The heavy-set man grunted in reply and when he passed us by, the trainer said, “Nick Thomopolous. Has a piece of about thirty fighters. Gotta be nice to him.”
“What’s with the coat.”
“Wears it winter, fall, and spring. Summertime he gives it a rest. He’s a little nuts, is what he is. Maybe a lot nuts. Hard to tell.” I watched as Thomopolous strolled over to the far ring, where a baby-faced light-heavy in gold trunks was dancing circles around a sparring partner who looked old enough to have gone ten rounds with Teddy Roosevelt. People immediately clustered around the man in the fur coat and you knew he was two hundred and fifty pounds of dread and money.
I turned back to the trainer.
“What about Merman.”
Adelman’s face remained blank. “What do you want to know?” “What kind of guy is he?”
“He hire you, Merman?”
“Maybe.”
The trainer flashed a sour smile. “Watch your back. On his good days, he’s a two-bit cocksucker.”
“What about his bad days?”
“I heard he killed a guy. Maybe two.”
“Really.”
“Yeah.” Adelman waved a copious cloud of smoke away from his kisser. “That’s what I hear.”
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who’d he kill?”
“Somebody who owed him. That was years ago. He doesn’t do his own work anymore.”
“He’s a shylock?”
Adelman shrugged. “He always made a living, that’s what 1 know. How come he hires you?”
“The kid was threatened. Walker.”
“Threatened?”
“Got a note, fancy handwriting, says if he doesn’t take a flop in his prelim on Friday he gets drilled.”
Adelman took the Tiparillo from his mouth and scratched the back of his head.
“That makes no fucking sense.”
“I agree.”
“If there was big money moving on a prelim it’d stick out like a boner in a steam room. Can’t hide that.”
“The note was signed ‘Friends of White Athletes.’”
Adelman remained mystified, then turned and whistled at a swarthy, heavy-set trainer across the room.
“Eddie, who’s Typhoon Walker fighting on Friday?”
The heavy-set trainer didn’t hesitate. “Sweet Eddie O’Brien.” Adelman turned back to me. “Sweet Eddie O’Brien.”
“I heard.”
“Knocky O’Brien’s kid.”
“Who?”
“Knocky O’Brien.” Adelman stared at me as if I had just drawn a blank on my own name. “The Nazi guy.”
An hour later I was sitting in the Old Seidelburg saloon with my pal Toots Fellman, a reporter for the Daily News and former house dick at the late and unlamented Hotel Lava, a fleabag on West Forty-fourth where Toots had received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in human depravity.
“American Patriots Party,” Toots said with a mouth full of bratwurst. I nursed a cup of coffee. “He’s an ex-cop from Staten Island. His wife was killed, stabbed maybe forty times, they made a colored guy for the murder and Knocky went batshit. I mean seriously batshit.”
“How batshit is seriously batshit?”
“Started dressing up in brown outfits, hung a swastika from his roof, began having meetings in his basement. It’s legal.”
“He have any kind of following?”
“Marginal, but its growing faster than you might imagine. A lot of extreme anti-Commies running around, and it attracts the more dim-witted of them.”
“I thought the Bund had been outlawed.”
“This isn’t the Bund and they don’t strictly call themselves Nazis. ‘Patriots’ is the dodge, but they’re getting money from various Jew-haters and all these anti-Soviet groups.”
“You ever meet him?”
“Knocky?”
“Yeah.”
“Heard him speak once. Couldn’t tell if he was really nuts or it was just an act.” Toots finished his brat and wiped his hands. “Let me see that note.”
I handed the letter across the table.
“I’m thinking that a New York guy named O’Brien, odds are he went to Catholic school,” I said.
“You talking about the handwriting?”
“Correct.”
‘“Friends of White Athletes.’” Toots stared at the letter, then handed it back to me. “Almost too neat somehow.”
“I thought the same thing. And his kid is Typhoon’s opponent? It’s so...”
“Obvious,” Toots finished my sentence. “Obvious out of stupidity or obvious in a perverse sort of way.”
“A blind alley.”
“Exactly.” Toots looked around. “I need some more coffee.” He waved in the direction of our waiter.
“What are you doing this afternoon,” I asked him.
“Getting laid or taking a nap, depending on my luck.”
“I have a better idea. When’s the last time you visited Staten Island?”
“Oh, go screw yourself, Jack,” said Toots. “Do your own goddamn sleuthing.”
That was just his way of saying yes.
An hour or so later, I drove my Buick Roadmaster off the Staten Island ferry and into the hills of New York’s smallest and most verdant borough. Toots consulted a road map and aimed me in the direction of 28 Mohawk Lane, which is where Knocky O’Brien maintained his residence and the world headquarters of the American Patriots Party. As we turned on Choctaw Avenue, a Dodge station wagon came racing straight toward us, then swerved, went up on the road shoulder and roared past.
“Jesus!” Toots shouted and whirled around to look at the speeding car.
“What the hell was his problem,” I asked. “Could you see who was driving?”
“Not really. A guy, his head was turned,” Toots said, then pointed out the window. “This is it.”
“This is what.”
“We’re at Knocky’s.”
