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

by Unknown Author

  His grown children took turns visiting with Patrick Hassler, when he would have us. Usually he was feuding with two of us, and friendly with the third. In December 1999,1 was the one allowed to visit.

  My father greeted me warmly, his mood was upbeat, his breath smelled strongly of ale. Seventy-two is not old but my father looked old. His skin was tinged with melancholy. His shoulders were stooped. He’d lost weight, his flesh seemed shrunken on him, loose and wrinkled like an elephant’s skin. He wasn’t a tall man any longer, he’d become a man of average height. A man who has punished himself? We sat in the kitchen talking. The subject was selling the house, and what to do next. We were sidetracked by reminiscing of course. When 1 returned to Yewville always I was returning to the past. The city had not changed much in decades, it was economically depressed, frozen in the late fifties. The prosperity of subsequent decades in America had bypassed this region. Here, I was in Colum Donaghy’s era. A thrill of something like panic, horror swept over me. For never had I understood. Why. Why that man so admired by so many had killed himself. He’d won his last fight. He had not lost the fight with Roland LaStarza, everyone knew. And he’d been only thirty-one years old.

  I did not want to think that, at the age of thirty-one, a man’s life might be over.

  In Yewville, I stayed in a motel and visited my father for only a few hours each day. He seemed to want it this way, his privacy and his isolation had become precious to him. On the second day of my visit, he brought out the old photo album and we sat at the kitchen table looking through it together. I knew not to bring up the subject of Colum Donaghy and yet—there we were calmly looking at snapshots of him, and of my father with him, and of others, everyone so young and attractive, smiling into the camera. I was deeply moved by the snapshots taken in the gym, cocky-looking Colum and his friend Patrick in boxing trunks, headgear, arms around each other’s shoulders, clowning for the camera. So young! Here were two men confident they had much life yet to live, and surely they had every right to think so. Except, seeing Colum Donaghy, and seeing that the date of the snapshot was February 1954, in that instant I was compelled to think of September 1958.

  Four years, seven months to live.

  My father said slowly, “It’s like Colum is still with me, sometimes. I can hear him. Talk to him. Donaghy was the only person to make me laugh.” Suddenly my father was confiding in me? He spoke calmly but 1 knew he was trembling.

  So we talked of Colum Donaghy, and of those days. Forty years Patrick had outlived Colum, good Christ! That was a joke on them both. That was something to shake your head over. I said, “It was one of the mysteries of that time, Daddy. Why Colum killed himself. Just because he hadn’t won that fight with LaStarza? But he hadn’t lost it, either. He was still a hero. He must have known.”

  My father said, “Hell, I’m an old man now, I want to tell some things that couldn’t be told before. Colum didn’t kill himself, honey.”

  “What?”

  “Colum Donaghy did not kill himself. No.”

  My father spoke slowly, wetting his parched lips. I stared at him in disbelief.

  “Colum was killed, honey. He was murdered.”

  “Murdered? But—wasn’t the gun his?”

  My father hesitated, rubbing his eyes with both hands. His face was discolored by liver spots, deeply creased and fallen. “No, honey. The gun was not Colum’s. Colum owned no gun.”

  A chill came over me. A terrible subterranean knowledge like a quickened pulse. And my father glancing at me, to see how I was taking this.

  He would tell me now, would he! An elderly man on the brink of the grave, with nothing to lose. Even his fear of God he’d long ago lost.

  The thought came to me swift and unbidden. He is the one who killed Colum Donaghy.

  I could not accuse him. Before this man, 1 would always be a stammering child.

  He saw me staring at him. With a frowning, finicky gesture he smoothed the wrinkles in one of his shirt sleeves. The shirt had been laundered and not ironed, and fitted him loosely. “I had to tell the police what I did, honey. It would’ve been my life, too. I’d been warned. Gus Smith warned me. And Colum was gone, nothing would bring him back. Jesus, when he opened up like he did in the eighth round! It was a beautiful thing but—he was a dead man from that point onward. See, they’d told him what to do. What not to do. They were paying him, and he’d agreed. He was to fight like hell but LaStarza was going to knock him out. All this I knew, but not directly. Colum hinted to me he was going against his manager and his trainer, and LaStarza’s backers, he’d even bet on himself to win. He’d intended all along to win. He was a—” My father’s voice quavered. It was rare for him to speak at such length, and so vehemently. But now, words eluded him. “—so Goddamned stubborn Irish."

