Felony Fists (Fight Card)

by Jack Tunney

  “What do you want?” he asked. His tone was belligerent as he sat in the chair facing the back wall. Tombstone leaned on the closed door behind him. I sat in the chair in front of him with my arms folded.

  “You don’t look very good, Cooper,” I said. “Prison life doesn’t seem to agree with you.”

  Cooper looked like he’d lost ten pounds since the night I stopped him and his buddies from beating Rodney. His features were drawn to the point of gauntness.

  “What would you know about it?”

  I leaned forward, snapping out my right hand to grab Cooper’s chin. “I know you’ve got the answer to a question.”

  “I ain’t telling you nothing.”

  The words coming out of Cooper’s mouth were slightly distorted by the hold I had on his chin.

  I released him and sat back. “I want to know where you got the twenty dollar bills you had in your coat pocket.”

  A glint of fear flashed in Cooper’s eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I smiled, ignoring his statement. “You must have been wondering all this time what happened to the envelope with the bills. It wasn’t booked into your property, and nobody has said a word about it since. Maybe you thought some copper got light-fingered and kept the money for himself. Maybe you thought you were home free.”

  “I told you, I don’t know nothing about no counterfeit bills.”

  “I didn’t say they were counterfeit.”

  Cooper looked cornered. He was starting to sweat. He turned in his chair, looking back at Tombstone. No help there.

  I moved my chair closer to Cooper and leaned forward. I played a hunch. “You were a bad boy, weren’t you, Cooper?”

  “I didn’t do nothing . . .”

  “Do you know how many guys there are locked up who told me they didn’t do nothing.” My voice was lower, soothing. “I don’t think you were supposed to have those bills. I think you snagged them when nobody was looking.”

  Sweat was beading heavily on Cooper’s forehead. “I’m not saying anything. Do you know how long I’d last in here if it got out I squealed.”

  I sat back in my chair again. I nodded as if I was thinking about it. “Do you know how long you’d last in here if I put the word out about you stealing those bills? Do you think Mickey Cohen would just let that pass?”

  I saw Cooper’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed. “Look, don’t do that, okay?”

  “Then tell me.”

  Cooper rubbed his hands over his face. “The bills were just sitting there – a mountain of them. We was supposed to burn ‘em. Nobody was going to miss a handful. They was just samples.”

  “Where was this?”

  “This guy, Chadwick, brought them in to show Mickey. He had ‘em in a duffel bag. Told Mickey as soon as the good paper came in he was ready to roll.”

  “You’re telling me this happened in Mickey’s office?”

  “Yeah. Mickey went crazy. Yelling at Chadwick for bringing the stuff. Told Tellis and me to take the stuff out and burn it – make sure there was nothing left.”

  “And you couldn’t bear to see all that funny money going up in smoke?”

  Cooper shrugged. “It looked good to me.”

  “Where does Mickey have Chadwick stashed?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Cooper,” I let my voice take on an edge.

  “I swear,” Cooper implored me with open hands and spread arms. “I heard it was in the garment district downtown. Mickey runs a couple of sweat shops down there – uses the sound of the sewing machines to hide the sound of the printing press.”

  “You ever been there?”

  “I’m telling you, no, never. I don’t know.”

  I nodded. Nothing was ever easy.

  ROUND 10

  Before I really knew it, the night of the Haywood fight was upon us. I was anxious, which was usual before a fight. Once the first blows were thrown and received nothing else would matter.

  Boxing was one man versus another man, and Father Tim had taught both me and Mickey we were always man enough. Officially, I was stepping up tonight – not only entering the pro ranks, but moving into the world of the light-heavyweights. However, back at the orphanage and all the way through my Shore Patrol duties and beyond, I’d fought whoever had come my way – bigger, badder, meaner, two guys, three guys, more, it didn’t matter.

  I needed to fight. Getting hit and hitting back harder was in the marrow of my bones. I’d tried to run away from it when I left the Navy to join the cops and do something different. But here I was going into the ring with everything on the line again, and I realized how much I’d missed it.

  Trevor Haywood was big. A true light-heavyweight. But he hadn’t taken me seriously. Why should he? I was an amateur middleweight making the step up to light-heavyweight for his first pro fight. So, Haywood was big, but he was out of top shape.

  When he threw a punch, I clearly saw it coming, blocking and countering. I was throwing two or three punches for every jab he threw. I felt ready. I felt strong. It was only the first round, but the fight was already taking on its unique character – me dancing and Haywood lumbering after me.

  We were back at the Olympic Auditorium, but this time I’d been promoted to the undercard – one fight below the evening’s main event. The weigh-in for the fight had been that morning. I was still five pounds under the light-heavyweight limit, but Mama Hawks had sewn two lead weights into my silk shorts, and I tipped the scales at two pounds over the lower limit.

  I moved in to pound at the perceptible layer of fat around Haywood’s belly. He didn’t even grunt. At one time, Haywood had been a contender, but booze and broads had taken their toll. His manager had done a good job of keeping the inevitable hidden from the boxing writers, even to the point of keeping Haywood’s workouts closed to reporters and the public. But, in itself, that was a bad sign and the word was on the street.