Knocky O’Brien lived in a white two-story frame house that needed a paint job and significant roof work. The lawn and backyard appeared well maintained but lacked any sign of human habitation. There were no bicycles or lawn chairs, no clotheslines or bird feeders. The place was quiet and altogether unremarkable, except for the large red-and-white swastika that hung from the roof. That was an eye-catcher.
“Am I the only one who feels nauseous here?” asked Toots.
“Goes right through you, doesn’t it?” I said through clenched teeth. “If I had any hair, it’d be standing on end.”
We each took a long breath, then started up the walkway. Toots and I were going to play it as straight as possible—he the earnest and inquiring reporter with an interest in Knocky’s hard-luck story, me the warm-hearted private dick.
Toots rang the front doorbell. I expected it to play “Deutschland iiber Alles,” but it just rang sharply. We waited, looked at each other, then looked at our shoes. After a minute of utter silence, Toots rang again.
Nothing.
I tried the door and it swung open easily. Toots stared at me.
“What the hell,” I said, and we walked inside.
We entered and walked into a vestibule that contained a worn throw rug and an umbrella stand. The umbrella stand had been knocked on its side. Toots raised an inquiring eyebrow. There was a second door. I turned the knob; the door opened to a small living room. A portrait of Adolf Hitler in all his brown-shirted glory hung over the sofa and dominated the room. Dominated it until your eyes traveled from the picture down to the sofa itself where Knocky O’Brien lay sprawled out, but not comfortably. His arms were flung wide and his mouth was wide open, as was the rest of his head.
“Holy fuck,” said Toots.
The room had the acrid reek of gunpowder and looked to have been thoroughly tossed. Chairs and a breakfront were overturned; a coffee table was upside down. Books and pamphlets were scattered across Knocky’s fraying carpet.
“Guess he put up a figh
t,” I told Toots.
“Holy fuck,” he repeated.
“That, too.”
I walked over and took a closer look at Knocky, not that I was eager to. From casual observation, it looked to me that he had been shot at close range at least three times.
“Guess you have an exclusive,” I told Toots.
“I guess I do. We gotta call the law, Jack.”
“Give me a second.” I wandered around the living room, opening drawers and sticking my fingers into cubbyholes. I came up with a couple of thumbtacks and fourteen cents in loose change.
“Jack, come on,” Toots repeated. “We gotta make the call.”
“Hang on,” I told him. I walked over to a rickety bookcase that had been pushed over on its side. It contained some recent fiction, some racy paperbacks of the suburban housewives variety, a few volumes of American history and a copy of Mein Kampf. I pulled Hitler’s treatise up out of the fallen bookshelf and it immediately felt strange in my hands, and not for reasons of ideology.
It was hollow.
I opened the cover and found myself staring at a rectangular compartment that held a taped-in plastic bag containing about a pound of white powder. I turned to Toots and showed him my discovery. He whistled.
“This gets more warm and fuzzy by the minute, doesn’t it,” he said.
Eventually we called the cops, of course, and in a matter of minutes two homicide bulls named Murphy and Clark arrived and came charging into the house like they had trapped Dillinger in the bathroom. We told the bulls what we knew, carelessly omitting the part where I found the pound of heroin. Toots said he was a News reporter doing a feature on the Patriots party, and I said I had just come along for the ride. The bulls didn’t quite buy it, but Toots’ press credentials were unmistakably legit. After they had asked us the same questions a couple of hundred different ways, they let us go, but not before Murphy told us, “He was good folks, Knocky.”
I went into neutral. “Really.”
Murphy’s eyes were blue and very hard.
“Yeah, really. And he was my brother-in-law. My wife was sisters with his ex.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said.
“You’re very sorry,” said Murphy. “Glad to hear that. I’m going to take this matter very personal. Like I say, he was good folks...”
His partner, Clark, tried to hush him up. “Joe...”
“Shut the fuck up,” he told him. “Good folks he was. All he wanted was to get these fuckin’ Commies out of this good country.”
I checked out the shine on my shoes. No way I was going to start jousting with this maniac.
“So I’m going to break some balls before this is over,” Murphy declared, as if reading from the Declaration of Independence. “That understood?”
Toots and I nodded, then we shuffled out of the house and out to the street and into my faithful Roadmaster. I started the engine.
“A dead Nazi who dealt heroin,” said Toots. “You found yourself a swell case, Jackson.”
An hour and a half later, after dropping Toots off at the News, I pulled up to my apartment house in Sunnyside and found Jerry Merman pacing in front of the building. When I got out of my car, he practically jumped into my arms.
“Did you hear?” he asked.
“Hear what?” I said, “and how the hell did you get my home
address?”
“Typhoon is missing.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was supposed to meet him at Hochstein’s at three o’clock. I get there, no Typhoon, and this kid is never late. I wait a half hour, he don’t show. I call this fleabag in Harlem where he’s parked, they tell me they haven’t seen him all afternoon. 1 tell them to check his room; they go up there, and everything’s in order.” “Maybe he found a girl for the afternoon.”
“That ain’t Typhoon, believe me. I know him over a year, you can set your watch by him.”
“That’s beside the point. He’s walking around knowing maybe somebody’s going to ice him. Thing like that’s going to make anybody skittish.”
Merman put his hand to his chin, as if in deep thought. “That’s a valid point. He’s frightened.”
“It’s not a particularly esoteric concept, Jerry. And how, I repeat, did you get my address?”
“I asked around. How about I come up for a couple minutes?” “You want to talk to me, come to my office. This is my home.” “Fair enough,” Merman said. “But I’m worried. Maybe you’re right, maybe he just panicked. I just wanted to come up and try calling his hotel again, but I can do that from a pay phone, right? No need to invade your privacy. Can I call you later?”
“You have my number?”
“I’ll get it if I need it,” he said with a smile, walking in the direction of a dazzling salmon-and-white Kaiser parked in front of A1 Deutsch’s candy store.
“Jerry?” I called out.
“What?” He kept walking.
“What do you know about Knocky O’Brien?”
He stopped in his tracks. “You know about Knocky? That’s fast work, Jack.”
“What do you mean, ‘know about him’? Know what about him?”
“He’s a Nazi, hates Jews and colored.” Merman nodded with some agitation. “You think he’s behind this? Interesting theory.”
“He was murdered this afternoon. That’s even more interesting.”
Merman didn’t move a single facial muscle. “Who was murdered?” he finally said.
“Knocky.” I liked saying his name. “Three shots to the head at close range.”
“Holy shit.” He paused with his hand on the fabulously beautiful Kaiser. “You sure I can’t come up and talk to you about this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Makes me extremely nervous, hearing that about Knocky,” Merman said, “and knowing my kid is unaccounted for all afternoon. Not that I think he would do such a thing in a million years.” “Did Typhoon even know about him?”
“About Knocky?” He liked saying it, too. “I doubt it, but you never know. Maybe somebody at the gym told him.”
“Didn’t it figure that the note might have come from Knocky? He’s a white supremacist, his kid is fighting Typhoon?”
Merman shook his head. “Too obvious, don’t you think?
Plus, Knocky’s kid fought colored before and nobody ever got threatened.”
“You’re right,” I told him, and he was. This didn’t add up at all. “So why start with Typhoon?”
“Hey, Jack,” Merman said, “who’s the detective, me or you?” He opened the car door. “I gotta go find my kid. This ain’t good...he might have panicked, who knows? You can get a gun up in Harlem as easy as you can get a platter of chicken.”
Merman got in his car and drove away. I turned and walked into my building with a sinking sensation in my guts. This case had started out sour; now it was getting positively rancid.
I sank further when I got out of the elevator at the third floor and found Typhoon Walker seated on the windowsill directly across the hall from my apartment. The sill was wide and faced the windows that looked out over the front courtyard of my building,
“Evening, mister,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but I have to talk.” He watched me take out my keys. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” The door to the neighboring apartment opened and Mrs. Campanella stuck her large head out. She was wearing a house dress and an apron, and the aroma of veal parmigiana coming from her apartment was overpowering.
“Everything okay, Mr. LeVine?” she asked with some trepidation. Well-muscled Negroes in their early twenties were not a common or comforting sight in the building.
“Everything’s great,” I told her, and gestured to Typhoon. “Come on in, kid.” Typhoon entered my apartment. Mrs. Campanella crossed herself and went back into hers.
I locked the door behind me and when I turned around Typhoon was staring out my living room window at the street below.
“You’re in training so I won’t
offer you a beer, but how about a soda, kid?” I said to him.
“Just water, mister, if that’s okay,” he said.
I walked into the kitchen, took a Blatz out of the refrigerator for myself and poured some water into a glass I had bought at the Futurama exhibit of the ’39 World’s Fair. When I came back into the living room, Typhoon was still on his feet, staring out over the streets of Sunnyside like he was getting his first look at Paris.
“What’s on your mind, kid?” I asked him, handing him the glass of water.
“He come out here?”
“Your manager?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yeah,” I told him, and took a long cool swallow of my Blatz. “He just left in that Kaiser.”
“Some car that is, mister.”
“Sure is.” I sat down on my couch. “I’d ask you to sit down, but my guess is you’re gonna keep standing.”
“I ain’t much good at sitting down, mister,” the kid said. “You’re scared.”
“Yes, sir.” He was figuring how much to tell me, but coming to my apartment obviously meant that he trusted me already. “Yes, sir,” he repeated, taking a delicate sip of his water. “I think Mr. Merman’s the one wants me to sit down on Friday night.”
This was getting to be really fun.
“Why do you think that, kid?”
“He got money problems, I think. He got a lot of problems.” “He a dope addict by any chance?”
Typhoon rubbed his nose like it was a magic lamp, then he nodded. “Yes, sir. I believe he is.”
“Heroin?”
Typhoon nodded again. “I don’t want to take no dive, mister. I’m a good fighter and I could make money someday. Got a big family down in Hattiesburg. Five brothers and four sisters.”
“I understand.” I drank a little more Blatz and tried to sort this all out. “You think Merman is supporting a habit. That gets
very expensive.”
Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw Page 6