Scenarios nd-29

by Bill Pronzini

  Monahan's Gym was one of those tough, men-only places that catered to ex-pugs and old timers in the fight game, the kind of place you used to see a lot of in the forties and fifties but that have become an anachronism in this day of chic health clubs, fancy spas, and dwindling interest in the art of prizefighting. It smelled of sweat and steam and old leather, and it resonated with the grunts of weightlifters, the smack and thud of gloves against leather bags, the profane talk of men at liberty from a more or less polite society.

  I found Charley Slattery in the locker room, working there as an attendant. He was a short, beefy guy, probably a light-heavyweight in his boxing days, gone to fat around the middle in his old age; white-haired, with a face as seamed and time-eroded as a chunk of desert sandstone. One of his eyes had a glassy look; his nose and mouth were lumpy with scar tissue. A game fighter in his day, I thought, but not a very good one. A guy who had never quite learned how to cover up against the big punches, the hammerblows that put you down and out.

  "Sure, I been expectin' you." he said when I told him who I was. "Iry Feinberg, he said you'd be around. You findin' out anything the cops dint?"

  "It's too soon to tell, Mr. Slattery."

  "Charley," he said, "I hate that Mr. Slattery crap."

  "All right, Charley."

  "Well, I wish I could tell you somethin would help you, but I can't think of nothin. I dint even see Nick for two-three days before he was murdered."

  "Any idea who might have killed him?"

  "Well, some punk off the street, I guess. Guy Nick was arguin' with that night-George Weaver, he told you about that, dint he? What he heard?"

  "Yes. He also said he met you upstairs just afterward."

  Slattery nodded. "I was headin' down the lobby for a Coke, they got a machine down there, and George, he come out of the elevator with his cane and this little radio unner his arm. He looked kind of funny and I ast him what's the matter and that's when he told me about the argument."

  "What did you do then?"

  "What'd I do? Went down to get my Coke."

  "You didn't go to the basement?"

  "Nah, damn it. George, he said it was just a argument Nick was havin' with somebody. I never figured it was nothin, you know, violent. If I had-Yeah, Eddie? You need somethin?"

  A muscular black man in his mid-thirties, naked except for a pair of silver-blue boxing trunks, had come up. He said, "Towel and some soap, Chancy. No soap in the showers again."

  "Goddamn. I catch the guy keeps swipin' it," Slattery said, "I'll kick his ass." He went and got a clean towel and a bar of soap, and the black man moved off with them to a back row of lockers. Slattery watched him go; then he said to me, "That's Eddie Jordan. Pretty fair welterweight once, but he never trained right, never had the right manager. He could of been good, that boy, if-" He broke off, frowning. "I shouldn't ought to call him that, I guess. 'Boy.' Blacks, they don't like to be called that nowadays."

  "No," I said, "they don't."

  "But I don't mean nothin by it. I mean, we always called em 'boy,' it was just somethin' we called em. 'Nigger,' too, same thing. It wasn't nothin personal, you know?"

  I knew, all right, but it was not something I wanted to or ever could explain to Charley Slattery. Race relations, the whole question of race, was too complex an issue. In his simple world, "nigger" and "boy" were just words, meaningless words without a couple of centuries of hatred and malice behind them, and it really wasn't anything personal.

  "Let's get back to Nick," I said. "You liked him, didn't you, Charley?"

  "Sure I did. He was goofy, him and his skeletons, but he worked hard and he never bothered nobody."

  "I had a talk with Wesley Thane a while ago. He told me you had some trouble with Nick not long ago."

  Slattery's eroded face arranged itself into a scowl. "That damn actor, he don't know what he's talkin about. Why don't he mind his own damn business? I never had no trouble with Nick."

  "Not even a little? A disagreement of some kind, maybe?"

  He hesitated. Then he shrugged and said, "Well, yeah, I guess we had that. A kind of disagreement."

  "When was this?'

  "I dunno. Couple of weeks ago."

  "What was it about?"

  "Garbage," Slattery said.

  "Garbage?"

  "Nick, he dint like nobody touchin' the cans in the basement. But hell, I was down there one night and the cans unner the chutes was full, so I switched 'em for empties. Well, Nick come around and yelled at me, and I wasn't feelin' too good so I yelled back at him. Next thing, I got sore and kicked over one of the cans and spilled out some garbage. Dan Cady, he heard the noise clear up in the lobby and come down and that son of a bitch Wes Thane was with him. Dan, he got Nick and me calmed down. That's all there was to it."

  "How were things between you and Nick after that?"

  "Okay. He forgot it and so did I. It dint mean nothin'. It was just one of them things."

  "Did Nick have problems with any other people in the hotel?" I asked.

  "Nah. I don't think so."

  "What about Wes Thane? He admitted he and Nick didn't get along very well."

  "I never heard about them havin' no fight or anythin' like that."

  "How about trouble Nick might have had with somebody outside the Medford?"

  "Nah," Slattery said. "Nick, he got along with everybody, you know? Everybody liked Nick, even if he was goofy."

  Yeah, I thought, everybody liked Nick, even if he was goofy. Then why is he dead? Why?

