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

by Unknown Author

  Leon Krane looked up with his characteristic truculence. “What do you know about Spike Milligan?”

  “There was an FM station in L.A. that played the Goon Show all the time. “

  “You probably had a fancy FM radio.” FM was still fairly rare then.

  “I made it from a kit, an Eichler.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet your dad bought it for you and helped you build it, too. Guys like you had all the advantages.”

  This was not turning out the way Jack Liffey had expected, but he pushed on. “Actually, my dad’s a longshoreman. I don’t think I merit this silver spoon stuff. I’m here on scholarship.” It was an expensive private college, and Jack Liffey was still feeling a bit overwhelmed competing with all the prep school boys who’d read so many things—Camus, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann—he’d barely even heard about.

  “Me too. Of course. I never had a dad. Ma had to sell cosmetics door-to-door.”

  “That’s an honorable trade.”

  Leon snorted. “Sure it is,” he said sarcastically. “Everybody thinks she was a door-to-door whore just because she didn’t marry my dad.”

  Actually, as far as Jack Liffey knew, everybody didn’t know a thing about Krane’s mom and wouldn’t have cared. There didn’t seem to be any way to offer a conversational gambit that would calm him down. Then he remembered the calculus book in his hand. This had been the ploy. Krane was a math major.

  “I wondered if you could look at this calculus problem with me.” He knew the answer perfectly well, of course.

  “I see, Jackie old son, that’s what this is about. Well, let’s see if we can’t put our heads together and figure it out.”

  He’d been very close to walking out of the room then, but he decided to give it just a little more of the old college try, even with the Jackie-old-son business. But Krane insisted on explaining the entire basis of differentiation, why calculus had been invented in the first place, stopping now and then to comment on the Goon Show that he’d left running on his cheap little transistor in a maddening distraction, and finally he labored the simple problem to death in a hectoring voice that suggested you were an idiot if you had to go through all the steps.

  “Thanks a lot, Leon. I get it now.”

  Experiment over. He would have to live with his own meager supply of karma, as it were.

  “Anytime, Jackie old son. My door’s always open.”

  Barney Monroe saw him come out of the room fast and fuming and accosted him later. “Had a nice little chat, did we?”

  “Fuck you, Bar.”

  “Whoa. So you’re not a saint after all, Jack.”

  He never tried again, of course. Monroe was right. Eighteen-year-olds, even those with the best of intentions, rarely try that hard for sainthood.

  The next fall, when they came back for their sophomore year, they were dispersed to various dorms and town apartments and Jack Liffey lost track of Leon Krane. The next he heard of him, the school weekly was reporting that Krane had become a pretty good flyweight boxer, at the very lowest weight class, under 112 pounds. Apparently he had begun his boxing career like Irish Jim O’Brien, head down and flailing, but had become a lot better under tutelage. Boxing was not a big sport at the college, but they sent their better candidates twice a week to a famous gym in the nearest town with a barrio. Leon learned to keep his head up and put some control into his flailing, and he was so fast and so relentless that he turned out to be good enough to beat all the town Chicanos and eventually go into Golden Gloves one weight up.

  By their junior year Jack Liffey was living with Barney Monroe off campus, and whenever the topic of Leon’s career came up in the paper, Barney referred to him as “your pal.”

  “I see your pal beat somebody called Oscar ‘The Dog’ Avila in Whittier. He must’ve been good if he had a nickname.”

  “Jesus, your pal, that all-purpose affable boxer guy, he made it to the state championships.”

  “This is rich, they’ve got an interview with your pal after he took some Golden Gloves title. Mr. Krane, to what do you owe your storied success? And this pal of yours, no slouch with the wit, old Leon replies, 1 banish weakness.”

  I banish weakness became Barney Monroe’s catchphrase for a while, his all-purpose formula for acing exams and snagging Friday night dates.

  “Oh, man, getting up for eight o’clock French class is murder. But I banish weakness."

