guild, but just then the door crashed open and there stood John T. Stoddard. Guild had asked one of the boxing people to find him.
Stoddard’s first reaction to being called back here was anger, then terror as he saw his son’s pale hand on the floor from behind the table.
“My God,” Stoddard said.
Guild looked away. He did not like Stoddard, but he did not want to take any pleasure in seeing the arrogant man’s face begin to reflect the waiting sorrow.
Dr. Fitzgerald started to say something to Stoddard. “Be quiet,” Stoddard said.
Stoddard’s footsteps were heavy on the wooden floor. One, two, three, four. He walked over and stood above his son.
“Who did this?”
“You know who did it.”
Stoddard seemed shocked by Guild’s harsh response.
“Reynolds did it,” Guild said. “The man you hired to rob you. He wasn’t much of a shot, Stoddard. Maybe you should have thought of that beforehand.” He thought of what he’d found in Reynolds’s pocket, the office key and a layout of the building. Only Stoddard could have given it to him. He smacked the key on the table.
Stoddard broke then.
He stood swaying miserably above his son, crystal tears on his jowly face. The sounds he made were intolerable for Guild to hear. Guild had sounded not unlike this one night shortly after the little girl’s death.
Guild took Dr. Fitzgerald’s arm and led him out to the hallway, where Reynolds was being wrapped in a blanket.
“What the hell’s going on in there?” Dr. Fitzgerald demanded.
Guild shook his head. “He played it a litde too cute, and it didn’t work.” He thought of Stephen. He slammed a fist into the wall.
“That’s a good way to break some knuckles,” Dr. Fitzgerald said.
But right now Guild didn’t give a damn. He didn’t give a damn at all.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sportswriters would later say that it was round twelve that proved decisive.
Rooney could scarcely believe what was happening. He started landing vicious body blows at will and then spent the second half of the round concentrating on Victor Sovich’s face, opening up a wide cut above the right eye and even cutting him on the chin.
Sovich, so long accustomed to winning, began using almost pathetic defenses, limply putting his hands up in front of his face, only to have them smashed away by Rooney’s blows.
For the second time in the fight, Sovich fell down. This time it was on both knees, not just one, and this time it was Sovich who had some difficulty getting back up. He knelt there, his wide white body sleek with sweat, one glove placed on the lowest rope as he struggled to regain his footing.
Fortunately for Sovich, the bell rang. His corner people rushed in and dragged him back to the comer.
* * *
“I didn’t mean for it to happen this way,” Stoddard said as they walked back into the office.
“Why the hell’d you have me come in here, anyway?”
“Because I want you to believe me.”
“You want me to forgive you, Stoddard, and I can’t do it. You set up the robbery so you could pretend to Victor that somebody else took his money. Only it didn’t turn out so good.”
Stoddard took some whiskey, stared down at the dead face of his son. “I treated him like hell, didn’t I?”
“You know the answer to that.”
Stoddard started sobbing. He put his face in his hands and wept.
Guild stood up and walked around. His boots were heavy on the floor. He went over, exasperated, and sat on the edge of the desk, where all the money was, and had a cigarette. He looked at the money and hated it as if it were a living thing. Then Guild remembered the letter.
He said, “He found your wife.”
“What?”
“Awhile back he hired an ex-Pinkerton to look up your wife.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Here.” Guild tossed him the envelope. “Stephen never opened it.”
“Why not?”
“He said he was afraid to.”
“He went to all that trouble, and he was afraid?” Stoddard’s voice had started to rise in anger, the way it always did when Stephen had displeased his father. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken that tone.”
“It’s the tone you always took with him.”
“You want to hit me, don’t you, Guild?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Hitting you would be easy. You’re going to have to live the rest of your life with how you treated him. That’s going to be the hard part.”
Something resembling a sob came from Stoddard. He lifted the flask and had another drink. “I wasn’t always terrible to him.”
“I know.”
“I loved him.”
“That’s the hell of it.”
“What is?”
“I really think you did. And you still treated him the way you did.”
“It wasn’t easy for me.”
“I don’t suppose it was.”
“He never got over his mother leaving us, and I had to be both parents to him. Or try to be.”
“Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself, Stoddard. He’s the one who died, not you.”
Stoddard glanced up. “You going to tell Victor?”
“Right now I don’t give a damn about Victor. I want you to give me my money, and I want to get out of here.”
Stoddard brought his fist down on the desk. “I’m giving the orders around here.”
“I want my money or I’ll go and tell Victor myself what happened here.”
Guild walked over and snapped his fingers and put his hand out.
“I want my money right now.”
But for the first time Stoddard was looking at the envelope on his lap.
Even before he opened the envelope, Stoddard was crying. Guild wasn’t sure why, exactly. He just supposed Stoddard was a little bit insane now. Guild would have been.
Guild walked over to the desk with the money and started counting greenbacks. When he’d counted out his fee, he rolled the bills up and put them in his pocket.
Stoddard paid no attention.
He just kept reading the letter. He rocked back and forth and sobbed. Guild had seen Indian women mourn this way. It was not becoming to see it in a man.
Finished with the letter, Stoddard dropped it to the floor. He put his face in his hands and began his slow rocking again. He cried so violently Guild expected him to vomit.
Guild went over and picked up the letter from the floor and started reading it.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Clarise sat in her hotel room, watching the street below for sight of the wagon that would take her to the train depot. She kept looking
at the clock on the mahogany bureau. It was nearly five-thirty. The train left at six-thirty. She wanted to be certain not to miss it.
The heat, waning now, had left her feeling unclean. She hated that feeling. She rose and went over to the porcelain pitcher and basin on the bureau. Even warm, the water felt good on her face and hands. She opened her lacy blouse and massaged clean water onto the tops of her breasts. She thought of last night with Leo Guild. She had not liked a man, least of all a white man, in some time. But there was a humility about Guild she liked. That was the only word for it. Humility.
Going to the bed, she sat on the edge of the mattress, the box springs squeaking slightly beneath her weight. She looked at the yellow bowl of red apples against the light blue wall. In the sunlight the bowl and the apples and the wall looked like a painting. She stared at it until the tears came.
There should not be tears now, of course. She had waited so long for this day that she should feel nothing but joy.
The poison she had put in Victor Sovich’s water bottle would be taking effect by now. His punches would be ineffectual. He would die in the ring, just as her brother had died in the ring.
At first Rooney would see this as a day for celebration. A mediocre boxing career would have been turned around. Rooney would have big plans.
The light in the room was the purple of dusk. In the street below was the clatter of buggies and wagons and the faint sound of laughter from the porch where oldsters passed the time by whittling on white wood and lying to each other about the past.
She wished her brother were here with her now. He would be pleased with what she had done.
A knock. “Taxi’s here, miss.”
“Thank you.”
“He says shake a leg.”
“I’ll be right down.”
“They like to have you there early for the train.”
“Right down,” she said again.
The room had enveloped her in melancholy, and she found herself reluctant to leave. The soft song of birds, the gray light in the window, the scent of perfume spilled in her carpetbag. She did not want to leave. If she closed her eyes she could be a little girl again. Her brother would not be dead and Guild—