On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery

by Tom Schreck

  The one exception was Hymie Zuckerman. Hymie was the eighty-seven-year-old benefactor who put up the original money for the agency. He was an old Brooklyn Jew who made his fortune in the dry cleaning business. It seemed to me he cared about helping people and giving back and didn’t care about kissing ass and political opportunity. He had enough money to air condition hell and he knew it, and he also knew that was the reason these other business people joined the board. Being friends with Hymie meant instant business connections and that’s why they were sucking up to him. He didn’t care about people manipulating him if it helped the agency and therefore, in his mind, helped the greater good.

  I also liked Hymie because he liked me. He was a fight fan, knew the game inside and out, and loved to talk about it. A lot of people don’t know that Jews, along with the Irish, dominated boxing in the twenties. Throughout its history, boxing has been dominated by whatever minority was experiencing the most oppression or prejudice at the time. It probably has to do with being hungry, tough, and angry. When a minority group rises in the social order, they usually drop out of boxing dominance. It helps explain why there aren’t a hell of a lot of WASPs with fine pedigrees in the game, which is another reason I like boxing. As far as I am concerned, golf and WASPs deserve each other.

  As a fighter and a student of boxing history, I’d kibbutz with Hymie about the fighters of his era, especially the greatest Jewish fighter of all time, Benny Leonard, a lightweight who remains one of the best pound-for-pound fighters ever.

  Hymie also got a kick out of an Irish Catholic Polish guy like me mixing some Yiddish into our conversations. I’d greet him with a big “Shalom aleichem,” making sure I rolled the “ch” as much as I could. I’d also give him an “Abi gezunt,” a Yiddish expression that meant something like, “Go with good health.” Hymie loved it and would come over and pinch my cheek and say something like, “Do you hear this goy? Can you believe him? He could sell gefilte fish in Brooklyn!”

  Claudia hated the fact that Hymie liked me, partly because she hated me and partly because he had little use for her. Hymie knew about helping people and he knew about administrators. He knew Claudia was a blowhard administrator and he saw her as a necessary evil. His dislike for her probably wasn’t enough to ever save my job if it came down to it, but she sure sensed he didn’t like her.

  Despite my respect for Hymie, having the rest of the board in was a pain in the ass. Claudia had recently formed a subcommittee board group to oversee quality assurance. It was a perfect vehicle for her to point out to the board my poor paperwork and how it put the agency at regulatory risk. She was laying further groundwork to can me and this subcommittee would utilize the power of the board to justify my firing. The place would be so much better if she only put a similar amount of effort into actually doing something for the clients.

  Regardless of the bullshit, regardless of my hangover, and regardless of Al’s objections to the contrary, it was time to go to work. I grabbed a stack of files to start to work and, as luck would have it, opened up the Abermans’ chart. The only thing in all of life that could possibly approach doing a couple’s session with the Abermans on the boredom meter was having to write notes about it. I was trying to think how to write the psychobabble term for chronic nag when the phone rang.

  “Duff, it’s Rudy.” In addition to being my landlord and co-conspirator when it came to bullshit disabilities, Rudy also made rounds at Crawford Medical Center, which everyone called CMC.

  “What’s up, Rude?” I asked.

  “I wanted to give you a heads-up,” Rudy’s voice was all business, which wasn’t like him. “You’re Mikey the gay guy’s caseworker, aren’t you?”

  “Is he in detox again?” The way these guys went in and out of the hospital made me crazy.

  “No, Duff.” Rudy got quiet. “Somebody worked him over pretty good. He’s in ICU.”

  “Worked him over?”

  “Somebody beat him to within inches of death. He’s not conscious,” Rudy said.

  “Holy shit …”

  “Yeah, I know,” Rudy exhaled hard. “He doesn’t have anybody, does he?”

  “No, the family deserted him a long time ago.”

