Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw

by Unknown Author

  When he got to the ring, he bobbed his chin at Teddy Atlas, who was one of the best two or three trainers in the business, and sidelined as an ESPN boxing commentator. Atlas grinned and winked at him. Once in the ring, Race said, “Move around, keep warm,” and Joe began dancing and shadowboxing.

  A couple of minutes later, a loud cheer went up from the crowd as Antonio Avila, in a tiger-striped silk robe, came trotting down the aisle with an entourage of seven, including a stunning Mexican girl in a low-cut, red-sequined sheath dress. When Avila got into the ring, he danced around, smiling and waving to the crowd on all four sides.

  After that, as usual, everything seemed to go very fast. With both fighters in their respective corners, the bell sounded three times and ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. took a microphone to the center of the ring and introduced the three judges, physician at ringside, timekeeper, knockdown counter, referee and lastly the two fighters. There was some polite applause for Joe, and another resounding cheer for Avila. Robes off, the fighters were called to the center of the ring for final brief instructions from the referee, then returned to their corners to await the opening bell. Race, from outside the ropes, massaged strong fingers on the back of Joe’s head and said, “Move to your right—only to your right.”

  The bell sounded. Both men came out circling, jabbing lightly, testing the canvas under their soles, feeling out the opponent in front of him. Joe held his position, taking Avila’s punches on his gloves, countering to the body when he could. Two of Avila’s punches caught Joe on his forearms and hurt. Joe began moving backward and to his right. Avila patiently stalked, an almost bored expression on his face, an expression that said: Do whatever you want to, man, but sooner or later I’m going to tag you. Joe did not let it bother him. He noticed that Avila was moving flat-footed, so Joe began using his toes more, became more springy, and increased his head movement. Midway through the round, he saw Avila drop his left glove a couple of inches when he threw his right. Joe wasn’t sure if it was a lapse in concentration on Avila’s part, or a habit. He watched for it again. Presently it happened a second time, then a third. It was habit, Joe decided—and it was a flaw in the younger man’s defense. In the final minute of the round, Joe watched for the left to drop, and twice when it did he threw a solid overhand right that caught Avila on the left temple. Neither blow had much effect on Avila, but Joe knew that if he could continue to land it, a cut might open. Meantime, Joe was continuing to take most of Avila’s punches on his forearms and upper arms, both of which began to throb for a few seconds after each blow. The bell finally sounded, ending a slow, unexciting first round.

  In the corner, Race worked in front of him with an ice bag and Vaseline, while Ortega, from the ring apron, talked in Joe’s ear. “He’s dropping his left,” Ortega said.

  “Yeah, I caught him a couple times.” Joe took a swallow of water from Ortega. Race put the ice bag on each upper arm for fifteen seconds.

  “Bof times when you tagged him,” Race said, “you stopped moving to the right and stood still. Don’t do that. You got to keep movin’ to the right!”

  “Okay, Race.”

  The bell sounded and the fighters moved forward, circling again. Avila threw a hard right hand, Joe caught it on his glove, and countered with his own hard right over a lowered Avila left again. Joe’s punch landed solidly and there were some cheers from the neutral spectators. I’m gonna bust this guy’s left eye open, Joe thought. The next time it happens—

  That was immediately. Another hard right from Avila that Joe deflected, and landed his own hardest right yet, again on the same spot next to Avila’s left eye. Except that this time Avila followed with a second smashing right that caught Joe, flat-footed, not moving to the right, flush on the jaw.

  Joe saw an odd flash of red in front of him, exploding like a splash of paint thrown at him. Then he was on the canvas, reaching with one glove for a ring rope to pull himself up. But his depth perception was gone now and all he did was paw at space. He could hear no sound at all—no crowd, no count, nothing; his temporal bone was in shock and both his inner ear and equilibrium were temporarily neutralized. Somehow he got to his knees, then pushed a foot in front of himself and tried to stand up. Instead, he tumbled sideways and fell back to the canvas.

