by Rex Burns
“No. There’s a woman here asking about it. A private investigator.” She looked again at Julie’s business card. “The Touchstone Agency… . That’s right… .” A snort. “It’s your decision, Larry.” Hanging up, she told Julie, “He said it wasn’t Chertok. It was a woman insurance agent who wanted to sell him some very expensive extended coverage if he rented to Lidke. He didn’t want to pay so he didn’t want wrestling.”
“Do you know of any leverage Chertok might have on Mr. Brundidge?”
“Larry occasionally does business with him, but nothing consistent, thank God. I’ve heard a few rumors about the people Chertok runs with, but nothing I’d care to offer as factual.”
“I’m interested in rumors.”
Her full lips smiled, but her eyes remained flat. “If I hear any more, Miss Campbell, I have your card.”
The next step should have been an interview with Larry Brundidge, but his secretary made it clear that the man wasn’t in—nor likely to be in whenever the Touchstone Agency called again. Back in her office, Julie pushed open a panel in the window to snag what breeze there was, but all she caught was the noisy snarl of midday traffic swirling around the many restaurants that marked Larimer Square. She was entering the morning’s expenses in the Lidke file when Uncle Angus opened the door and limped in.
“Julie—you look as lovely as ever! Jeez, it’s hot in here!” He fanned himself with a hat whose broad brim stopped just short of cowboy size and whose shade helped stave off the skin cancer so prevalent at Denver’s high altitude. “Used to be I was able to stand weather like this. Loved it. Loosened me up, you know? Now …”
Uncle Angus—her father’s half brother—was almost fourteen years senior to her father. Though the man could retire comfortably at any time from his real estate business, he continued working, though at a slower pace, and had shifted from home sales toward consulting on commercial investment. Uncle Angus’s wife was happy that he was still working—it took him out of the house and her kitchen; Julie’s father was less happy to have him consult for the Touchstone Agency whether his advice was needed or not.
“You should wear something cooler than a three-piece suit.” She offered a paper cone of water from the bottle in the office refrigerator. “No one wears that anymore.”
“Thanks.” Uncle Angus’s head tilted back to drain the cup, and Julie noted with a little pang of lost time how loose and gray the flesh looked under his jaw. “This suit? You know the first rule in dealing with money? You got to prove you don’t need it. This suit tells investors I don’t need it.” He crushed the paper cup in a broad hand and lobbed it squarely into the trash basket beside her desk. “Trouble is, you’re not supposed to sweat, either.”
Julie laughed and nodded at the large office window. “We need to get drapes or curtains of some kind. I’ve talked to Dad about that.”
“Yeah. West window like that, in summer you need less view and more shade. Tell you what: I can get you a deal from one of my contacts—some nice drapes wholesale, you know? Get something that makes the place look a little … softer—less businesslike. Make your clients feel more comfortable. People in trouble, they want to feel at ease talking to you, you know? What say we do that: surprise your dad with a little interior decor and staging—he’ll like it!”
Julie could imagine her father’s reaction if she asked Uncle Angus to stage the offices for psychological appeal. “What do you hear from Allan?” Questions about family always veered safely from her uncle’s suggestions.
“So he wouldn’t like it. All right—he always was stubborn. One of these days he might grow out of that. Maybe.” He grunted and wagged his head. “Allan—he got that promotion—called me last week. He’s now some kind of division head.” There was more resignation than pride in the man’s voice, and Julie understood. A promotion meant her cousin was even less interested in coming back with his wife and children to the Denver area.
“That’s good!”
“Yeah. It is.” Her uncle settled into her upholstered guest chair and used his cane to lever his arthritic hip out straight. She stood to offer him the firmer desk chair, but he shook his head. “Easier to sit like this. How’s things going? Seems kind of quiet around here.”
It was his way of asking whether she had changed her mind about quitting her father’s business to move into his real estate firm.
“Things are quiet now—we go through cycles. But Dad’s out on a job that could lead to something big. And I picked up a case yesterday.”
