The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  The paltry paid crowd roared when they saw the true champion emerge into the sunlight.

  The lone guard on the door to the walled-in area for the dressing and other rooms told Gene’s crew: “Not a single chartered train came! And everybody else is still hanging outside!”

  “Nothing changes!” hissed Doyle as they hurried to the pine-planked sweat chamber the promoters grandly called a dressing room.

  Inside, door closed. Harry threw a bucket of water over Gene, wiped him with a towel. Kept muttering: “Great fighter, you’re a great fighter, great fight. Not me, you. ‘S’ thing to be.” From a duffel bag, Doyle pulled pillowcases cut for masks and money hauling, his .45 shoulder rig, a suit jacket. He tossed revolvers to Harry and Gene.

  “Don’t worry, Champ. They ain’t loaded.”

  Gene said: “If the trains didn’t come —”

  “We take what’s there!” said Doyle. “You better pray there’s enough!”

  Gene had only his shirt left to button when a thunderous creak! rolled through the wooden arena. The room around them bent and screamed. From outside came a great roar. Three would-be holdup men ran into the dungeon of rooms built under the area. The dim hall was empty. They ran to the corridor door. No guard. They hurried up the ramp into a blast of sunlight. Dempsey and Gibbons danced in the ring for Round One, but the great rolling-herd roar of a thousand voices caught even their attention.

  In they came from every entryway. Men in suits and straw hats, work boots and denim. Women in long skirts and yellow scarves. Umbrellas and pocket flasks. Clothes ripped by the barbed wire and turnstiles they’d torn down to storm inside for free. Damn the big money they’d never have: no one would keep them from their championship.

  “Look!” Harry pointed to a corridor a hundred feet away. A toad of a man, his straw hat askew, hopped back and forth in front of a stampeding phalanx, his hands outstretched to hold them back, screaming so loud that even Gene and his crew heard him: “Go back! You didn’t pay! You’ve got to pay! Everybody’s got to pay!”

  Laughter drowned him out as he spun into the ranks of wildfaced men and cackling women. Gene lost sight of Taylor as the crowd swirled. The banker popped out, pressed against a railing as elbows and shoulders slammed his back. The toad’s face was a purple moon with craters for eyes and the scream of his mouth. Taylor’s hands clutched his chest like he’d been punched, clawed at his throat fighting a strangler. A well-wisher poured amber liquid from a pocket flask into the uptight banker’s maw. Taylor choked, gurgled. He flopped over the rail as the crowd surged into the arena. Revelers plucked the banker from the rail and dragged him along until he sprawled into a hatless toad heap on a bench, reeking of bootleg whiskey like he was dead drunk, but Gene knew the toad was just dead, that he’d bake in the sun until the cleaning crew and newspaper eulogies told about an innocent casualty of championship fever.

  “Gone.” Harry trembled as he stared at the chaos. “‘Sail gone to crazy!”

  “Come on!” yelled Doyle as the crowd of twelve thousand gate crashers scrambled in and the bell rang the end of Dempsey-Gibbons Round One. “We’ve got a job to do!”

  “No good,” muttered Harry as Doyle marched them back down inside the bowels of the arena, past the unguarded corridor door. “Nothing’s no good ‘less you’re a fighter.”

  “Shut up!” snapped Doyle as they hurried back to Gene’s dressing room.

  Harry plucked at Doyle with a trembling hand: “No good, you’re no good, this is all gone no good and we know what you’re going to do!”

  Shut up, Harry! willed Gene.

  Harry chose to fight for the first time in his life. He jumped on Doyle: “Get him now, Gene! Don’t wait!”

  Doyle threw Harry into Gene. Gene shoved Harry back toward Doyle as that man’s right hand whirled. A heartbeat before the crowd outside roared the start of Round Two, Gene heard snick and saw light flash in the dim wooden cavern. Crimson misted the air between Harry and Doyle. Harry spun to show Gene his new wet red collar. The inertia of the switchblade slash turned Harry all the way around to face Doyle again. Doyle pushed the dying man aside. Harry fell between wooden beams to lie underneath the arena until the demolition crew found him two weeks later, long after insects and animals finished with his flesh. The law chalked up his bones to a worker who’d gone missing after cops ran two Wobbly labor organizers off the construction site, one of those tragic industrial accidents that happens all the time.

  Doyle stabbed at the boxer but Gene still had the jazz. He batted the knife out of Doyle’s hand with a left slap and slammed his right fist straight into the killer’s jaw. Fifteen rounds earlier, that punch might have put Doyle out for good; now it dropped him out but breathing.

  Finish him — No! Gene dragged the moaning man to his dressing room, threw him inside, and slammed the door: no lock. He wedged the knife in the doorjamb and snapped off the blade.

  Doyle won’t be out for long. The wedged door won’t hold him long. Think! Won’t let us get away, were witnesses, ‘n’ he doesn’t need no other reason than rage.

  But first he’ll go to the money. Try to feed his money hunger first, then revenge.