  Next thing he knew, Ortega and Race were lifting him to his feet and half-dragging him to the stool in the corner. Ortega held the ice pack on the back of his neck, while Race sponged him off and massaged his temples. The ringside doctor was next to Race, shining a penlight in Joe’s eyes. His hearing returned and he heard the din of the crowd.

  “What’s your name, son?” the doctor asked.

  Race gave him a quick drink of water, and he said, “Uh—Joe

  Bell—”

  “Where are you, Joe?”

  “Uh—Indigo or something—”

  “Okay,” the doctor said.

  Race stood him up and helped him on with his robe. Joe heard the ring announcer saying into the microphone, “—forty-six seconds of Round Number Two, the winner, with his fifteenth consecutive knockout—”

  Then Ortega and Race were supporting him as he walked back up the aisle and into the dressing room again.

  Jesus, he thought along the way, that kid sure can hit.

  Twenty minutes later Race took him out of a cold shower and helped him dry off. Joe was feeling all right again as he started dressing; he did not even have a headache. One of Avila’s trainers came in. “Your boy okay?” he asked Race.

  “He’s okay,” Race said.

  Avila’s trainer smiled. “We weren’t sure that dropped left trick was going to work. Took us a month to teach Antonio to do it so he could drop a second right in. But it worked.”

  “Yeah,” Race said. “Good strategy. Long as you fight somebody who don’t keep moving to the right.”

  As he started to leave, Avila’s trainer said, “Hey, you know that Morales kid I tol’ you about, was in the hospital?”

  “What about him?”

  “A call came in during the fight. He died.”

  “Too bad,” Race said, without a lot of sincerity.

  Joe sat and looked down, tying his shoes, almost feeling as if Antonio Avila had hit him again. He died. Two little words, but my God—

  Could it be? he wondered. Had he really beaten a man to death? Then he remembered what he had shouted at Morales: I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you! He finished tying his shoes and sat staring at his hands.

  “Wha’s a matter?” asked Race.

  “Huh? Oh, nothing.” Joe quickly took hold of himself. “I was just thinking about the fight. It happened so quick.”

  “You lucky it did,” Race said. “A boy’t can hit that hard, it’s better to go down from one punch than take half a dozen shots to the head. That boy’s a killer. How you feel?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “They got a four-round back-up fight on now before the main. You wanna hang around and watch the main?”

  Joe shook his head. He died. “I think I’ll go back to my room and lie down.”

  “You want me to walk down wit’ you?”

  “No, I’m okay. You stick around and watch the main.” “Okay. You go lie down. Take a nap. Gil an’ me’ll pick you up in a couple hours. We’ll stop somewhere on the way back to L.A. Get us a good dinner. Maybe Chinese, how’s that sound?’

  “Sounds good.”

  “Okay. See you later, Joe.”

  “Okay, Race.”

  Race walked out toward the ballroom-arena, and Joe left by the nearest exit, crossed the parking lot and walked down the highway. A single thought kept resounding in his head. He died. The two words beat like a bass drum in his mind. He died, he died, he died— At the Aztec Motel, he counted his money. Out of the two hundred Ortega had given him, he had ninety-four dollars left. He packed his suitcase and slipped out of the room, because he owed another thirty-eight dollars for the second day. Walking to the opposite end of the motel, away from the office, he cr
ossed the highway and started back on the other side, toward the bus depot.

  He died, he died—

  There was a bus leaving for Los Angeles in thirty minutes. And one coming through heading for Phoenix in twenty. Joe went up to the ticket window.

  “Can 1 get a seat on that Phoenix bus?”

  “You bet,” the agent said. “One way or round trip?”

  “One way.” There was a small black-and-white TV set on a desk behind the window, and Joe saw that the agent had the Friday Night Fights on. The main event had started. Hector Camacho Jr. was kicking Vic Malloy’s ass.

  “Thirty-two dollars,” the agent said. Joe paid him and took the ticket he pushed forward.

  An hour later, in a window seat on the dimly lit Greyhound bus, staring at his reflection in the window as the black California desert along Interstate 10 raced backward outside, Joe shook his head sadly. What a tough break, he thought. Just when he was on his way to becoming a first-rate trial horse.