  “Look, Duff, with the way things are here, it would be nice if someone showed Mikey some attention.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The administrator here, Broseph, is a real bastard. With someone like Mikey with no insurance or crummy Medicaid, the hospital is likely to lose a ton of money. He’s been all over my ass to discharge guys no matter what shape they’re in.”

  “You just said Mikey was in rough shape,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Rudy raised his voice just a little. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The last time I kept a guy like Mikey longer than Broseph wanted me to, he wrote me up—I’m on thin ice here. He hates anyone with bad insurance.”

  “That’s fucked, Rudy,” I said. “I’ll be right up.”

  I started to put the files away and felt myself slam the cabinet drawer hard enough that it got Trina’s attention.

  “Hey—are you all right?” Trina asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I’m not a big believer in peace and love and all that shit, but I don’t understand it when people cause harm to someone who isn’t even bothering them. Every now and then some assholes go into Jefferson Park with the idea of “rolling fags.” Fuckin’ cowards hurt people for no other reason than because they hate gay people. Another fuckin’ way of labeling people so that they have no value, only this shit is another step into evil. The fact that once a guy got the shit beat out of him his health depended on which insurance plan he signed up for was beyond ludicrous. This Broseph asshole sounded like a real charmer.

  I was getting ready to leave when the phone rang again. It was Dr. Gabbibb. Dr. Gabbibb was a piece of work. He’s Indian, five foot two, and very dark. It’s very difficult to understand him, and because he’s so fucking arrogant, he refuses to repeat himself. He also has some sort of Tourette’s-like affliction, so when he’s talking, he’ll suddenly blurt, “DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, shit.” After each one of those episodes, he’ll say, “excuse me,” like he just had a tickle in his throat or something. I had to talk to him frequently because the detox sent us lots of cases and the conversations would go something like this:

  “Allo, Doofy? Dees is Doctor Gabbibb at the datox.”

  “Yes, doctor,” I’d say.

  “I dave un clynt to send at you for treatment now,” Gabbibb would say.

  “Excuse me, doctor,” I’d say.

  “DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, shit! … excuse me,” he’d say and hang up.

  I just got in the habit of agreeing to whatever he said and then calling his secretary to find out what was up.

  Gabbibb worked a ton of hours because he was a research oncologist in addition to his duties as the detox medical director. Technically he may have been very good, but his social skills and bedside manner were the worst. I don’t know if it was a cultural thing or what, but I never met a more condescending man in my life. The hospital gave him whatever he wanted because he headed the cancer research at the medical school. I guess if you can cure cancer, people will put up with a lot of shit.

  I was hoping I could keep Gabbibb’s phone conversation short and uneventful.

  “Doofy? Dis homosexual patient in here is on your responsibility caseload?”

  “What?” I said.

  “DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, shit … excuse me.” The doctor was going on his roll.

  “I’m on my way up there, doctor,” I said, hoping to get off the phone quickly.

  “No rush, Doofy. Dees man is not worth time,” he said and hung up.

  It was probably a good thing he hung up, because I was about to go off and I don’t know how many DATs he had in him.

  They let me in to see Mikey for fifteen minutes in ICU. His head was swollen to twice its normal size, he had a tube taped to his nose, his face wa
s mostly purple from the bruising, and he had five different sets of stitches. He was surrounded by computerized machines with little red and green lights and something that checked his heart rate.

  I felt cold and sick to my stomach, and though I couldn’t quite identify what it smelled like, I hated the hospital smell. Mikey was unconscious and when I touched his hand there was absolutely no response. I’m not really a religious guy, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I said a quick prayer. I said, “Hang in there, Mikey” out loud and felt foolish, but I had heard somewhere that it was good to try to speak to people in comas.

  I went through the sliding doors of the ICU and there was Gabbibb with his stethoscope around his neck and a clipboard in his hand.

  “Doofy.” Gabbibb’s big brown eyes grew wide. “Don’t tell me you were here visiting dee homosexual.”

