“One more stop, my friend. I believe Tracy Kimball might hold the key to this mystery.” He gave the driver her address.
Tracy was just returning from the local grocer’s when we arrived. We followed her inside as she unpacked and stored the butter and eggs. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
“We met Shell Ames,” Simon told her.
“Shell—? Oh, Dragon’s manager.”
“He said you saw him with Dragon a couple of weeks ago.” “Roger did. I was with him.”
“Do you know Ames well?”
“Not at all. Roger had mentioned him, but that was the only time we’d met.”
“But you’d know him if you saw him.”
“I’m sure I would.”
Simon nodded, as if finally certain of his next course of action. “Come with us now to Leather’s Gym. I want you to identify him.”
“Roger told me women aren’t allowed. He would never take
me.”
“The gym closes at five. We’ll wait for him outside.”
“I don’t know...”
“It will help to find Roger’s killer.”
“Then I’ll do it,” she decided.
We were back at Leather’s Gym a half hour later, waiting in the park down the street. I remembered our meeting Tracy there just after Russell’s murder. Now we watched young fighters carrying gym bags leave the building after their workouts, perhaps imagining that one day they might be the next Dragon Moore.
After a long wait, five o’clock passed without any sign of Shell Ames. “Come on,” Simon decided. “We’re going up.”
“But women aren’t—” Tracy began.
“The place closes at five. If anybody’s still up there, that’s who we want to see.”
I held the street door open for Tracy and she preceded us in silence up the steps to the second floor, giving me a nice opportunity to admire her legs. Then she entered the gym without hesitation. I heard Miles Leather’s voice bellow out, “No women allowed!”
“It’s after business hours,” Simon pointed out as we entered behind her. “Is Shell Ames here too?”
The gimpy manager came out of the office. “What is all this?”
Simon turned to Tracy. “Take a good look at these two men, Miss Kimball, and tell us which one is Shell Ames.”
My expectation of a sudden blinding revelation was doused when she pointed out the man we knew to be Ames. “This one, of course. The other man is Miles Leather.”
Before either of us could say anything a third man emerged from the office. It was Dragon Moore himself. “What is going on here? These are the people who came out to the training camp yesterday.”
“Yes, just what is going on?” Leather asked.
Simon Ark took a step forward. “I have come to explain a most perplexing problem. This man we see before us, Dragon Moore, is rumored to be much older than he looks. Items on the Internet would have us believe he boxed and wrestled more than sixty years ago. A photograph of a boxer with the same name more than a hundred years ago shows the identical facial birthmark shaped something like a dragon. How could this be? Could your fighter possibly be that old?”
Dragon Moore merely smirked while Leather took a menacing step forward. “Have your say and get out of here. Take the woman with you.”
“I’ll make it brief,” Simon promised. “Putting aside the possibility of a man past one hundred being able to box like a heavyweight in his twenties, we are left with only two explanations. Could the man in the picture, the nineteenth century Dragon Moore, be a great-grandfather of the present one, having passed the birthmark down through several generations? Upon reflection I discarded this explanation. That fact alone, if true, would have been enough of a hook to ensure wide press coverage. No, you wanted to make Dragon a real legend, with the press puzzling over the story and that birthmark for months to come.”
“It’s real,” Leather insisted. “It doesn’t wash off.”
“It’s a tattoo!” Simon thundered, pointing his outstretched finger like Solomon rendering a biblical verdict. “A tattoo that deliberately copied the birthmark on the earlier Dragon Moore’s face! Of course your man wasn’t named Dragon or Desmond Moore when you first came up with this scheme, which is why there’s no record of his birth in New Orleans. He had a different name then. You found that old photograph of a fighter who looked something like Dragon and persuaded him to change his name and get the tattoo, matched exactly to the photo, and began dropping hints on the Internet that he was over a hundred years old.”
“Are you saying we killed Russell because he discovered our plan?” Leather asked.
“Hardly. Any story he wrote would only have stoked the publicity and prolonged the debate. The American matchmakers would have offered big purses to lure Dragon back across the ocean for a fight.”