  But I was left behind in this. I’d heard, but hadn’t absorbed what I heard. “Daddy, I don’t know what you’re saying. Who killed Colum?”

  “Who, exactly? Their names? Hell, I don’t know their names.”

  “But—who hired them?”

  My father shrugged. Shook his head, disgusted. “Some sons of bitches in New York, I suppose.”

  “But you told police—”

  “Hell, you couldn’t trust the police either. Boxing was part of the rackets, there were payoffs, high-ranking cops and judges and politicians. I said what 1 said, I didn’t have a choice. I had you kids to think of, and your mother. Yeah, and I was afraid, too. For myself.”

  “Daddy, I’m just so—stunned. All these years...Colum was your closest friend.”

  “Colum knew what boxing was! Goddamn, he wasn’t born yesterday. He wasn’t any saint. Nobody forced him to sign on for the LaStarza fight, he knew what it was. LaStarza might not have been told, he only had to fight for real. But Colum! He thought he could win, and impress everybody, and everybody would love ‘The Kid,’ and the New York promoters would sign him on. He could take

  LaStarza’s place, he was thinking. Marciano’s! But he’d underestimated LaStarza. That was his second mistake. He didn’t pace himself the way a boxer is trained to, he punched himself out by the tenth round and couldn’t KO his man so it went to the judges. They called it a draw. It stank, everybody knew it was rotten, but there it was. A draw, and nobody won. But Colum lost.” My father spoke disgustedly, shoving the photo album away from him.

  “So the judges were bribed.”

  “Hell, those bastards wouldn’t even need to be bribed. They’d have naturally done what was expected of them.”

  “Daddy, I can’t believe this! You loved boxing.”

  “I loved some boxers. I loved watching them sometimes. But boxing—no, I didn’t love boxing. Boxing is business, a man selling himself to men who sell him to the public. Christ!”

  I was impatient suddenly. “And you never sold yourself, Daddy, I suppose?”

  “For your mother and you kids, sure I did,” he said. “I sold myself however I could. Just owning that garage, that barely made a living, I had to pay ‘protection’ to s.o.b.’s in Niagara Falls. If I hadn’t paid them they’d have firebombed me. Or worse.”

  “You? Extorted?”

  “Hell, it wasn’t only me. Maybe it’s different now, the police will protect you. But in those days, no. If I’d told anybody that Colum had been murdered, and the gun wasn’t his—” His voice ceased suddenly, as if the strength had drained from him. He was rubbing his eyes in a way uncomfortable to see, as if wanting to blind himself.

  “Daddy, I feel sick about this. I—don’t know what to say.”

  “We sold ourselves however we could,” my father said angrily, “and so have you kids in your different ways. What the hell do you know?”

  “It was all a lie then? Colum never took his own life—his life was taken from him, and you knew, Daddy. And you didn’t try to get justice for him.”

  “‘Justice’! For who? What’s that? ‘Justice’—bullshit. I’d have been shot too, or dumped in the Niagara River. You’d have liked t
hat better?”

  I was upset, revulsed. I stood and walked away. Suddenly needed to escape this airless kitchen, this house, Yewville. My father reached for me but I eluded him. I fled outside, he followed me. The ground was crusted with snow that looked permanent as concrete. Our breaths steamed. My father said, close to pleading now, “I didn’t want you, your mother or anybody, to know how close we were to the edge in those days. It was Colum, it could’ve been me. I wanted to shield you, honey.”

  One day I would understand, maybe. But not then. I told him I’d talk to him later, I’d call him, but I had to leave Yewville now. Driving away I was shaken, stunned as if my father had hit me. I was filled with a sick, sinking sensation as if I’d bitten into something rotten, the poison was activated in me, unstoppable.