  Nothing Haywood was showing me tonight so far was going to change anything for him, even if he won.

  I covered up when Haywood threw a heavy hitting right and left. I felt the power that had once been behind them, but now they landed with more thud than bang. I kept my arms up and my elbows tucked in. I moved away and counter punched.

  The bell to end the round dinged and I headed for my corner. Pops got busy yammering at me while Tina took out my mouthpiece and got busy with the sponge.

  When I turned my head to the right to spit, I could see Mickey Cohen and his entourage sitting in the front row. Solomon King was there as well, looking sour. It must have rankled him that if I won this fight, he’d have to fight me to get his shot.

  I could also see Anita O’Shay, wrapped in a mink stole and sitting on the far side of Mickey. I could tell she was forcing herself not to look at me. Was she really in to this as deep as I suspected? Or was she just another good looking dame getting her kicks rubbing up against a big time gangster?

  “Corners out,” the ref yelled.

  I stood up. Tina put my mouthpiece back in. Pops was shaking his head. He knew I hadn’t heard a word he’d said. I looked back down at Cohen. He wasn’t looking at me. I turned to follow his gaze and saw he was looking at Tina. All the dames the guy had around him and he was looking at a thirteen year old kid.

  The bell rang and I turned back into the ring. Somehow, Haywood had made it across the ring and was on top of me before I realized it. He started swinging haymakers and I was against the ropes. The crowd was cheering, egging him on to hit me and hit me. The heavy thudding blows came one after the other, battering my scrambled defense.

  I rolled with the punches as best I could, catching their rhythm and sliding to the sides. A better fighter than Haywood would have finished me then and there. I’d been stupid and unprepared, but I wasn’t going down and I could feel him losing steam.

  I feinted right and went left, bobbing under a lumbering right hook, and danced away to the center of the ring. Haywood turned like
an angry bear. I let loose a bolo punch, looping it over his right shoulder and exploding it on the right side of his head.

  The bolo was something I’d been working on since I’d seen a film of Kid Galivan using it to take out Johnny Bratton in 1951 for the welterweight title. I liked it because it was really a distraction technique. By dropping your back hand and pretending to make an obvious wide sweeping throw, your opponent's eyes gravitated to the dropped hand, leaving you free to throw your front arm.

  If you threw it enough times, your opponent would figure out what you were doing, changing his focus to your leading hand. Then you switched it up and followed through with the looping bolo punch itself. Because of the distance and torque you could put into it, it was a devastating blow when it landed

  In this instance however, I wasn’t using it as a distraction. I let loose with another bolo, from the right this time. Haywood was too shaken by the first punch to do anything to stop this one landing and he went down to the canvas.

  The ref pushed me back and away to a neutral corner. Blood was singing in my veins. This was life. I wanted Haywood to get up. I wanted to hit him again and again.

  The ref ticked off five, and Haywood came up to one knee. At the eight count, he stood up. The ref rubbed Haywood’s gloves off on his shirt and then moved out of the way.

  “Fight,” he said, signaling to me.

  I moved in quickly, throwing a barrage of combinations, but Haywood was hunkered down. His thick neck had pulled his head back into his shoulders like a turtle, and he kept his thickly muscled arms up. It was a defensive posture he could cruise in all day while he got his bearings back.

  The bell let loose and I headed back to my corner. Time was funny during a match. When a fight was not going your way, the bell seemed to take three days to ring. When you were on top and banging away, three minutes seemed like three seconds.

  I hated showing off, but I had a plan. As I approached my corner, I held my arms up to the crowd, who roared approval back at me. There was no feeling like it in the world.

  I brought my right arm down , along with my gaze, until my fist was pointing at Solomon King. I then did a fancy little shuffle and shadow boxed back onto my stool. The crowd went crazy again. The boxing world is very small. Most everyone knew the great comer, Solomon King, was going to have to get through me – a cocky kid putting on a show.

  “What are you doing?” Pops said, as I sat.

  I spat out my mouthpiece. “My job,” I said. “It’s not about this fight, it’s about the next.”

  “Well, you better finish this fight first or there won’t be a next.”

  ***

  Haywood came out for round three a lot more cautiously. The guy was a brawler, but he also had some technique. We danced and probed, neither giving nor taking much punishment.

  And then it happened . . .

  Haywood accidentally on purpose stepped on my left foot with all his weight, effectively trapping me in one place and opening me up for a head butt as I tried to move away. It was a dirty trick used by desperate fighters who did it with enough skill for the ref not to notice.

  What Haywood hadn’t calculated was I’d been in bar fights across three continents, I’d fought on ships from here to Taiwan, and if that dirty trick had been pulled on me once, it had been pulled on me a hundred times along with a hundred others.

  As soon as I felt the pressure on my foot, I moved forward instead of back. I ducked my head and bent it down. When Haywood’s inevitable head butt came, instead of catching me square in the face with his forehead, he smashed the ridge of his left eyebrow into my skull. Hard.