It was Julie’s way of answering that she had not changed her mind.
Which her uncle understood. “Good for you—not so good for me. I’m not only getting older, Julie, I’m getting tired. I need an office manager, somebody I can trust, to take over the crap that wears me out. Besides,” he added, “I’d feel better knowing there’s a Raiford still in the business. You know I always thought of it as a family firm, but Allan … I mean, with you there it would still be a family firm.”
“Uncle Angus—”
“Hey, it’s just an old man talking. Let him talk, OK? Besides, I’m not saying you’d be stuck doing office stuff. But you’d have to get your license, and you’d want to start out in the office before you handled any sales.”
“Why in the office?”
“It’s a good way to learn the business. Pick up the threads, learn what happens with the paperwork. And then in a couple years when I step out, you’d be ready to take over the whole operation.” He added, “You’d have something a hell of a lot more stable than running off to Abu Dooboo or wherever the hell Jim went last time.”
“Abu Dhabi. He said it was interesting.”
“Damn dangerous, too—a young lady like you running around alone in places like that. I don’t know what Jim’s thinking about, I swear!”
“Uncle Angus, I’ve told you: Dad drills me in security as well as in self-defense. And I’m not much for office routine—not even when I worked for the paper.”
“Yeah. Office crap drives me up the wall, too. But you’re good at organizing things—you’re like your mother at that. Jim’s not. I mean, look how you run this business. You do your street work and then come in and take care of all the office stuff. Jim says he leaves it all up to you because you’re so good at it.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.” Her uncle’s voice took on a slightly pious note. “He really admires your ability. Talks about it all the time—how good you are at it.”
Julie caught the teasing twinkle in Uncle Angus’s eye, but she resolved to ask her father about it nonetheless. “I’m in this racket because I like it.”
“Sure. I understand. Same way I feel about mine.” He was silent a moment, thinking about his brother’s stubbornness in remaining in this line of work when there were so many better-paying jobs he could do. And—despite what his niece said—jobs that were safer for both of them.
“Well, maybe when you’re ready to try settling down again …”
“I tried that.”
He caught the warning in his niece’s voice and nodded, stifling what he was going to say to gaze out the window toward the gently rolling landscape and more distant mountains that could be glimpsed between the new towers of offices and apartments.
Julie typed the final entries in the accounts folder of Lidke’s file.
After a few minutes, her uncle said, “You know, when Jim started up this business, I never thought it would last this long or do so well. Not for any fault of his, I mean, but just the nature of this kind of work—it doesn’t have a steady demand you can count on. And then when you left the newspaper to join him, well, sometimes family gets in the way in a business. You know, you can’t just tell a family member what or how to do something like you can the hired help. Family feelings get in the way, you know what I mean?”
Julie did.
“But you
guys seem to work it out pretty well. Maybe I’m just jealous because Allan doesn’t want to move back to Denver.”
“Maybe he’s like you. He wants to do it on his own.”
“Yeah. Maybe. And maybe I want my grandkids where I can see them grow up.”
Julie understood that. And the worry briefly crossed her mind that her father, when he reached his brother’s age, might begin to think the same way.
“Well,” Uncle Angus said, “if you change your mind, commercial real estate’s a good business. It can get pretty exciting, too, when you watch an investment take off—I mean, just look at all the construction cranes out there putting in more buildings. Hell, it even gets more exciting if a deal flops. You keep it in mind, OK?”
“I will, Uncle. Thank you.”
He let out a long hissing breath. “Yeah. You’re welcome.” A wag of his head. “As stubborn as your old man. So tell me, what’s this new case you got?”
Julie watched her uncle’s face settle more heavily into the deep lines and creases carved by the years. “A professional wrestler. He believes he’s being threatened.”
“Yeah? Pro wrestling? I know a couple guys used to be pro wrestlers. God, what a way to make a living—worse than a career in double-A ball!” Uncle Angus had played baseball in college and in the minors before finally surrendering to the knowledge that he would never move up to the majors. He still loved the game, had Rockies season tickets for behind home plate, and was happy to keep up with friends who had quit playing to become managers and scouts and coaches.
“Do any of them live in Colorado?”
“Yeah. Dutch Schwartz. Started wrestling as Mountain Man Schwartz and Sulemein the Savage in Chief Littlewolf’s Traveling Athletic Show.”
“Who’s what?”
“Chief Littlewolf. Traveling carnival—small-town circuit, set up a tent, put on a show, move out the next day.”
“Schwartz used two names?”
“Used a mask. Wrestled one bout as Mountain Man, then put on the mask and wrestled the next as Sulemein. Sulemein was always the bad guy and Mountain Man was usually a good guy—here in Colorado, anyway. The promoters had a hell of a time giving the fans reasons why Mountain Man wouldn’t wrestle Sulemein. Sulemein didn’t do much to help, either. He’d scream that he wanted to meet Mountain Man in the ring. Called himself some terrible names.”
“Perhaps I could talk with him.”
The heaviness faded from her uncle’s face at the thought of contributing something to Julie’s work. “Sure—I can phone him. I mean if you really want me to. I haven’t seen him in a while, but you know how that is—we touch bases whenever.” He added, “He works for a supermarket chain now—warehouse manager of some kind.”
“Can you call him? Ask if he’ll talk to me?”
“I can do it right now!” Uncle Angus fished a small address book from inside his coat. “He’s been out of the game for a long time,” he warned. “He may not have as many contacts… .” He paused.
“If you can arrange a meeting, Uncle, I’d appreciate it.”
Satisfied, he settled his glasses on his nose and tilted his head back to study the face of his cell phone. “Damned trifocals. Makes the lines jump all over.” His broad finger poked deliberately at the telephone’s cramped number pad. He asked for Mr. Schwartz and a few moments later was leaning back and grinning at the ceiling as he traded insults with the man on the other end of the line.
5
Dutch Schwartz said he would be happy to meet Angus’s niece. How about Matilda’s Outback around three thirty. “Don’t mention the f-word,” Uncle Angus warned Julie.
“The what?”
“The f-word: ‘fake.’ You want to get a pro wrestler steamed, tell him his business is fake.”
Julie looked at her uncle. “You’re telling me it’s real? Backflips off the corner posts? Hyperimmobilizing Death Claw grips? All that’s real?”
“Hey, that’s the showbiz part. But Dutch says he’s broken more bones than he can count—some of them twice. They do stunts, and stunt men get hurt.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way, and on the drive east of Denver, Julie had to admit she still wasn’t convinced. But Uncle Angus had warned her, and his knowledge was usually founded on what he’d seen or what he’d experienced, so it was worth paying attention to.
Matilda’s Outback was a restaurant and watering hole in a small shopping center on the prairie in eastern Aurora. It could have been a hardware store or an insurance office, any of the dozen businesses that fit in the generic boxes making up the long façade of plate-glass windows. On one side was a dry cleaner’s and on the other a unisex hair salon. Inside the glass doors was an authentic Australian motif: plaster kangaroos hiding in plastic palm trees, potted vines, QANTAS posters of Sydney’s harbor, ads for Foster’s Lager, a movie poster for “Crocodile” Dundee.
This long past the lunch hour, the tables were almost empty. A few hadn’t yet been cleared of dishes and crumpled paper napkins; but even if the room had been crowded, Dutch Schwartz would have been easy to spot: he filled one whole side of a booth near the unused dartboard in the bar area.
When he saw Julie turn toward him, his shoulders heaved with an effort to stand. But the table clamped his thighs to the bench and he settled for a wave of his arm that made his flowered Hawaiian shirt billow like a small tent. Above the shirt’s bright splotches of frangipani was a bullet-shaped head so wide that it made his eyes seem set close together. “You’re Julie? Angus’s niece? How’s he doing?”
“He said to tell you hello—and he’s sorry he can’t make it. His arthritis has him pretty sore.”
“Yeah. That’s tough. I got some spots in my joints, too. Hurt like hell!” Schwartz paused while the waitress said, “G’day, mates.” She wore a khaki shirt and shorts and safari boots with knee-high socks and smiled while taking their drink orders. “So what’re you after, Julie? Angus said something about you do investigations of wrestlers or some such?”
She told him what she did for a living and a few things about the new case. “Can you tell me something about pro wrestling? It will help to have an insider’s view of it.”
“I’m no insider no more. But this guy hired you—Lipke? Lidke?—he’s right about FWO. They’re one of the big ones now. Them, the World Wrestling Federation, World Championship Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment. Outfits like that got the game sewed up. Television. They find a cable channel that needs programming, you know? Tailor the matches for five minutes of wrestling, ten minutes of ads. Use it to hype live shows coming to town as well as closed-circuit broadcasts. Can fill thirty thousand seats for a live match, plus closed-circuit sales out of town. Then they rebroadcast it a week later on regular television for a good commission and spend the rest of the time counting their money.”
The waitress brought two frosted schooners of beer. Schwartz lifted his glass to Julie and sucked at the collar of foam. Then he wiped the corners of his mouth with thumb and forefinger. His lips had been split in several places, and the glossy stitching had not been cosmetic. A scatter of short ridges—hard purple flesh—marked his forehead.
“Some of their people really can wrestle. You can tell they got the moves. But a lot of them, even the workers …” His large head with its close-cropped gray hair and wrinkled, pendulous ears moved back and forth slowly.
“Workers?”
“The guys who know the game, know the moves, keep the action going. There used to be workers and talkers. But anymore, I swear they’re all turning into talkers. All they are is big and noisy. If they tried to pick their nose, they’d stick their finger in their eye. But, Jesus, they get paid. If they’re in a top promotion, they get real money. Even the people wrestling prelims.”
“How much?”
“Like fifty thou’ for starters. But somebody like, who?—Hulk Hogan. I hear that su
cker used to gross between five and ten million a year. Advertising income, souvenirs, all that stuff added in.” Another long drink and a disgusted belch. “We used to make fifty bucks a night if we were lucky. Ride the Greyhound from one Podunk to another, eat grease burgers, flip a coin to see who got to sleep on the floor.” His damaged lips folded back in a laugh. “Loser got the bed.”
“Was it”—Julie groped for a safe word—“choreographed as much as it seems on television?”
“Choreographed?” Schwartz’s voice tightened and he leaned over his glass to stare hard at her. “You trying to say ‘fake’?”
“Arranged as to who would win and who would lose.”
Satisfied, the heavy man swayed back to take a swallow of his beer and twirl the schooner for a moment. “Yeah, gotta have some kayfabe—you know, make it look real but hype up the hurt. Always has been a show—promoters want to fill seats. Hell, sometimes we’d just flip a coin to see who won that night.” He added, “Unless one of us was a local. The local always won. Too damned dangerous in some of those railroad towns if he didn’t.” He shook his head. “Ever hear of Gorgeous George? Nah—you’re too young. But that guy was a genius. He put it all together in the fifties: the television, the hype, the fan clubs. Big money. These new promotions, WWF and so on, they tightened up what he started and then went national. That was the beginning of the end for carnival wrestling and regional circuits.”
“How did they grow so big?”
“Went out and did it, that’s how. Used to be, what, twenty, thirty promoters had the country carved up into regions. Put on matches in local arenas or even tents, had regular circuits, even used a little local TV. Gave the stations free films of last week’s action to bring in the house. But then came cable and national syndication, and that really got it going. Some guy … Newhouse, I think, started with some regional syndicate out east, twenty-thirty years ago. Providence? Anyway, started on local cable, tailored the matches for a couple hours’ airtime with a lot of breaks for sponsors and hype for next week’s grudge matches. Started dressing his wrestlers up like comic book heroes—costumes, music, lights, smoke, the whole bit. Had interviews, fan magazines, posters, shopping mall shows. I’m talking major hype, you understand—MTV with muscle.”