by Jack Tunney
“Perfect,” I said. “Now, clean up the spit buckets and then shower.” He sauntered off with a smile, a little taller, a little more confident.
“Flynn,” Pops called loudly, his voice filled with his normal raspy aggravation. “Come here.”
I ducked between the ring ropes and joined Pops and Billy. Over their shoulders, I saw Bonnie Wallace come into the gym. She drew some stares as the gym wasn’t usually habituated by women, but Bonnie ignored them and nodded in my direction. I held up a finger, acknowledging I’d seen her.
Pops was talking at me. “Set up southpaw and let Billy run some combinations.”
I was wearing chinos, a sweatshirt, and high-top Converse sneakers. “My hands aren’t wrapped,” I said, looking at the gloves Pops was holding out.
“I’m not asking you to hit him, I’m asking him to hit you.”
Nobody says no to Pops. I shoved my hands into the gloves.
Southpaw wasn’t a problem for me. I was just as comfortable fighting left-handed as I was fighting out of an orthodox stance. It was just the way my brain worked. I sometimes switched in the middle of a round, which reigned confusion on my opponents.
Billy hadn’t fought anybody who was a southpaw. He was a tall, rangy, kid with pitch black straight hair falling into his eyes. He was a confident fighter, and fast, but I knew my set up was throwing him off.
“You have to reverse your brain,” I told him. Keeping my right in his face, I turned him the opposite way to his normal attack. “Think of it like fighting your mirror image.”
“Flynn . . .” I heard a new voice call my name and turned to see who it was. Billy stepped around my right lead and threw a jab into my nose. Blood exploded.
Without hesitating, I threw a roundhouse left striking Billy over his right ear. I twisted my punch at the last moment, so I hit him with the inside of my fist. Even though he was wearing headgear, the force of the blow shorted out his brain and turned his legs to rubber.
Slack-faced, Billy staggered backward like a puppet with half its strings cut. Pops moved in quickly to support him, but he was grinning. He knew Billy’s cheap shot had earned him the painful lesson.
As far as Billy was concerned, the blow came out of nowhere. Getting hit in the nose stopped most people in their tracks. The pain was intense, plus there was the shock of the blood – your blood.
That was the reaction Billy’s cockiness made him expect. However, I’d lost track of the times my nose had been mashed. It hurt, but it was far from disabling. Over the years, I’d also bled a body’s worth of my own blood. It didn’t faze me anymore.
Billy was a good fighter, excellent for his age. However, there was a lot of difference between dominating peers in PAL’s tournaments and sparring with somebody who’d fought in streets, bars, and rings for fifteen years. My punch was harder and faster than anything Billy had ever faced before in his fights. Plus, he was a bantamweight, between 118 pounds and 126 pounds. I weighed in near the top of the scale for a middleweight, between 160 and 175 pounds.
When he regained his senses, he’d even realize I’d pulled the punch at the last second. If he was as good as Pops hoped, he wouldn’t forget the lesson.
I didn’t forget it when Father Tim taught it to me the same way.
Holding a towel beneath my nose and pinching the bridge, I made my way over to the ropes. A uniformed police sergeant I didn’t recognize was looking up at me from ringside. The shiny name tag over his right uniform shirt pocket read, McCulley.
“Sorry,” he said realizing he’d distracted me.
“No need,” I said. “The kid had to learn the lesson sometime. Also, I should know better than to look away when I’m in the ring.”
McCulley smiled, looking at the blood on my sweatshirt. “The chief wants to see you,” he said.
“Chief Parker?”
“You work for another one?”
“No,” I said, climbing out of the ring. “Give me a minute.”
“Don’t take long,” McCulley said. “He wants to see you now.”
I walked over to where Bonnie was standing. She held out an ice bag from Pops’ small freezer. I took the bloody towel from my nose and replaced it with the ice bag. I tossed the towel on top of a stack Pops’ daughter Tina was carrying to the laundry. She’d been in my corner during the Carter bout, and now she stuck her tongue out at me.
She was a rascal, but it came from being an only girl with eight brothers. I think Pops must have loved her more, but he didn’t treat her any different than his sons. She’d even spent some time with the gloves on, holding her own against any of the PAL’s kids her age.
I looked back at Bonnie. She was tall and poverty thin despite being comfortably well off from the earnings of other women. She was also smart, knew how to do business, and kept her girls as safe as she could.
She had more dirt on city politicians than Pops did, but she kept a low profile, ran her house clean, and didn’t make waves. It was her formula for success in a world where Negro women were hardly allowed to exist.
I always worried, however, that someday she would have to pay the piper in some fashion – it was the nature of her profession.
We’d met when I rolled on a call where two of her girls had found themselves in a bind with a customer who was demanding more than they we willing to give. When I got there, the customer, a big ‘ol boy who thought he was a fighter, decided he could mop the floor with me. I proved different, and he woke up in jail on a assault charge.
I figured life was already difficult enough for the two girls and made sure they got home to Bonnie without problems. Bonnie and I had been friends ever since.
“Rodney, get on the bus?” I asked.
“I put him on myself,” she said. “When I called Father Tim, he said to tell you he’s heard from Mickey, who practically has to get somebody else to write his letters for him, but he hasn’t heard from you.”
“I send money.” I felt stung. I’d taken to school and absorbed reading and writing easily. Mickey had always struggled. Said he didn’t care, but I knew he didn’t understand why learning was so easy for me and not for him.
“Father Tim said you’d say that and to tell you money alone isn’t enough.”
“So, you came here to deliver a scolding from a priest.”
“No, but it was fun,” Bonnie said, then asked, “Did you know Rodney was a dip – a thief?”
“I know what a dip is,” I said. “What did he pickpocket from you?”
“Not from me. From one of the men who were beating him.” Bonnie stepped closer and casually handed me an envelope. She was close enough for me to smell her faint perfume.
“He say which one he took it from?”
“He said the tall one he kicked.”
Cooper. A good thief always takes advantage of a distraction, and I’d been distracted dealing with Tellis.
“He said it was in the inside jacket pocket.”
I opened the envelope and looked inside. There were five twenty dollar bills. I didn’t understand.
I hefted the envelope. “You know what’s in here?”
“He said they were counterfeit.”
I opened the envelope again and rubbed one of the bills between my fingers without taking it out. “Maybe,” I said. “But they’re good enough to pass. This is a fortune to a kid like Rodney if he played it right.”
“He said nobody would believe a kid like him would have a twenty dollar bill without having stolen it. He also said nobody ever stood up for him before. He said he owed you.”
I wondered if he’d still feel that way once Father Tim got hold of him.
“Thanks,” I said to Bonnie.
“You’re even surprised I didn’t keep ‘em,” she said, but her eyes were smiling.
“I know you better,” I said.
“You just think you do.” She turned to walk away. “And stop bringing me your strays. I run a business not a charity.”
The tone of her voice g
ave lie to the statement. If I brought them, she’d take them in.
“You done?” McCulley asked from behind me. He was a barrel-chested guy, who looked as if he was swaggering even when he was standing still.
I took the ice bag off my nose. The bleeding had stopped. I swallowed a gob of blood.
The chief.
My stomach churned. Not from the blood, but thinking the arrests from the night before might have more fallout than I’d expected.
ROUND 4
McCulley dropped me in front of the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway, which housed the chief’s office, thirty minutes later.
The new Police Administration building, at First Street and Los Angeles Avenue, had been under construction for almost ten years. There had been uncountable delays for everything from funding to labor strikes, but the imposing seven story structure was finally set to open sometime in the next year. Until then, the various police administration units remained scattered throughout different downtown buildings.
Inside the Bradbury, I’d waited for the exposed elevator to wind down to the ground floor. The operator opened the collapsible gate and let me in.
Creaking and groaning, the elevator reluctantly wound up to the fourth floor. It took forever. I didn’t know what to expect, but I felt I might be better off if the elevator cable snapped.
The chief’s office had a reception room where I was told by his secretary to take a seat. Fifteen minutes later I was still wiggling around on one of the hard chairs. It was clear from the secretary’s face, I should have put more effort into my appearance. I’d had a white dress shirt and tie at the gym along with a worn sports coat. I’d put them on with my chinos, which I now saw had a spray of tiny blood spots on one leg.
Eventually, the pebbled glass of the chief’s inner sanctum opened slowly. Nobody came out, but the secretary gave me a permissive nod. I stood, took a deep breath and went to answer the bell.
The only contact I’d ever had with Chief Parker was when I’d been standing at attention during graduation from the police academy. Parker had walked past me and forty other rookies as part of a ceremonial inspection. He had hard, cold, eyes deep set in a fleshy face. The small round lenses of his glasses drew even more attention to the intensity of his stare.
Now, in his office, he examined me with the same look as I stood in front of his desk. I heard somebody move behind me. They must have been hidden by the door when I stepped in. My scalp prickled.
The office was basic, nothing more than a working space. The chief was sitting behind a large oak desk, which sported scarred legs and an explosion of papers across the top.
The chief didn’t get up.
I could feel a presence looming behind me. I forced myself not to turn around. I did not like the way this was going. I liked being a cop. I thought I was a good cop. I didn’t want to have it taken away.
The chief eyed me speculatively. “Do you own a suit, Officer Flynn?”
I gulped. “Yes, sir, but this was all I had with me when Sergeant McCulley came to get me . . .” I knew I was blathering.
“Enough,” Parker said, waving his hand dismissively before moving on. “I think you know Detective Jones.” The chief came down hard on the word detective and nodded his head toward the person behind me.
I turned, not surprised to see the tall Negro with the tuft of white in his hair.
“Cornel Jones,” he said in a deep voice. “Call me Tombstone.” He didn’t offer his hand, but he gave me a huge grin, showing where his moniker came from. His teeth were horse-sized. The front two flat slabs of ivory were half-mooned at the top by pink gums. They looked exactly like cemetery grave markers.
Up close, you could see he was built to fit his teeth. He was at least six-foot-five. Where he was standing, I couldn’t see the door behind him.