  The last time I saw my father alive.

  Not Colum Donaghy but Patrick Hassler, the sole person close to me who has taken his own life.

  Taken his own life. But where?

  My father died early in the morning of New Year’s Day. He’d swallowed two dozen painkillers, washed down by ale. His heart, the medical examiner ruled, had simply given out; he’d never regained consciousness; his death was self-inflicted.

  If I knew better, I told no one.

  I would live with what I knew, and I would bear it.

  He’d left behind items designated for us, his children. His survivors. There was a shabby envelope with my name printed carefully on it, and inside were the old, priceless photos of Colum Donaghy. One I hadn’t seen before was of Colum and my father and me, posed in front of a car with a gleaming chrome grille. The date was 1950,1 was four years old. Colum and Patrick were each leaning against a front fender of the car, and I was propped on the hood, smiling, legs blurred as if I’d been kicking at the instant the picture was taken. (By my mother?) I was a blond, curly-haired little girl in a pink ruffled dress. Both men were holding me so I wouldn’t fall. I saw that a stranger, studying this snapshot, the three of us in that long-ago time of June 1950, could not have guessed with certainty how we were related, which man might be the little girl’s father.

  THE PROBLEM OF LEON

  by John Shannon

  Jack Liffey had been there at Stinkey’s the evening Leon Krane set his fists on his hips, all five-six of him, and screeched out to the near end of the college bar, “Come on! I’m like a rubber, I take all sizes!”

  The man-mountain middle linebacker from the school team, Kaz Kristowski, had swiveled around with one eye slitted. “You talking to me, pussy?”

  This was well after the wave of mysterious thefts that struck the dorm their freshman year, in fact it was into the junior year, after most of them had completely lost track of Leon. But one of the endemic pastimes their first semester had been trying to figure out just what made this odd Leon Krane tick. Or, rather, why it was so very hard to like Leon Krane. They had whole sitting-on-the-bed late-night bull sessions on the subject: What is it about a human being that makes him the absolute standard of cringe? Why was the Smithsonian Likability Lab flying guys out to study Krane and zero their instruments? I think Wittgenstein himself would have trouble with this one. Who the hell’s Wittgenstein, for crap’s sake?

  That’s the way it went.

  Leon wasn’t stupid, but he was ineffably unpleasant and tiresome and permanently aggrieved, and he’d clearly been off somewhere, maybe stuck in the bathroom trying to comb his long black recalcitrant hair, when sense of humor had been handed out.

  Leon never smiled, hardly ever got the point of jokes, and if he did get them, he just shrugged and passed on to some other subject he wanted to talk about. It was Jack Liffey’s opinion that maybe Krane got the jokes well enough, but he just didn’t feel he belonged enough to have a right to laugh. Jack Liffey tried to talk the guys in Walker Hall into making an effort to include Leon in the Vultures, see if he’d maybe get more bearable, but he almost got ostracized himself for the suggestion.

  “You want to go room with the Krane, spaz?”

  On the Krane question, the majority tended to the view that it was indeed lack of a sense of humor pure and simple that made someone unlikable. But Jack Liffey wasn’t so sure. He thought it might have something to do with the way Krane insisted on bringing up subjects that were really of no intrinsic interest, like the different breeds of grass seed used for racetracks or how ants follow trails of formic acid, and the way he talked about them in a nagging aggrieved way, as if he knew in advance you weren’t going to be interested. But, really, other people could talk about those same subjects and you didn’t mind, you actually listened. Leon could open his mouth, get out a few words—“You know, eastern white oak is much better for furniture than red oak”—and moss would start to grow on the walls.

  Who could say, really? On the late-night philosophical level in the dorm, it was far more entertaining to gab about sex or their lost childhood religions or foreign films like Last Year at Marienbad, which were just beginning to come to college towns then.