  “His name is Michael Osborne,” I said.

  “I know dat,” Gabbibb said. He didn’t get it. “Shouldn’t you be catching up on dose files?”

  I shook my head and started to walk away. I got about ten feet and I couldn’t help myself.

  “Hey, Gabbibb,” I shouted.

  He turned and looked down his nose and over his glasses at me.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  I turned back around and headed out. All the way down the hallway I could hear it.

  “DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, shit … excuse me … DAT, DAT, DAT …”

  The next set of sliding doors closed and the rest of the DATs faded into the rest of the hospital sounds.

  I wound my way through the hospital corridors, looking for Rudy’s office. I’d been there a bunch of times but I can never find it easily. After a couple of wrong turns, I found him. Through the window I saw him at his computer with his belly causing maximum stress to the elastic waistline of his trousers and beads of sweat gathering on his forehead. The man was always sweating.

  I let myself in and Rudy didn’t even look up from his computer.

  “Hey, Rude, I—”

  “Hang on.” His face cringed and he pounded a few more keys. “Sorry, Duff. I’m trying to get caught up.”

  “Lot of that going around,” I said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Is Mikey going to make it?” I asked.

  “Duff,” Rude exhaled heavily. “I ain’t going to bullshit you. It doesn’t look good. He might even be better off if he didn’t.”

  “Are the cops involved?”

  “Some detective talked to me in the ER. He didn’t seem all that energetic.” Rudy lifted his glasses off his nose and rested them on top of his balding head.

  “I’m guessing the cops aren’t going to sweat the assault of a guy who spent his life in the bushes of Jefferson Park.”

  “Probably not,” Rudy added. He was about to say something else when his beeper went off. “It’s the ER, I gotta run.”

  I got out of the way. Rudy ran past me, and with the weight he carried, there was likely to be a second code blue if he continued to run. He disappeared down the stairs and I headed to the elevator.

  I was walking through the ER to get to the parking lot, and there was some sort of crisis going on. Rudy was yelling, they had that cart with the paddles, and they were working over someone on the floor. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  They started to move the guy onto a gurney and a nurse was holding a clear bag that was connected to a tube that was running to the guy on the table. They had an oxygen mask on him, and I could see that Rudy had blood splattered all down the front of his white shirt and tie. I heard something yelled about surgery and they ran the gurney down the hall.

  Rudy wiped the sweat from his brow and picked up the phone on the triage desk. He hung up angrily and barked orders at the nurses. He took a deep breath and looked up and saw me.

  “Duffy,” he was breathing hard. “That was another one of your guys. That was Eli.”

  7

  It had been a hell of a twenty-four hours. I had drunk myself to sleep last night with Walanda’s death on my mind. There was also the question of what, if anything, I could do to find Shony. Then Mikey, then Eli—getting hit in the nads by Al and stepping barefoot in shit was the highlight of the day. The karma or whatever drives the world was getting really fucked up. I mean, these folks weren’t exactly on top of things before this shit storm blew into them. I just didn’t get it.

  I got to the Moody Blue and cracked open a Schlitz. I hit the answering machine and there were a couple of messages. The first was Smitty again, and he had news that the promoter in Kentucky had sweetened the purse to seven grand. He also found out more about the opponent and that he was 15 and 0 with fifteen knockouts, all coming in three rounds or less. Smitty said the guy was being groomed for a title shot, and from the videos he’d seen, the guy could really swat.

  The second was from Lisa. She was forcing back tears and I could tell it wasn’t going to be good news.

  “Duffy, I’ve been thinking.” She sniffed through the tears. “I hate to do this on the phone, but I just can’t bring myself to do it in person.”

  I think I knew how this was going to go.

  “… I haven’t told you, but I’ve been seeing a therapist. She thinks that now isn’t the right time for me to be in a relationship. She also thinks that you’re an archetype of my relationship with my father and that I’m re-creating dysfunctional patterns,” she said.