  LONG ODDS

  A Toby Peters Story

  by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  A hard right to the midsection. It was more than a jab. It was hurled concrete behind a lightly bandaged hand in a thin padded glove. It was the first punch of the fight.

  The big kid doubled over in pain. He looked surprised. I wasn’t. I had seen Archie Moore fight before. They called Moore “The Mongoose.” He was a patient stalker who moved forward in his baggy pants, arms crossed in a style he called “armadillo.”

  Moore was just thirty, but he had already had more fights than five pros put together had in an entire lifetime. Less than a decade later he’d become the light heavyweight champion of the world and hold the title for a record eleven years. He’d also go on to become the only fighter who faced both Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali in the ring. Tonight, however, he was an up-and-coming crowd favorite with a great record.

  Before the kid could come back to reality, Moore got in fast, hit hard, bobbed away from a wide right and landed a short right to the chin that had the kid limp and ready to give up or go down.

  I was ringside in Moore’s corner, a white towel draped around my neck over a white T-shirt, watching the fight, though I was supposed to be watching the crowd.

  I looked like a typical cornerman, flat nose, somewhere over forty, a touch of gray at the temples, around a hundred and eighty pounds. I looked more like a washed-up middleweight than a private detective, which was fine for the job. My job as a second, if the fight went for more than one round, was to step into the ring between rounds with a stool, a bottle of water and a bucket for Moore to spit in. My job as a private detective was to find the person who had told Moore to take a dive or die.

  The other man in Moore’s corner was an old-timer named Charlie Otis. Charlie was a big old-timer, a black man with short white hair who had sparred with Jack Johnson. Charlie had a belly now and the air of a Buddha. Nothing seemed to bother him. His job was to fill in the corner for fighters whose regulars were busy somewhere else or who couldn’t afford to come along because the purse wasn’t enough to make it worthwhile.

  It didn’t look as if the fight would go more than one round. It didn’t look as if it would go more than one minute. The kid hadn’t landed a single punch.

  Moore followed the right to the chin with a looping left to the side of the head. The big kid staggered back, looking for something or someone he might recognize. Moore backed up, hoping the kid would fall, but he was either game, embarrassed or too confused to know that his best chance to survive with teeth was to go down, collect some sympathy and whatever he was being paid.

  The referee, a little guy with almost no hair wearing a sweat-dampened long-sleeved shirt, stepped up to the kid, looked into his bleary eyes and heard the crowd calling for the fight to go on. The referee knew where his cash was coming from. He motioned for the fight to continue.

  The day before the fight Moore, a squat, determined and compact brown man who was a good forty pounds lighter than the kid he was closing in on, had come to the closet I call my office. He had to go through the dental torture chamber of Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., to get there.

  There were two names on the door to our offices. One, in big black letters, read “Sheldon Minck, D.D.S.” From time to time Shelly added a bunch of initials to impress the trade that happened to be looking for a dentist on the sixth floor of the Farraday Building in downtown Los Angeles. “S.S.C., F.C.V.” were the current letters. Below Shelly’s name, in small letters, was “Toby Peters, Private Investigator.”

  I had a California license and everything that came with it. In my case, everything was a telephone booth-sized office with a window overlooking an alley, a small desk, two chairs, a painting on one wall, a photograph of my father, me, my brother and our dog, a German shepherd named Kaiser Wilhelm. The photograph was more than thirty-five years old.

  The war news was good. The Russians were pushing the Nazis back across the Dnieper. The RAF and the U.S. Air Force had shot down a hundred and four Nazi fighters in three days. Douglas MacArthur was on New Guinea waiting for the Aussies and Americans to take New Britain so he could make that landing in the Philippines he had promised.

  Moore had called, said he got my name from Joe Louis (who had been one of my clients) and said he had to talk to me. Twenty minutes later he sat across from me in my office while a patient in Shelly’s dental chair moaned and Shelly sang something that might have been “Anything Goes.”

  “I got a call,” Moore said. He was wearing dark slacks, a white shirt and a dark zippered jacket. “I’ve got a fight tomorrow night at the Garden. Some kid called Sailor Jack Sweets.”