  Gene ran to the counting room. Get there first! Tell them Doyle’d gone crazy! Killed Harry! Was going to hold them up. With a clerk, maybe two, maybe guns with bullets, they could ambush Doyle and the clerks would be witnesses to Gene’s story, to his being a hero, to him and Billie being innocent, safe, fr —

  The counting room door stood ajar.

  The crowd roared as Gibbons split open an old cut over Dempsey’s eye in Round Four.

  A short guy in a good suit stood in the counting room. Four chairs behind the long table were empty. Notebooks and tills were strewn everywhere. But no silver dollars. No stacks of greenbacks. The short guy stared at the big man in the doorway whose hand dangled a revolver.

  “If you’ve come for money, you’re too late,” said the short guy. “Someone beat you to what little of it they had. Got them to give it up to him. Then once the bust-in riot started, the clerks knew it was over and they all left to see the big fight. “

  “You’re Dempsey’s manager. Jack Kearns.”

  “Guilty. And with that gun in your hand, you’re a man looking for trouble.”

  “Doesn’t have any bullets.”

  “A man with a gun and no bullets is a man who’s in trouble.” Kearns squinted. “I saw you fight, Mallette. You held back. Got size, speed, strength, technique. But give it up. You got no future as a real champ. Inside you there’s no killer.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Not likely. What did they promise you for winning?”

  “Wasn’t about the money.”

  “For you, probably not. But how much to be the champ of this town?”

  “A thousand.”

  “They cheaped you. You’ll never get it anyway. This crazy day cheated them, too. They’ll all go bust.” Kearns held a fold of bills toward Gene. “Every winner deserves a purse. Five hundred, and keep this between you and me. Call yourself lucky to get it and get gone before your half-assed manager comes looking for his cut.”

  Gene didn’t know what to do. Put the money in his pocket. Kearns took the revolver from Gene. Broke open the cylinder and clucked at the empty slots for bullets. “You’re too honest for your own good.”

  He took a flat .25 automatic from his back pocket and disappeared it in Gene’s hand. “An honest guy needs iron that works. This one’s ready to go, though it won’t damage anybody who’s not kissing close.”

  Kearns walked toward the door. The crowd outside roared when Gibbons connected with a combo that stung the champion and then danced around the ring to escape a furious Dempsey.

  “Mr. Kearns!” said Gene. “Who got all the money from the fight?”

  “Gee kid, beats me.”

  Then he was gone. Outside, the crowd roared. Gene fled the counting room. Saw the door to his dressing room shake. Out of the door crack fell a kni
fe blade.

  Gene ran. Made it out of the roaring arena. A naked yellow eye baked the oiled air. He muscled his way through a dirt street jammed with crazed strangers. Two Martin boys set off a string of Chinese firecrackers. A man and two women sat on an overturned sausage peddler’s cart, stuffing themselves with meat tubes they plucked from the ground. A tuxedoed redhead bounced off Gene and staggered away, his eyes whirling in his head. A cowboy shot his Peacemaker into the air and no one flinched.

  Where are you, Billie ? Got to be here! She’s got to be here!

  Firecrackers. A horse screamed and a fat woman laughed. The cowboy fired his pistol.

  Car horn, was that a —

  “Gene! Over here!”

  Billie waved from the Ford’s running board. Gene shoved his way to their getaway car that was pinned against the curb by a deserted truck. Parked vehicles jammed every road.

  She grabbed Gene to be sure he was alive and real. “Where’s Doyle? Where’s . .. ?”

  “All gone wrong. No heist. Doyle killed Harry. He —”

  Glass exploded in the car window.

  Doyle: near the arena. He stood on a wobbly overturned pushcart, his gun hand shaking as he lined up for another shot over the sea of heads who didn’t give a damn.

  Gene grabbed her hand, held on to his life, and plunged into the mad, milling crowd.

  “One chance!” he yelled as he dragged her behind him. Every bone in his body wept. His legs shook. Lemonade he grabbed from a kid didn’t cool the fire in his throat. “We got one chance! Get to Texas John! Not crooks! We’re targets ‘n’ only he can save us!”

  “His house is two miles across town!” But she ran with him.

  By the time they’d fought their way to Main Street, Billie was more carrying Gene than running with him. They looked back and saw only the sea of people in their wake.

  “Still there,” gasped Gene. “He’s still there somewhere. Won’t stop. We can’t stop.”

  The crowd became a solid wall of flesh at the east end of Main Street, an audience to the volunteers battling a ball of fire that had once been a tailor shop.

  “Railroad tracks!” gasped Billie. “Nobody’s there! We can go quicker along them!”

  “But not straight to John’s! That’s maybe three football fields north of his house —”

  “Only hope,” she told him as they staggered to the steel rails. Hundreds of parked freight cars squatted on the tracks, diverted there for the passenger charters that hadn’t come. A metal dang! shuddered the wall of boxcars beside them as the locomotive a thousand yards away got a clear track signal. Steel wheels creaked a slow revolution.

  Gene pressed Kearns’s close-in gun into Billie’s hands. Shoved Kearns’s money into her dress pocket. “Get on train! Can’t make it farther. Can’t run no more.”