  Maybe I didn’t know how this was going to go. This was thicker bullshit than even I was used to from women.

  “… The fact of the matter is that though you and I had fun together and seemed to care for each other, it wasn’t on a deep enough plane. My therapist says I need more intimacy and that’s impossible with a man like you …”

  Oh geez …

  “I also have begun to explore myself, and my therapist thinks that I may have a better chance of exploring intimacy with other women …”

  I definitely didn’t know how this was going to go.

  “… So I’m going to explore some lifestyle changes … I’m glad I got this out. My therapist says it’s important for me to be assertive and direct. Please don’t call me, Duff, not for a while. I need time to think. Then maybe we could work on being friends.”

  I’m so glad she was assertive enough to call my machine and let me know about her lesbianism. I’ve lost a lot of relationships, but never have they cooked up the lesbian card to bail. Ah, the satisfaction of another relationship milestone.

  As for the being friends thing, that was my absolute favorite. Somehow women felt that that absolved them from the guilt of ripping out your heart and treating it like a pig that was slated for sausagedom. Then they can keep you around like some emotional tampon that they can insert once a month when they’re lonely and whoever they were most recently fucking dumps them.

  Not that I’m bitter or anything.

  I called Smitty to find out about the fight. Smitty stayed up most of the night reading, so I never worried about waking him. He was never what you’d call chatty, but on the phone he was even less so. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Yeah …” That was his usual greeting.

  “You know, you really ought to work on being more engaging.”

  “You want to fight or not? The fight is this Saturday. That gives you three days,” Smitty said.

  “Yeah, that’s all right. I kind of feel like fighting,” I said.

  “Duffy, this boy is no joke.” Smitty’s voice was serious. “He can hit and you’ll have to be sharp.”

  “I’m always sharp, Smitty—you know that.”

  “I ain’t playin’, Duff,” he said.

  Smitty gave me the particulars about the opponent, the travel schedule, and the other logistical stuff I needed to know about the fight. The guy I was fighting was named Tommy Roy Suggs. We were going to fly Friday after work, which was good considering how things in the office had been going. It probably wasn’t going to be a great time to ask for a day off. The fact that they raised
my purse and were allowing us to fly meant they really wanted their boy and me to get it on. I was looking forward to fighting and the cash would be nice too.

  I was in decent shape, not great shape, but decent enough to fight. In my line of work as a short-notice fighter, I can’t afford to ever get out of shape. Matchmakers liked me because I would take the fights when they needed somebody in a hurry and no one else was saying yes. It was something I accepted, but I never actually got used to it. Managing my emotions over the next three days would be hell.

  Fighters get scared; they just don’t talk about it or focus on it. You really can’t and stay sane. For me, the anxiety will come out in other ways, usually manifesting itself in irritability and short temperedness. With the way things had been going, I didn’t think anyone would notice me get any crankier. There were some advantages to distracting myself over a pending fight, what with work being such a shit sandwich lately.

  With three days left before the fight, there was really nothing physical left to do that would prepare me for it. The best thing I could do would be to watch some tape of the guy and get myself as mentally prepared as possible. The seven grand would be nice—getting hit by some hotshot who could punch wouldn’t. Getting hit by someone who could throw hard was on the list of things I thought about while I wasn’t sleeping that night.

  It was that, getting dumped by my assertive, potential-lesbian ex-girlfriend, but most of all, it was about Mikey and Eli.

  “Hey Duff—didya hear about the Polish Olympic hockey team tragedy?” It was Sam.

  “The team drowned during spring training,” he said.

  I heard him laughing to himself all the way back to his cubicle. I had gotten almost no sleep the night before, and I was really on edge. There were so many things eating at me that I had difficulty thinking, so I had bigger things to worry about than Sam. For starters, there was a New York State Client Death Form on my desk and two Incident Report forms with a yellow sticky from the Michelin Woman attached to the top one. It read: