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

by Unknown Author

  “Augusta,” she said, because that’s what she always called him, Augusta, “why do you keep this old thing, it’s all covered with blood?”

  “Not my blood,” he was supposed to have said back to her.

  He had been a winner at everything he touched his whole life, from the time he came down from Harlem to win his first amateur tournament at the old Garden on Fiftieth Street. He won all his professional fights after he came back with his gold medal from the Melbourne Olympics in ’56. He won May York and the hearts of just about the whole world.

  Vinny never said it to anybody, not even his friends, because he knew how stuff got around, but he used to think: Jesus, people treat me like I’m the nigger here.

  Dream Street Stone won everything except his second fight with Vinny Tavernese and then never fought again.

  “You ever wonder why he didn’t come out for the fifteenth?” Vinny asked Gallo, sitting there in his bow tie and his checked sports jacket, just about the sweetest guy he ever met around the fight game.

  “Didn’t he say something about how that was the closest to death he ever came?” Gallo asked.

  “That was Frazier, after the Thrilla in Manila.”

  “Well,” Gallo said, “you must’ve asked him why he didn’t.”

  “This thought that maybe the thing wasn’t legit didn’t get into my head until lately,” he said. “And you know how it is with this hard head of mine, when a thought does get in there, it’s pretty fucking hard to ignore.”

  “You’re saying you never wanted to ask him before.”

  “I never did,” Vinny said. “But I’d like to now, if I could ever find the guy.”

  “Forty years after the fact,” Bill Gallo said, “you’re worried that maybe the greatest fight that ever was —a fight you won— wasn’t on the level?”

  “I still got a hard head,” Vinny said.

  They’d decided to meet up at Clarke’s because they used to go there a lot in the old days. Only now it was like a lot of places, Vinny didn’t know anybody. Frankie, the funny little guy who used to work the door of the back room, was gone, and Danny Lavezzo, the owner, had passed on a few months ago. Vinny didn’t even know any of the waiters. He’d looked around when he came in the front door, off Third Avenue, trying to spot some of the pasty-faced Irish guys who used to take such good care of him, even after he retired. Only they were gone, too.

  He told Gallo it was really his old trainer, Mike Altamero, who started putting these ideas in his head, right before he died of lung cancer. He got Gallo laughing, telling him what it was like even at the end, Mike doing everything he could to shoo the young nurse he had taking care of him round-the-clock at his little apartment down on Horatio. He’d send her out to buy more paperbacks for him, then as soon as he’d see her on the street, he’d have Vinny open the window for him so he could have a smoke out of the pack he kept hidden under his mattress. And out of nowhere one day, talking about the old days—what the hell else were they going to talk about?—Mike blew some smoke out the window and said, “You ever think he dumped that last one?” knowing Vinny knew which last one he meant and who he was talking about. Vinny could still picture him now, a Mets cap on his bald head, wrapped in a blanket, coughing so hard Vinny started to worry that maybe you could catch cancer from a guy sucking on a Lucky Strike. The cigs had killed him, and even at the end he was still holding on to them like they were some kind of lifeline. Vinny’d asked him, “Why would he dump it? I was as ready to go as he was. 1 was afraid he’d breathe on me hard and I’d go down.” Vinny told Gallo he shook his head that day, no, no, no, saying, “Why dump a fight three minutes from the end?” And Mike Altamero had looked at him and said, “Maybe that’s the best time you can dump it, because then nobody says a word.”

  “What if I’d gone down before that?”

  Mikey pointed at him with the Lucky and said, “No, that’s the thing, you dumb guinea bastard. He knew, on account of the bastard was smart. He knew you and he knew himself, especially after fighting you once already. He knew he couldn’t put you down.”

  In Clarke’s Vinny said to Bill Gallo, “I asked him why he was bringing this shit up now, and he looked at me and said, when you start moving toward the dancing lights, looking for that soft landing on the other side, you gotta ask all the questions, whether you get answers or not.”

  Gallo said there was a guy at the paper could maybe help Vinny track down Dream Street, one of their columnists, a kid named Frank Sann. He went over to the phone booth they still had in the back room, came back a couple of minutes later, smiling. It occurred to Vinny that Gallo looked a lot younger than he did, even if they had to be about the same age. It must be the work keeps him going, drawing every day, still writing his boxing column on Sunday.

  “Frank reminded me, he did that long piece on you last year, on the anniversary of the second fight,” Gallo said. “He said he’d love to help, if he could put you and Dream Street together after all these years it might read like some kind of Sunshine Boys of boxing. You remember that one?”

  “George Burns and Walter Matthau played those old Jew comics,” Vinny said. “Didn’t Matthau just die?”

  Gallo nodded.

  “Sometimes when a guy like that dies, I’m surprised, ’cause I had him for dead already,” Vinny said. He looked at Gallo. “You didn’t tell him the real reason I want to see him, did you?”

  “You want to tell him, tell him. I just told him you needed help finding him.”

  Vinny tried to signal for the check, but Gallo reached over, gently grabbed his hand, said the paper was paying for lunch.

  “Maybe it was Mikey talking about those dancing lights,” Vinny said. “Maybe I can see them myself sometimes. Who the hell knows? All I know is that there’s a big difference between Mikey and me. I want to do more than ask the questions.”

  Vinny finished the last of his espresso and said, “I need an answer here.”

  Frank Sann sat at the kitchen table in Vinny’s apartment with one of the other ESPNs, the all-news one, on in the background, and said that it was the goddamnedest thing, but that Dream Street Stone seemed to have disappeared.

  “You’re telling me no one knows where he is,” Vinny said.

  “Somebody knows where he is,” Sann said. “I just haven’t found that somebody yet. But I will, just give me more than a day.”

  Sann was another kid too young to have seen him fight, in his thirties, a good-looking kid with short hair already going to gray a little bit, and one of those neat little beards all the young guys were starting to wear. And Gallo said this was the best young guy in the business now, not just a good writer but somebody who wouldn’t quit. I figured, Gallo told Vinny, I couldn’t screw around, I better find a guy for you willing to go the distance.

  “I did finally hook up with Dream Street’s accountant this morning,” Sann said. “Only he acts like this is a spy movie, or he’s in the Secret Service. He said that Mr. and Mrs. Stone were doing just fine, they had just been traveling extensively since Mr. Stone’s retirement from what the little dork called the entertainment industry. Beyond that, he couldn’t help me and good day.”

  “Jesus,” Vinny said, “he hasn’t been in anything in about twenty years. Where they been traveling nobody can find them, the moon?”

  “I’m going to do another Internet sweep this afternoon,” Sann said.

  He’d brought them coffees from the Starbucks around the corner. Vinny wouldn’t have been caught dead in there himself, but he had to admit he was starting to acquire a taste for some of that chocolate mochaccino.

  “Sweep,” he said. “When I was a kid, sweep was what you did at the bar to earn a nickel.”

  Sann took out his notebook, tossed it on the table between them.

  “Same shit’s in there today as yesterday,” he said. “They sold the flat in Rome, what was their home base when he was in the movies over there, a long time ago. Sold the house in Los Angeles about five years ago.
They still own what used to be their summer house, out in the Hamptons. His Hollywood agent is dead. So’s his lawyer. The only person I’ve talked to who’s had any contact with him lately, or at least says he has, is this snippy accountant.”

  Sann lit a cigarette now, Vinny thinking, Okay, now he looks like a sportswriter. In the old days, they all smoked, even Vinny between fights. Sann offered him the pack now and Vinny shook his head. The way he felt lately, all the things he was sure were wrong with him, he was sure he’d have lung cancer by dinnertime if he even smoked one.

  “Do me a favor before I go,” Sann said, “play this out for me.” Vinny waited. Sann had that tone he took with him already, in person or on the phone, a little like the colored doctor’s tone, talking to him slowly and patiently, the way he would some slow kid.

  “You find Dream Street. We find him. You walk up, ring his doorbell. Then what? You tell him you were in the neighborhood, you thought you’d drop by after thirty years, or whatever the hell it is? You think he’s just going to come out with it, that the most famous fight of all time was fixed, and by him?”

  “Yeah,” Vinny said, “I do.”

  “You do.”

  “I’m gonna tell the guy I won’t tell, that 1 just have to know. I’m gonna tell the guy I can’t die not knowin’. I’m gonna tell him all that and then I’m gonna ask him one other question.”

  Vinny’d worked hard to talk better his whole life, all the way back, knowing everybody used to make fun of him, but sometimes it still came out “ax” him a question.

  “What question is that?” Sann asked.

  “I’m gonna ask him who the better man was that night.”

  Vinny tried to explain all of it to Frank Sann then, surprised at how fast the words came out of him, and how well, as if somebody else was doing the talking for him. Everybody knew Dream Street was on the way out, this was going to be his last big score in the ring, he’d already gotten a couple of parts, one in a pretty good John Wayne Western, and he didn’t want to take any more chances on ruining that pretty face of his. It was one of those times, the Friday night fights starting to die off on television, when people figured boxing was about to die anyway. Dream Street figured the real money was in the movies. So this was it, a chance for him to go out on top, make his hero’s exit, go out to Hollywood with his wife, May, like he’d always said he was going to.

  But Vinny knew he could take him. Vinny was no genius outside the ring, but he didn’t get to be champ in the first place not knowing how to fight. He’d figured out early there was a difference between getting punished and getting hurt. Dream Street could punish him, but he couldn’t hurt him. And Mikey Altamero was right: he couldn’t put him down. Vinny knew Dream Street was prettier and faster, and people rooted for him the way they’d root for Ali late in his career, when they really came around on him, forgetting how they hated his ass when he was this wise-ass colored kid out of Louisville.

  He told Sann all that, and more.

  “You know why I’m the people’s champ?” Dream Street said at the last press conference in Boston before the fight. “Because the people, they love the Dreamer.”

  Vinny leaned into the mike they’d put in front of him at the table—he forgot which Boston hotel it was—and said, “Don’t worry, you’re gonna get all the dreaming you want come Saturday night.”

  Dream Street came back with, “No wonder the Mob could never get their hooks into you, Vincenzo. Even if they asked you to do some business, they were afraid you wouldn’t understand the question.”

  They never did get their hooks into him. They sure tried, though. There was the day at the apartment Vinny and Madeline had on Central Park West, in the same building John Garfield lived in, maybe a month before the Dream Street fight. Joey Spada, who’d gotten into boxing as one of Frankie Carbo’s lieutenants, just showed up at the door, having greased the doorman, with a suitcase full of money.

  Vinny explained to him one more time that he hadn’t taken all those shots to the head so he could be another Joey Spada whore.

  “ Whore," Joey said, grinning that shit-eating grin of his, “not hoo-er.”

  “Well, you’d know,” Vinny said.

  “How about this, smart guy? How about I put the word out after Dream Street beats your ass you threw the fight anyway? Then watch you go around denying it the rest of your life.”

  “Nobody’ll believe it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m not smart enough to know how to lose.”

  “So maybe then I got to come up with other ways to fuck with you,” Spada said and walked out the door with the suitcase, Vinny never even asking how much was in it.

  The last time he heard from them was in Boston, three nights before the fight. Spada didn’t quit either, at least until somebody finally shot him up so much he looked like one of those dummy targets they use in shooting galleries. A kid in a topcoat that was too long for him, a snap-brimmed hat like all the wiseguys wore in those days, knocked on Vinny’s door at the Parker House. Didn’t even introduce himself.

  “My boss wants I should ask you a question.”

  Knowing Vinny knew who his boss was.

  Vinny, standing there in his boxer shorts with the stupid

  hearts on them some old girlfriend had given him, just eyeballed him. “He wants to know if you had a change of heart.”

  Vinny shook his head slowly, side to side. If the kid made any kind of move he was going to drop him.

  “That being the case, he asked I should remind you about something he told you not so long ago.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as there’s more than one way to teach a dumb bastard —his words, not mine—a lesson.”

  Vinny thought at the time it was just another way of Spada and the boys threatening him and had pretty much always thought of it that way—whenever he did think of it, anyway—until Mikey Altamero had to get him all worked up about Dream Street a couple of weeks before Mikey passed.

  “Now you know everything I know, which frankly ain’t one whole hell of a lot,” Vinny said to Frank Sann. “That night in Boston, that’s really all I got left. Most of the money’s gone, the wives are long gone, even my kid, Vincent, he died of a stinkin’ drug overdose when he was a year out of college. I don’t want anybody runnin’ a benefit for me, I don’t want you helping me out on account of you feel sorry for me. I just want to know if it was on the square.” “You say it’s all you’ve got,” Sann said. “Then why put it at risk?” “’Cause I don’t want somethin’s not mine,” Vinny said.

  Sann called the next morning first thing, said he’d found Dream Street. Just like that. He’d pick Vinny up out front of his building in half an hour, he had to rent a car first.

  “Where?” Vinny said.

  “That summer place I told you about, in the Hamptons.” “How’d you find out?”

  “A cop out there knows somebody who knows somebody who did some landscaping for May Stone. They saw him.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “What, you want everything? I didn’t ask how he was doing.

  These guys don’t know how he’s doing, just that his privet needed trimming. They saw him for a minute on the back deck. He waved and smiled. That was it.”

  “They’re sure it was him?”

  “It was him.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Vinny said and Sann said, “If you say so,” and hung up.

  Now they were at Exit 55 on the Long Island Expressway. Sann said it was about another hour from there. He’d been listening to one of the sports stations when Vinny got in the car and before they were even through the Midtown Tunnel, Vinny was ready to throw himself out the window if he didn’t change the station, the whole thing sounded to him like all three of his marriages combined.

  “Can I trust you?” Vinny said.

  “What did Bill Gallo say?”

  “He said yes.”

  “He ever lie to you?”

  �
��Never.”

  “He’s not lying now.”

  “If he tells me he dumped it, I don’t want it in the paper.” Sann didn’t turn, just grinned as he watched the road. “No shit.”

  “Then what’s in this for you?”

  Sann said, “A reunion piece that’ll make ’em cry. Maybe there’s even a short story in it, or a novel.”

  Vinny leaned back and thought about what he was going to say while Sann talked about Dream Street Stone, as if he had to share everything he’d found out the last couple of days. How he’d gone to Italy in the late sixties when the good movie parts started to dry up for him over here, and became a huge star, sort of like a black Clint Eastwood, not as big as Eastwood in his spaghetti Westerns, but still a cult figure on his own, the mysterious black man in black. Vinny knew some of that, but not that Dream Street

  had made nine movies in nine years.

  “Like that Marvelous Hagler would do later on,” Vinny said. “The colored bald guy who fought that great fight against Hearns?”

  “Marvin Hagler wasn’t as big as Dream Street was in the sixties,” Sann said.

  In the early eighties, Dream Street came back to the States, even got himself a good recurring role in a cop show, Midtown North, playing a detective just trying to hang on, live through the last year on the street before his pension.

  “Then the show became a hit, and then that cop had to put off his retirement for another six years,” Sann said. “You ever watch it?”

  Vinny said, “Coupla times. I kept waiting for Dream Street to do that little foot shuffle thing he did, bing bing bing, and get the jab in the bad guy’s face. But he’d just shoot them and look bored doing it.”