  Haywood jerked his head back in shock. As he did so, blood from the split over his eye splashed across me. His weight moved off my foot. His hands dropped momentarily in shock. And I threw a right uppercut that started at my feet and hit him right on the point of his chin.

  Haywood went straight back and down – out before he hit the floor.

  I don’t know why I felt I had to get under Solomon King’s skin. Perhaps it was instinct. I’d never been in a position before of knowing who my next opponent was going to be before I’d fought the previous fight.

  Fighting, in war or in the ring, is as much about getting inside your opponent’s head as it is about making physical contact. If I was to beat him, I needed King to think I was a fool who had just gotten lucky. I needed him to underestimate me.

  I was not going to underestimate him. I knew I needed every advantage I could get.

  With Haywood still flat on the canvas, the ref held up my arm as the victor. I swaggered over to the ropes in front of Solomon King, Mickey Cohen, and all their cronies. I knew I was emulating what had happened naturally after the fight with Lester Carter. Then it had been true distain on my part. This time it was hubris.

  I spat out my mouthpiece in Cohen’s direction. It landed at the red stiletto clad feet of Anita O’Shay. She was looking at me now, but her expression was anything but adoring.

  There was no sense in pretense. Cohen knew I was the face of the police department. Chief Parker’s stooge. I was being used to stop King and therefore stop Cohen from getting his claws into the fight game.

  “Your boy is going down,” I said to Cohen. When I said the word boy, I infused it with the intonation of every red-necked cracker I’d ever heard use the word. I was purposely avoiding talking to Solomon.

  I was a little ashamed to hear myself talk in such a tone – Father Tim would have belted me one – but I was delighted by the reaction I got out of King.

  Flowing to his feet, Solomon King was up and had one hand on the lowest rope, ready to pull himself into the ring, before Cohen’s bodyguards could grab him from behind.

  “Come on then,” I said, bouncing on my toes and throwing some fast combinations. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  I could literally hear Solomon King growling. He was like a caged panther, held back by a tether of human handlers.

  I laughed and bounced away to my corner. My expression changed as soon as I saw Tombstone looking at me.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “Me too.” I said, slipping into my robe with Tina’s help, and out of the ring.

  ROUND 11

  “They want to move the fight up six weeks,” Pops said.

  “What?” I felt stunned.

  “It’s King’s way of getting back at you for your little show at the end of the Haywood fight.”

  Moving the fight up six weeks only left two weeks before the big showdown – only two months after my fight with Haywood.

  I’d been concentrating on getting under King’s skin. I should have been better prepared for him to counter.

  “No way!” I said. “The fight date has been set. It can’t be changed on a whim.”

  Pops sighed. “It’s not a whim. It’s the fight game. King’s trainer, Marvin Stockbridge, says it’s all set.”

  “We can still refuse,” I said.

  “If we do, it look like we be scared.” This came from Tombstone in his deep basso voice.

  “I need the extra time to recover from the Haywood fight,” I argued.

  “No, you don’t,” Pops said. “You came out of that fight cleaner than sparring ten rounds with Donovan, and you do that every day.”

  “Solomon King isn’t Trevor Haywood, and he sure ain’t Donovan Hawks,” I said. The words were out of my mouth before I realized Donovan was close enough to hear. We’d just finished sparing. His face clouded over.

  “I need the time to train,” I said.

  “No, you don’t,” Pops said.

  “Don’t keep saying that!” I tugged helplessly at the eight ounce glove I was trying to remove, and then tried to shake it off in frustration.

  Tina Hawks moved in and grabbed my agitated hand. She made me hold still while she finished unlacing the glove. I wanted to pull my hand away from her. She was a thirteen year old kid and she was in my corner going up against Solomon King
. What was Chief Parker thinking?

  What was I thinking?

  Tina pulled the glove off. I turned and walked away before she could start to unwrap my tape. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pops take her shoulders and hold her back from following me.

  That was fine. I didn’t want anyone following me.

  “Do what you want,” I said over my shoulder.

  It had been six weeks since the Haywood fight, and every day Pops rode me hard for calling out Solomon King like I did. I tried explaining I hadn’t been showing off for the sake of showing off. I needed King overconfident if I was going to beat him. It did no good.

  “Just beating King isn’t going to be good enough,” Pops growled. “You’re going to have to destroy him, because he is going to be out to destroy you.”

  “I handled Haywood in three rounds . . .”

  “You handled nothing!” Pops got himself into full flow. “Haywood is a has-been who never-was. You beat a strawman nothing more. Solomon King is the real deal and he is hungry for victory. He don’t care nothin’ about Cohen, the mob, or your precious Chief Parker. He only cares about being the light-heavyweight champion of the world . . . and right now you’re standing in his way.”

  Every day I heard it.

  And every day sparring with Donovan, I could feel Donovan holding back, smirking. He wasn’t giving me his best, and he knew I knew it. He’d never come out and say it, but he wanted me to lose. Somehow, he figured he would get a shot if I went down in flames.