“Then who killed him?”
Simon walked over to the ring and climbed the steps, fitting himself awkwardly between the ropes. “The murder of Roger Russell had nothing to do with Dragon’s story, and I think 1 can prove it. Would one of you join me in the ring, please?” When nobody moved, he said, “Tracy? How about you? I promise 1 won’t throw a punch.”
She climbed reluctantly into the ring and Simon positioned her exactly in the center. “You see, the mistake everyone made was in assuming that Russell was killed during a sparring match, but he couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?” Dragon asked.
“Because the autopsy found a spot of blood on his right hand, even though both his hands were covered with boxing gloves. You see, Russell’s shirt was removed and the gloves put on him after he was dead.”
Ames and Leather exchanged bewildered glances, and I was as confused as everyone else. “But his shirt would have had blood on it too,” I argued.
“Exactly! And that’s why it had to be removed by the killer. It couldn’t have been left on the gym floor or draped over a chair to spoil the illusion of a fight. The autopsy mentions blood on his pants but none on his torso, another proof that he was wearing the shirt when he was killed.”
“If he wasn’t boxing, why did the killer use a cestus on him?” Ames asked.
“Again to heighten the illusion there was a fight in progress.”
“How did the killer get him into the ring if they weren’t going to fight?”
“Simply by asking him, as I just asked Tracy Kimball to join me here. Isn’t that how you did it, Miss Kimball?”
Suddenly she threw a punch at Simon that might have hurt had it connected. He grabbed her arms and held them tight until I came to the rescue.
It was some time later, after Sergeant Willis arrived to take her into custody, before we heard the rest of Simon’s story. “Love and money are usually the primary motives for murder,” he told us. “She still loved Russell, but he’d stopped loving her. He was back with his wife in America and their affair was over. The murder weapon, the cestus, came from his own collection. At least part of it was still at Tracy’s apartment, of course. We saw a statuette of a bare-knuckled fighter in her bookcase. She slipped the cestus into her purse and insisted on accompanying him to meet us at the gym. Then she lured him into the ring and hit him from behind. She had to hit him a second time to finish him off. She removed his bloody shirt and disposed of it later in a trash can. There were plenty of boxing gloves around the gym and she laced a pair onto his hands. Her idea was that we’d never suspect a woman of killing him in a sparring match.”
“That’s all you had to go on?” Sergeant Willis asked.
“That and one more thing. She claimed she’d never been here before because they bar women, but when I lured her here this afternoon with a made-up story of identifying Shell Ames, she walked up those stairs and through the proper door without hesitation, even though there are three unmarked steel doors out there.”
We caught the Friday night plane back home, and I arrived in time for Shelly’s party.
THE TRIAL HORSE
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by Clark Howard
When the knock on the door came, Joe Bell was lying on top of a moist sheet in his Jockey shorts, snoring quietly like the engine of a late-model car that was starting to miss. His bed was a pull-out couch in a grubby little apartment in Boyle Heights, just east of Los Angeles. There was no air-conditioning in the building, just window units called “swamp coolers” that produced barely cool air almost moist enough to drink. But Joe was a good sleeper, so the humidity didn’t bother him. Gladys, his wife, bitched about it constantly, especially when she put hot curlers in her bleached hair getting ready to go to work at the Arabian Cafe at seven a.m. She sweated so heavily that she had to wait until she got to work to put her mascara on.
When the knock on the door persisted, Joe’s quiet snoring stopped, and when it persisted even more, he opened his eyes, thinking: The landlady! Gladys didn’t pay the fucking rent. He had almost made up his mind not to answer the knock when a voice outside called his name.
“Joe! Joe Bell! It’s Race, man! Open the door!”
Joe hauled himself out of bed and opened the door. Race, a tall, rail-thin, gray-haired black man with scar tissue around both eyes, came in and closed the door. “Wha’s up wit’ you, man?” he asked. “You hung over?”
“No, man. I thought you was the landlady. Wait a minute—”
Joe went into his tiny bathroom, took a leak and rinsed his face with cold water. “What’s going on, man?” he asked Race, drying his face as he came back into the living room.
“Danny Pitts broke his wrist yesterday in training.”
“No shit! Sparring?”
“Yeah. Some blockhead just down from Stockton. Came in low with his head and Pitts caught him with a right hook that bent his hand all the way back. Could hear the dorsal snap clear ’cross the gym.”
“Jeez. He had a fight with Avila coming up, too. Tough luck.” “Tough for him. Maybe good for you.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Ortega wants to see you.” He meant Gil Ortega, manager of fighters, matchmaker and owner of Ortega’s Championship Gym. “Me? What’s he wanna see me for?”
“What you think, stupid? He gots to find a sub for Pitts.” “Yeah, but why me? Mus’ be plenty of guys around he can get. Active guys. Hell, Race, I ain’t had a fight in ten months.” “Yeah, but you gots a leg up on this slot, baby.”
“Why’s that?”
Race smiled. “’Cause you lily-white, son, and Ortega agreed to put a white fighter in against Avila. His last six wins have been over niggers, spies and slopeheads. Public wants to see him do damage to a white boy for a change.” He studied Joe for a moment. There was some bulk around his middle. “What you weigh?”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t know. One-seventy, seventy-two.” “Yeah, well, Ortega gonna want you to get rid of that baby fat. You gon’ have to make one-sixty.”
“When’s the fight?”
“Three weeks from Friday. And it’s on ESPN, baby.”
“No shit!” Joe patted his excess weight. “I can make one-sixty by then. When’s Ortega wanna see me?”
“Soon’s you can get over there. Shave, get cleaned up. Wear a loose sport shirt outside your pants. Tell Ortega you weigh one-sixty-seven. Suck your gut in and keep your shoulders back.” Race returned to the door. “I’ll see you over there,” he said, and left.
Joe went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. He sucked his stomach in, braced his shoulders back and flexed his biceps. ESPN, he thought with a smile. Son of a bitch!
Ortega’s Championship Gym was housed in a one-story terracotta-and-brick building on Soto Street near Cesar Chavez Avenue. In the sixty-odd years since it was built, it had been a wholesale grocery store, a free medical clinic, a Chicano zoot-suiter jitterbug dance hall, a youth center and a weekend flea market. For the past ten years it had been Gil Ortega’s training gym for professional fighters. A weathered sign above the entrance read:
ORTEGA'S CHAMPIONSHIP GYM—HOME OF FUTURE CHAMPIONS.
Gil Ortega was a big man, not fat but brawny big, with thick arms, eyes like bullet holes and a sweeping Zapata mustache. He was dressed in fresh gray sweats, watching a young Mexican kid work the speed bag, when Joe Bell walked up and stood silently beside him. Noticing Joe, Ortega bobbed his chin at the kid. “He’s from Culiacan. Every kid comes up from there, I always hope might be another Julio Cesar Chavez. That there is called wishful thinking.” He looked knowingly at a flowing Hawaiian shirt Joe wore outside his trousers. With one big hand, he patted Joe’s stomach. “Who’s the father?”
“Come on, Gil, I ain’t in that bad a shape,” Joe protested.
“No? What do you weigh?”
“One-sixty-seven.”
“Bullshit. You weigh one-seventy-two, seventy-three. You think I fell with the last rain? Don’t try to bullshit me.” He walked away, saying, “Come on in the office.”
They walked the length of the gym. It was a big, rectangular room, two training rings occupying the very center, one end outfitted with speed bags, heavy bags, full-length sparring mirrors, exercise pads, a rope training corner and various other accoutrements of the trade. Beyond that area was a locker room and showers. Along one side of the main room, Ortega had installed metal bleachers for spectators who could pay a buck to watch the workouts, two bucks if a titleholder was working.
At the other far end of the room was Ortega’s office. Through a frosted-glass door, Ortega and Joe entered a small reception area where Ortega’s wife sat at an ancient wooden desk sorting out file cards on which were neatly typed the records of practically every professional fighter in North and Central America and the Caribbean.
“Hi, Joey,” Ortega’s wife said, looking up.
“Hi, Stefi,” Joe answered.
“How’s Gladys?”
“She’s okay.”
“She still a blonde?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmmm. She still working for that Arab?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“She better watch out for that guy,” Stefi warned. “He’s got a heavy reputation with the ladies.”
“Gladys can take care of herself,” Joe said.
Joe followed Ortega into his inner office. Ortega sat down behind an incredibly cluttered desk, and Joe, taking a chair facing him, watched as he fished around in the clutter and came up with several sheets of paper stapled together. “Race told you about Pitts, right?”
“Yeah. Tough luck.”
“I had him on ESPN on the undercard of the Hector Camacho Jr.-Vic Malloy card three weeks from Friday. He was going against Antonio Avila. You know him?”
Joe shrugged. “Seen him around is all.”
“They call him ‘The Anvil.’ Fourteen and zip, fourteen KOs, nobody’s gone past three with him. He and Pitts were set for eight. The ESPN people have agreed to cut it to six if 1 can find a suitable sub for Pitts. You interested?”
“Where’s the fight at?” Joe asked. He didn’t want to take any long trips. Stefi wasn’t the first one he’d heard say that the guy Gladys worked for was a real cocksman, a player who put the moves on every woman he was around. Not that Joe didn’t trust Gladys. He just didn’t want to be away overnight, was all.
“It’s at the Rialto in Indio,” Ortega told him.
Joe nodded. That was okay. He could get back home after the fight. Indio was just a few miles past Palm Springs. The Rialto Resort and Casino was one of the new Agua Caliente tribe casinos. “How much?” he asked Ortega.
“Twenty-five hundred.”
Joe grimaced. “Come on, Gil. How much was you paying Danny Pitts?”
“Six grand. But Pitts is twenty-two and three. He’s still a contender. You’re nineteen and nine. A trial horse. Plus which, Pitts has never been stopped. You been stopped twice.”
“Only on cuts!” Joe protested. “And one of them was from a
butt.”
“Cuts, butts, don’t make no difference. You been stopped twice, Joey. That�
�s the record.” Ortega sighed quietly and looked at one of Stefi’s neatly typed cards on his desk. “Your last fight was ten months ago. You lost in six to Fredo Castro down in Albuquerque on that Johnny Tapia card. What you been doing since then?”
Joe looked away. “This and that.”
“Race said you was doing day work on the piers down in San Pedro. And he said you was delivering telephone books for Pac Bell. And doing clean-up work for Alvarez Brothers Landscaping.”
Joe kept looking away and did not answer. Presently, Ortega sighed again, a little more heavily this time. He wished to God he didn’t love fighters as much as he did.
“Okay, I’ll give you three grand. And I’ll see if I can throw some sparring work your way in the gym after it’s over.”
“What if I win? You get me another match? For more dough?”
“You ain’t gonna win.”
“Yeah, but what if I do, Gil? What do I get?”
“If you win, I’ll give you my wife, my Cadillac and the key to my safe deposit box.” He leaned forward and his tone softened. “Forget about winning, Joey. Just give Avila a good fight for as long as you can. Try to take him past three rounds. Do that and I’ll give you an extra five hundred.” Ortega rose. “I’m gonna have Race train you. Come on, let’s get you a locker and some gear.”
After he left the gym, Joe went over to the Arabian Cafe to see Gladys. She was in the kitchen, getting salads ready for the lunch trade. When he told her about the Avila fight, she said, “Thank God! Now maybe we can move into an apartment with real air-conditioning. Hass told me he saw some vacancy signs down on Whittier Boulevard.” Hass was her boss, Hassim Hamed, an Iranian who was constantly talking about raising venture capital to open an Arabian boutique restaurant in Beverly Hills. Joe did not like him much. He did not like the way Hamed was always covertly glancing at Gladys’ breasts. And buttocks. And legs. When Joe complained about it, Gladys told him he was crazy. Hass, she said, was always a perfect gentleman toward her.
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