  But soon the Krane question pretty much fell out of sight in all its forms until that fateful night at the end of their junior year when the feisty little boxer barged into Stinkey’s and called out the linebacker. They never even knew why.

  After the challenge, Kaz Kristowski sloped down off his barstool and advanced on Leon Krane like a big mountain cat forced to attend to some pesky rodent.

  “Here’s your chance to split, man,” the big linebacker offered softly, in a dead flat voice. He might have been a little drunk. “You don’t even cast a shadow in my world.”

  Leon Krane’s head topped out about chest level on the bigger man, and he was literally less than half his weight. Kristowski must have run to 270 easy, and a lot of it was weight-training muscle then, no matter what he would look like in another ten years.

  “Eat my shit-caked shoes, Polack.”

  Kristowski took one big swing that seemed to go half-hearted before it got all the way to Krane, as if his large fist was having second thoughts of its own. They say the secret to a bar fight is not size or strength, not even a knowledge of dirty punches, knees to the groin and gouges that break skin, but simple speed, getting in as many blows as quickly as you can, and speed is what Krane had in spades. I don’t think anyone there could have counted the number of times he hit the big linebacker’s startled face in his first flurry. Even talking of a first flurry gives a false impression, because Krane just didn’t stop. He was relentless, hammering away in a rat-tat-tat of lefts and rights that stunned the bar into silence with its bottomless ferocity. With all Krane’s training the punches had force, too, snapping the big man’s head back and forth.

  Kristowski windmilled a couple of times in a bewildered response and then went down hard on one knee. Still, Krane didn’t let up. He pounded away, evading the big flat hands Kristowski threw up to protect his face. Krane went in through those defenses as if they weren’t there and just kept hammering over and over, always at the man’s head, until the big man sagged down into a crouch, then crumpled onto his side, bellowing and emitting strange animal noises. Krane dropped to his knees and continued to punch the man’s face. Blood was spattering around now and the tormented voice changed pitch and became a wail of distress.

  Jack Liffey couldn’t stand to see any more of the beating, and he wasn’t alone jumping to his feet. A half dozen people converged to grab at Krane’s pummeling fists and pull him off.

  “That’s enough, Leon. Enough."

  “You’ll kill him.”

  Leon halted his attack as if a switch had been thrown, and his face instantly went cool and neutral as he stared down at his bleeding handiwork, the linebacker’s face already going puffy. In retrospect Jack Liffey felt that might have been the spookiest moment of all. Anyone could understand loss of control, a person lashing out in rage or humiliation or some kind of emotional frenzy, but to think that Krane’s whole homicidal attack had been a kind of willed and calculated battering was too alarming for words, took one back to the whole discarded notion of evil at work in the world.

  After that night, though, Leon Krane became something of a taboo subject throughout college. The hideous beating, the strange cold personality, his social isolation and his descent into a netherworld of off-campus working-class gyms were all unsettling facts without anyone finding in them a lesson that was simple enough and comprehensible enough to make the human condition seem any less troubling. Krane-ness, the Krane Problem became a true quandary, an unpleasant bump in the mattress that made no sense, and the young man’s mind generally shies from anything that cannot be co
ntained in a simple topic sentence.

  This Krane silence, the moral hush that surrounded the idea of him, was sealed for good when neither of the bar brawlers returned to college for the senior year. It was rumored that Krane had gone off to become a professional boxer, while poor Kristowski never really recovered from all those head blows and went into a seminary in the Midwest, probably the only one of them all who was destined daily to contemplate the mystery of Leon Krane.

  “Jack? Jack Liffey?” came the voice on the phone.

  “That’s my name.”

  “You probably remember me as Leon Krane. You were the only guy in college ever nice to me. I need your help. I hear you find kids.”

  It took a while to make the connection. It had been over thirty years since he’d even thought about the name. Wherever Krane had gone after that fateful bar fight, Jack Liffey had finished college, done two years of graduate school before the draft, spent his Vietnam year in a radar trailer, then bummed around the world before settling in as a technical writer in L.A. and working his way up to the corner office in a big aerospace building in El Segundo and a salary in the high sixties. He married a bit late, refurbished a lovely suburban bungalow in Redondo Beach, had a wonderful daughter and then lost it all to the aerospace exodus at the end of the Cold War. Drink and anger cost him the marriage and house, and the only thing that had pulled him out of his self-destructive funk was discovering he had an unexpected talent for locating missing children. He didn’t make much money at it, but it was a calling that let him climb out of bed in the morning feeling he was on the plus side of existence. That was worth a lot at the time.

  Krane gave him an address in East L.A. “One other thing, Jack. My name is Leon Carne now, it has been for a long time. You may know me as Carnito.”

  It did ring a bell, something to do with the sports pages that he never more than glanced at, and Jack Liffey called up his friend Art Castro, a walking encyclopedia of sports trivia, for a little fill-in.

  “Someday maybe you could give me a call when you don’t need something from me, Jack.”

  “What is this, The Godfather? I’ll take you to see the Pasadena Penguins play.”

  This was a standing joke between them. “There is no Pasadena Penguins.”

  “The Whatevers, then.”

  “Carnito was a pretty good featherweight for a long time, even went up and fought as a lightweight at the end. He could take a punch, and he was blazingly fast. Lovely to watch in his prime. Almost took the title from Antonio Esparragoza, but he was starting to slow down by then. Speedy Carnito was a big local favorite on the Eastside, like Oscar de la Hoya. You’ve heard of him?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I didn’t even know he wasn’t a Latino until I read a piece on him in the Times. Doesn’t matter though. We’re not racists. Hell, the founder of the Mexican Mafia was a white guy. You Irish guys used to be big in boxing.”

  Jack Liffey didn’t really think of himself as Irish, but he allowed Castro his conceit. “We got busy being cops and presidents.”

  “What a moral collapse. See you at the fights, Jack.”

  The house was on the shoulder of a hill in a bit of county area just east of the city limits called City Terrace. In a radius of ten miles there would be very little English spoken, and all the minimarkets sported that strange angular gang-banger writing he could never read. Every other house on this particular block was a pleasant enough 1930s bungalow, maybe a little threadbare but with tidy gardens. Krane’s address was a prime example of the process called mansionizing. You build on a second story, slap fanlights over all the windows, stucco everything in some obscure earth tone between peach and beige and make sure there are two really pompous columns rising up both stories a-flank the front door. It gave him the creeps, and on that street looked like a zebra in church, but he wasn’t there as an architectural critic.

  There was a picket fence, and his first hint that something might be wrong within was the dogs, three pit bulls trying insanely to get at him through the pickets. Some pit bulls are just dogs, but these were crazed little werewolves out for his blood.

  A short man came down the stoop quickly and made for the dogs. “Perros! Pendejos! Quieto!”

  He tried for a real kick, but the dogs dodged and fell into growls as they slunk away, with resentful backward glances. The man might have been Krane, he had the long black hair, though he had a broken nose now, a deeply lined face, a bushy mustache and the little underlip beard that musicians call a jazz-dab. The smile gave him away, that same humorless grimace Jack Liffey remembered from ancient history.

  “Jack, it’s good to see you.” His hand was leathery and

  strong.

  “Leon. Or what should I call you?”

  “That’s fine. I became Came legally a long time ago. And you know Mexicans, they like their diminutivos. I fought as Carnito, Little Meat. Speedy Little Meat.”

  “Almost a world champion, I hear.”

  Apparently that wasn’t a happy subject, because he ignored it and beckoned up to the house. A short round woman waited deferentially inside the door, like a servant. The second bad sign was her black eye. It was fading, but Jack Liffey didn’t like the implication.

  “Prepare café,” he said without introducing her, and she hurried away, down a spotless hallway.