  “A call?” I asked.

  “Guy said I should carry the kid till the third and then go down and stay down.”

  “Throw the fight,” I said when he paused and looked out the window.

  “Throw the fight,” he agreed. “I go down, guy says I find a wad of bills in my locker. I win and I’m dead inside half an hour after the fight.”

  “Tell the cops?”

  He shook his head no.

  “I got in trouble when I was a kid,” he said. “Did twenty-two months in a reformatory back East. I’ve got a record. I’ve got no proof about this call and 1 don’t want trouble with the California boxing commission.”

  “So...?”

  “I’m not gonna lose,” he said. “Even if I did 1 know there wouldn’t be a wad in my locker. It’s probably just someone hoping I’ll fold. No real threat, I guess. But...”

  “You want...”

  “You in my corner,” he said. “Watching my back. One night’s work.”

  “Fifty dollars,” I said.

  Moore nodded, stood, held out his hand. I took it.

  I had questions. The odds in the fight must have been at least ten to one on Moore, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Any bookie would smell a dead rodent if someone plunked down big money on the kid. So if money were being placed against Moore it had to be private or in pieces, laid off, covered. Still, an upset would have meant trouble for whoever was threatening Moore. Someone would have to be more than a little nuts or a lot desperate or both. I agreed with Moore, it was probably a bluff, but for fifty bucks why take chances.

  It was a little over thirty seconds into the first round.

  The big white kid with the hairy chest and confused blue eyes took another right to the chin without raising his arms to protect himself. The kid staggered back across the ring and into the ropes. Moore brushed his left thumb against the side of his nose and strode after the big kid who looked at the referee. The referee motioned for him to defend himself. He still hadn’t thrown a punch.

  The crowd was big, the usual for a Friday night. Lots of sweat. Kids in uniform. Fight fans of all ages. A few celebrities, including Lucille Ball, Warner Baxter and Lou Costello, were at ringside. There were more women than before the war but just as much smoke blocking sight and lungs. 1 checked the first two rows around me for the tenth time. I’d made the round
s checking out the rows on the side of the ring. Our gambler, if he was there, could have been anyone sitting there or anyone not sitting anywhere, but it seemed likely whoever had told Archie Moore to take a dive would be watching or have someone watching. The fight wasn’t being broadcast.

  As the kid looked for angels or for some sign that told him he was still among the living, I was looking for a very angry face somewhere in the crowd. I didn’t find one. Moore strode in with a looping left and a right to the midsection. The fight hadn’t gone long enough for sweat to spray the first rows and the timekeeper. The kid was going down. I hoped he didn’t have the heart to get up. He was more than outclassed.

  “Toby,” a voice came at my side. Shelly Minck stood next to me. He was sweating more than the fighters. Shelly was short, nearly bald, pudgy and wearing thick glasses on his nose and a cigar in his mouth. He looked like a confused baby.

  “I think I spotted him,” Shelly said, starting to lift his hand to point. I reached up and put the hand back at his side. Shelly’s arms are remarkably strong. Years of pulling out teeth, occasionally the right ones.

  “Just tell me,” I said, glancing at Moore, who had stepped back to let the big kid sink to his knees. The audience groaned. There were boos. This was Sailor Jackie Sweets about to fall flat on his face in Round One. Never mind that Jackie Sweets wasn’t really a sailor and his name wasn’t Jackie Sweets. He was a symbol. We were winning the war in Europe and the Pacific. He was supposed to win it in the ring, pull off a big upset. Never mind that only a few bigots, misguided patriots and drunks had bet on him, plus of course the guy who had called Archie Moore. The crowd wanted a victory. They wanted the American flag waving. They wanted to sing “Anchors Aweigh.”

  Jackie, whose real name was Bengt Forsberg, was about to sink into the California canvas. Bengt was eighteen years old, had been in the States for three weeks. He had come to California with his mother by way of Australia. Sailor Jackie Sweets couldn’t speak anything but Swedish. But he did plan to enlist in the U.S. Army if his mother would let him. I got all this from an LA. Times sports reporter named Scruggs Martin who owed me more than a beer or two.