  The upshot was that for the whole first semester Krane became the target of their RFs. The expression meant ratfucks, or malicious pranks. People burned his philodendron with lighter fluid. They gummed up his doorlock. They put fiery Mentholatum in his pound-off Vaseline. They sent love letters to undesirable girls in his name, and vice versa. They put a cherry bomb in a roll of wet toilet paper and blew it off in the middle of his room one Friday night so when he came back on Sunday evening several thousand little hardened wads of papier mâché were stuck to every surface, even his pajamas hanging over the chair. It actually got quite mean, and one night during finals they took his door off and hid it in the basement and the poor guy slept the night with a red-hot steam iron by his bed, threatening to scald anyone who set foot in his room.

  By the time they came back from break for the second semester, the Vultures—that is, the south wing of Walker—seemed to have grown weary of tormenting anyone quite that humorless about it, and they just started taking Krane for granted as a permanent annoyance, but their annoyance, like a buzzing fluorescent in the hall or a balky car that was hard to start in the cold.

  “Jesus, let’s hold this discussion down at the coop where the Krane can’t horn in.”

  Just as Leon was fading from their ken as a butt of pranks, things started to disappear. A bright red Raleigh bicycle locked to the pipe rack out front. A 45-rpm record player, complete with a rare collection of British Shadows records. One night Jack Liffey’s Hermes Baby portable typewriter—a prized memento from his dad—vanished right out of his locked room. That tore it for him and before an enraged mob of vigilantes gathered in the snack-room he volunteered to track down the thief. Of course, a lot of them suspected Leon right off, but Jack Liffey felt that was just too obvious a scapegoating. He set elaborate baited traps, a gift box left outside a door or a dorm room left provocatively open, and he even skipped the homecoming game to wait in a darkened bathroom, door ajar, his eye to a toy periscope trained on the quiet hall. The thief was far too clever for any of that. Right under his nose, a nice Bulova vanished from a dresser to mystify them all.

  Through all this, they watched Leon carefully and noticed a few new things about him. He cut corners a bit. Nothing really big, but he wouldn’t pull his share of tidying the snackroom. If you left your door open Thursdays he’d swipe the fresh towels off your bed rather than walking over to the laundry ladies to swap his own. They suspected him of copying term papers, too, but nobody felt like snitching him out on that, and for all the amateur detective efforts, there was nothing at all to tie him to the bigger thefts.

  Barney Monroe plopped down on Jack Liffey’s bed one night. “I grew out of being an Episcopalian a long time ago, man, but this guy is gonna reanimate my faith, I swear. He’s walking evidence of evil at work in the world.”

  “Isn’t that a bit operatic?”

  “You know that retarded townie who hangs out at the Sugar Bowl?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I saw the
Krane make her do an errand for him, and then he refused to give her the nickel he offered and laughed at her when she started sputtering.”

  “That’s what you call pure evil?”

  “It’s getting worse every day, I swear.”

  “Look, even if you’re right,” Jack Liffey said, “I mean, say he’s getting worse, say he’s even the sneak thief. What do you gain by calling it evil? He was probably abused as a kid, or his mom died young, or she ignored him. He’s selfish, he’s needy inside, he’s lacking in social graces, sure, he’s really unpleasant to get cornered into a discussion with, but there’s reasons for everything. Calling it evil just mystifies it.”

  “What do you say about guys who rape and kill little girls

  then?”

  “They’re psychopaths. They’re sick. How does calling it evil explain anything? It’s just a label so you can forget about it.”

  “I don’t know, man. Sometimes there just isn’t sufficient reason.”

  “That’s medieval. There’s always a reason.”

  “If you feel that way, why don’t you befriend the guy? Maybe you can save him,” Barney Monroe challenged.

  That shut him up for a moment. “Somebody probably should try it,” he heard himself say. “You’d get a lifetime supply of positive karma out of it.”

  He didn’t make any public commitment, but the next day, there he was, going down the hall toward Krane’s room. The door was open, and Krane was listening softly to what was apparently a rebroadcast of the BBC’s Goon Show on the radio and actually laughing aloud to himself, but it wasn’t like any laugh he’d ever heard before. There was no enjoyment at all in it. It was as if he were just doing it to prove to himself he knew how to laugh, like anybody else.

  Jack Liffey cleared his throat. “Spike Milligan’s great, isn’t he?”