  There was a glass trophy case in the living room, with a lot of silver pugilists on pedestals with their dukes up, some spangled belt buckles the size of UFOs and a couple sets of dangling bronzed boxing gloves. There was also a silvery plaque on the top shelf that almost sent Jack Liffey into a double take: I banish weakness. He hadn’t stayed in touch with Barney Monroe, who’d become a hot-shot surgeon at Cedars-Sinai, but the plaque immediately called up an image of Barney’s sardonic grin, and he felt like ringing him up to let him in on the joke. Or to ask him for help with the moral dilemma he sensed gathering about him. Apparently you still couldn’t get near Leon Krane-Carne without something dark and metaphysical tapping you on the shoulder.

  Leon’s face set into a grim stare. “My oldest boys became boxers, too. They’re doing okay, and they’re strong boys. My daughter even tried her hand at it before she got married. But my youngest went a different direction. I’ve tried everything, but Ramon actually wants to leave himself vulnerable to every wind.”

  “What sort of winds would those be?” Jack Liffey asked.

  They locked eyes for a little while, and something flitted past behind Leon’s, something he wasn’t going to talk about. “Just find him for me. He’s a minor and I don’t want him out there getting hurt.”

  The woman brought a tray of coffee and set it on a low table.

  “Are you Leon’s wife?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “Si, señor. Rosaura Sanchez Carne.”

  Jack Liffey stuck out his hand with a smile and she seemed startled but took it briefly and limply, and then poured the coffee and hurried away.

  “You got to get used to things being different in different communities, Jack.”

  He was about to mention the big difference of the black eye, and then decided he could use the money for this job and let it go. “Do you have any idea where Ramon has gone?”

  “Yeah, it’s a Korean cult with a headquarters in Hollywood. They think the world is going to come to an end at summer solstice next year. God knows what they’ll have their members doing to get ready for it.”

  “You know, 1 don’t kidnap kids, or deprogram.”

  “He’s a minor. He’s got to come home.”

  Leon agreed to a fee and gave him an address for the cult, and Jack Liffey finished off his coffee in one long pull so he could get out of there and think about this job and all the ambivalences trotting up around him like pit bulls.

  “One thing, Leon. Remember that football player you demolished at Stinkey’s?”

  “Sure.” He grinned, and there was almost enjoyment in it. “His parents threatened to sue me until they saw how ludicrous it would
look in court, Goliath standing beside me.”

  “What was it about?”

  “He called me a faggot.”

  “Were you the thief?” Jack Liffey added lightly, as if it hardly mattered.

  Leon stared back at him for a long time. “If I was, you rich pricks deserved it.”

  It took Jack Liffey several days to satisfy himself that Ramon Came had never joined the Hankook Gideon’s 300 Church of the Last Glorious Days. No one on earth but a hard-core Korean millenarian would get within hailing distance of those wild-eyed chanting loonies, he thought. It was probably a misdirection the boy had let slip to his father on purpose. Jack Liffey tried the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, on the obvious hunch, but the boy hadn’t gone there either. In a week he’d finally tracked the boy down to Zapata Graphics in Boyle Heights, an art center run by Liberation Theology nuns.

  “I can’t let you see him, Mr. Liffey,” Sister Erasmus insisted in a cluttered studio where a number of young people labored away at silk-screen presses and other tasks. The sister was heavy-set and a bit frowzy, but seemed quite kindly.

  She didn’t wear a habit or the airplane hat, none of them did anymore, but there was something about her that screamed nun at you, maybe the sense of peace and confidence.

  “I promise you, I have never taken a child home against his or her will. Especially if there’s a danger of abuse. Ever. But Ramon is a minor and I’ve got to at least talk to him. I’m functioning here as an officer of the court.” That was gibberish but it often worked.

  “All right. You may talk to him, but only in my presence.”

  She led him up a worn stairwell, past a lot of posters of brightly colored Mexican village scenes and cartoony low-rider sedans, the East L.A. trademark. She knocked politely and waited for an invitation before ushering him into a small studio with a cot and a tiny fridge in the corner. The resemblance was so obvious there was no doubt. He was like a slightly more Latino version of Leon, short and frail with soulful brown eyes and a very solemn demeanor.