  “Yes, you can!” Billie grabbed his shirt. “Look! You can see Texas John’s house from here! Just up that hill!”

  “Can’t get up that hill ‘fore Doyle catches us. You know he’s out there, hell-hound smelling us. He won’t stop until he gets his blood. Till he gets me. But you: hop on this freight, open boxcar cornin’ up. Hide. Taking care of me will slow him down. He’ll see me, stop for me. Enough so you can go. Get free.”

  “You can get away!” cried Billie.

  “No. I can only do what makes me special. You said it. I save you. Only special you can do is make me love you. Let me be special and love you and get you on the train. You be special and do it. Don’t let us both die as nothing.”

  “Too late,” she said, looking past him, wrapping her grip around the pistol.

  Doyle stood a hundred yards down the tracks.

  Billie raised her gun -—

  Gene covered her hand with his: “That won’t work until he’s close enough to kiss.”

  The barrel of her automatic swung down along Gene’s ribs. Billie hid the gun behind her.

  “You have to let him get real close,” said Gene. “He’ll like that. Do that. For you. Not for me. He’ll never let me get close to him again. But I won’t just stand here and take it.”

  He stepped away from her grabbing hand. Took two steps forward as Doyle strolled toward him. Doyle stopped when he was about the same distance away as a sucker shot to a bank door. But instead of night, he had a broad daylight aim, though the sky had suddenly gone gray with rain clouds as Dempsey threw everything he had at Gibbons, yet had to settle for a clinch finish at the final bell, a decision victory instead of a knockout.

  The freight train groaned and inched forward.

  Gene Mallette brought both hands up in fists and dropped into the stance of a boxer.

  Heard Doyle laugh and saw that man’s solo hand clear his suit coat and snap straight out.

  A crimson rose blew out Doyle’s left ear and sprayed red on a passing boxcar. Doyle fell to the chipped rock track bed as the crack! of a German sniper’s Mauser from a front porch on a hill a thousand yards away whispered to Gene above the rumble of the train.

  No second shot came from the man who used to have a badge and who knew what his eyes saw. Gene stared at the house on the hill: whatever had happened up there was over. He and Billie went to the dead man. A million angels dropped tears on them as she helped Gene throw Doyle and the guns through open doors of crawling boxcars. Gene almost fell under the steel wheels, but she grabbed him and held on. The train rumbled toward the mountains and the ocean beyond. Gene ripped the medal off his neck and threw it onto the last boxcar out of nowhere.

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  ~ * ~

  CLARK HOWARD

  The Cobalt Blues

  from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  Lewis got off the Harrison Street bus, turned up the collar of his old surplus Navy watch coat, and walked, head down against the cold March wind, to the Cook County Medical Center down the street. Chicago, he thought, was a lousy place for a guy to have to spend the last weeks and months of his life. He should have moved out to Arizona or down to Florida a long time ago, like most of the rest of the old gang he had grown up with did. At least he could be lying out in the sun while he died.

  At the big, sprawling medical complex, he made his way to the Radiology Building and entered the foyer. He paused a moment to turn down his collar, catch his breath, and pull a tissue from his pocket to dry his watery eyes. On his way to the elevators, he looked up at the lobby clock and saw that it was 8:52. As usual, he began making the mental bet he made every Thursday morning. Would he be the first to arrive and sign in? The second? Or the third? There were three of them that had the nine o’clock appointment: himself, a skinny white guy named Potts, and a sullen black man named Hoxie. The radiology technician had three come in at once because there were three phases to the treatment, and he could have a patient in each phase as the morning progressed.

  Because Lewis was an obsessive gambler, his mind, without conscious direction from him, invariably broke everything he did in life down to odds for or against. So when he stepped onto one of the elevators and reached past two Hispanic orderlies to press the button for five, he started trying to decide how it would be today: Would he be first, second, or third? The rule he applied was that he had to make up his mind before the elevator door opened on five. That was the only fair way to do it. Otherwise, he might see one of the other two in the hall upstairs. Then there could be no bet. Just like if he encountered one of them in the lobby. No bet.

  The elevator stopped on three and the orderlies got off. The door closed and the car started again. Since he was now alone, Lewis said aloud, “Okay, one, two, or three? What’s it gonna be?”

  This was important to him. This, in his mind, might tell him whether he was going to have a winning day or a losing day. To a confirmed gambler, every day was a new beginning, a fresh start, another chance to hit it big. Yesterday never mattered. A gambler that looked back on what he lost yesterday was a fool. The same as a gambler who planned what to gamble on tomorrow. Yesterday was over, tomorrow wasn’t he
re. There was only today.

  The elevator stopped on five. A split instant before the door opened, Lewis decided. Second. He would be second today.

  On five, he walked down a long corridor to a door with a sign above it that read: outpatient radiology. Taking a deep breath, as if he had a fortune bet on the moment, Lewis opened the door and entered the waiting room. In a glance he saw that Potts, the skinny white guy, was already there, slouched down in a corner chair, leafing through one of a dozen outdated magazines spread about the room. Hoxie, the sullen black man, sat in an opposite corner, looking straight ahead, not moving, as if he were in a trance.