I turned back to the chief.
He was standing up.
“Give me your badge, Officer Flynn,” Chief Parker said, delivering the K.O. blow with a demanding hand held out flat.
I felt like Billy had when I’d delivered the roundhouse left. My legs were shaky and I struggled not to fall down and kiss the canvas.
I swallowed hard. The fingers on the chief’s outstretched palm waggled a give it to me statement without words. “That was an order, Officer Flynn.”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the leather wallet where I carried my badge when off duty. I placed it in the chief’s palm.
He flipped the wallet open and looked at the metal oval with the word policeman curved above a relief of LA City Hall. In the center of the relief was an enameled circle containing the city seal. The words Los Angeles Police curved in the opposite direction below the seal. Finally, just above the bottom, was the badge number – 138.
It was just a hunk of metal, but I felt like I’d taken a hundred body blows when I gave it up.
Chief Parker tapped the badge absently. “When you came on the job four years ago, I’m sure you heard the rumors I was in bed with Bugsy Siegel.”
I had, but I thought it was best to keep my mouth shut. Parker was all about cleaning up the LAPD, so I wasn’t sure how true they were. I’d never seen any indication he was in bed with organized crime, but then I didn’t run in the higher circles of administration.
The chief pulled open the middle drawer of his desk and dropped my badge into it. “Siegel was the mob’s west coast capo. He was as vicious and crazy as everyone said. He brought Mickey Cohen up as his lieutenant – sort of like Hitler trying to get Satan on his side.”
Tombstone chimed in from behind me. “They say, when you sup with the devil you better use a long spoon.”
“Too true,” the chief agreed.
“There was one good thing about Siegel – he needed to keep organized gambling out of LA. If he didn’t, then his little oasis in the Nevada desert would shrivel and die. So, Siegel and I had a deal. I let him live in LA and he did a Big Greenie and squealed whenever the east coast would send a heavy out west to start numbers running or illegal gaming in my city.”
I knew Big Greenie was Harry Greenberg. He been a mob informant and got himself taken out in a hail of bullets. Siegel supposedly orchestrated the hit on orders from Louis Lepke Buchalter, boss of Murder, Inc. Siegel had been arrested for ordering the hit, but Whitey Krakower, the trigger man, was killed before getting to trial and the conspiracy charges against Siegel were dropped.
“Siegel had to know what was coming,” Parker went on, “but he was obsessed with getting Las Vegas off the ground. He’d tell me when the mob was sending somebody west, and my Hat Squad boys would meet them at the train station or airport. They’d take ‘em up and show ‘em Mulholland Falls, and send ‘em home with their tails between their legs.”
Mulholland Drive cuts across the tops of the hills separating LA from the farms and suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. There were no waterfalls there. Showing somebody Mulholland Falls meant taking them up to the top of Mulholland Drive and tossing them off.
They would crash through the scrub and bushes covering the hills until they landed on the road where it switched back on itself. Whoever took the trip down the falls would then be taken, bandaged and broken, back to the train station or airport and sent back home. Once someone had experienced Mulholland Falls, they never seemed eager to make a return visit.
Tombstone had come around to stand on one side of the chief’s desk. “Chief, I think Officer Flynn here is wondering why you telling him all this,” he said.
The Chief looked over at him. “You can find yourself back in uniform patrolling Harbor Division as easy as snapping my fingers.”
“Come on, Chief,” Tombstone gave up his big smile again. “You need me to show you be progressive.”
“You aren’t the only Negro on this department.”
“But I is the biggest . . . and the best dressed . . .”
I figured Parker would explode, but he just laughed. “You are, you are,” he said. He turned back to me.
“I’ll get to the point. Siegel is old news. Siegel could be controlled because he needed something. Cohen is a different story. You know what Cohen did the night after Siegel was hit?”
Everybody knew. It was legend. “He shot up the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel,” I said. “He demanded Siegel’s murderer come out and play, but there were no takers.”
“A pretty gutsy move, huh?” Parker asked.
“I guess . . .”
“It is, unless you were the one who hit Siegel yourself.”
That shut me up. Nobody was ever arrested for Siegel’s murder. It happened in Beverly Hills, just outside of LAPD’s jurisdiction.
The chief nodded knowingly. “Cohen isn’t Siegel. He’s far worse, a mad dog who wants to make this city wide open for every vice there is. And I’m going to stop him. Not all at once, but one step at a time until Cohen is either inside or under the sod.”
He reached into the desk drawer where he had thrown my badge and took something out. He tossed it to me.
I juggled it, but eventually caught it. It was metal and oval. I turned it over.
It was a Detective badge.
In physical form it wasn’t much different from my Policeman badge. It simply had the word Detective etched where Policeman had been on my other badge. However, the effective difference between the two badges couldn’t be calculated.
“I’m promoting you, Flynn,” the chief said.
“I passed the test?” I felt shell-shocked.
“Not if you mean that waste of time written test you took. You passed my personal detective test Friday night when you didn’t take a dive against Cohen’s prospect, Carter.”