  I went back to the Medford and talked with three more residents, none of whom could offer any new information or any possible answers to that question of motive. It was almost five when I gave it up for the day and went next door to the office.

  Eberhardt was there, but I didn't see him at first because he was on his hands and knees behind his desk. He poked his head up as I came inside and shut the door.

  "Fine thing," I said, "you down on your knees like that. What if I'd been a prospective client?"

  "So? I wouldn't let somebody like you hire me."

  "What're you doing down there anyway?"

  "I was cleaning my pipe and I dropped the damn bit." He disappeared again for a few seconds, muttered, "Here it is," reappeared, and hoisted himself to his feet.

  There were pipe ashes all over the front of his tie and his white shirt; he'd even managed to get a smear of ash across his jowly chin. He was something of a slob, Eberhardt was, which gave us one of several common bonds: I was something of a slob myself. We had been friends for more than thirty years, and we'd been through some hard times together-some very hard times in the recent past. I hadn't been sure at first that taking him in as a partner after his retirement was a good idea, for a variety of reasons; but it had worked out so far. Much better than I'd expected, in fact.

  He sat down and began brushing pipe dottle off his desk; he must have dropped a bowlful on it as well as on himself. He said as I hung up my coat, "How goes the Nick Damiano investigation?"

  "Not too good. Did you manage to get a copy of the police report?"

  "On your desk. But I don't think it'll tell you much."

  The report was in an unmarked manila envelope; I read it standing up. Eberhardt was right that it didn't enlighten me much. Nick Damiano had been struck on the head at least three times by a heavy blunt instrument and had died of a brain hemorrhage, probably within seconds of the first blow. The wounds were "consistent with" a length of three-quarter-inch steel pipe, but the weapon hadn't been positively identified because no trace of it had been found. As for Nick's background, nothing had been found there either. No items of personal history among his effects, no hint of relatives or even of his city of origin. They'd run a check on his fingerprints through the FBI computer, with negative results: he had never been arrested on a felony charge, never been in military service or applied for a civil service job, never been fingerprinted at all.

  When I put the report down Eberhardt said, "Anythi
ng?"

  "Doesn't look like it." I sat in my chair and looked out the window for a time, at heavy rainclouds massing above the Federal Building down the hill. "There's just nothing to go on in this thing, Eb-no real leads or suspects, no apparent motive."

  "So maybe it's random. A street-killing, drug-related, like the report speculates."

  "Maybe."

  "You don't think so?"

  "Our client doesn't think so."

  "You want to talk over the details?"

  "Sure. But let's do it over a couple of beers and some food."

  "I thought you were on a diet."

  "I am. Whenever Kerry's around. But she's working late tonight-new ad campaign she's writing. A couple of beers won't hurt me. And we'll have something non-fattening to eat."

  "Sure we will," Eberhardt said.

  We went to an Italian place out on Clement at 25th Avenue and had four beers apiece and plates of fettuccine Alfredo and half a loaf of garlic bread. But the talking we did got us nowhere. If one of the residents of the Medford had killed Nick Damiano, what was the damn motive? A broken-down old actor's petulant jealousy? A mindless dispute over garbage cans? Just what was the argument all about that George Weaver had overheard?

  Eberhardt and I split up early and I drove home to my flat on Pacific Heights. The place had a lonely feel; after spending most of the day in and around the Medford, I needed some laughter and bonhomie to cheer me up-I needed Kerry. I thought about calling her at Bates and Carpenter, her ad agency, but she didn't like to be disturbed while she was working. And she'd said she expected to be there most of the evening.

  I settled instead for cuddling up to my collection of pulp magazines-browsing here and there, finding something to read. On nights like this the pulps weren't much of a substitute for human companionship in general and Kerry in particular, but at least they kept my mind occupied. I found a 1943 issue of Dime Detective that looked interesting, took it into the bathtub, and lingered there reading until I got drowsy. Then I went to bed, went right to sleep for a change-

  — and woke up at 3:00 A.M. by the luminous dial of the nightstand clock, because the clouds had finally opened up and unleashed a wailing torrent of wind-blown rain; the sound of it on the roof and on the rainspouts outside the window was loud enough to wake up a deaf man. I lay there half groggy, listening to the storm and thinking about how the weather had gone all screwy lately and maybe it was time somebody started making plans for another ark.

  And then all of a sudden I was thinking about something else, and I wasn't groggy anymore. I sat up in bed, wide awake. And inside of five minutes, without much effort now that I had been primed, I knew what it was the police had overlooked and I was reasonably sure I knew who had murdered Nick Damiano.

  But I still didn't know why; I didn't even have an inkling of why. That was what kept me awake until dawn-that, and the unceasing racket of the storm.

  The Medlord's front door was still on its night security lock when I got there at a quarter to eight. Dan Cady let me in. I asked him a couple of questions about Nick's janitorial habits, and the answers he gave me pretty much confirmed my suspicions. To make absolutely sure, I went down to the basement and spent ten minutes poking around in its hot and noisy gloom.

  Now the hard part, the part I never liked. I took the elevator to the third floor and knocked on the door to Room 304. He was there; not more than five seconds passed before he called out, "Door's not locked." I opened it and stepped inside.

  He was sitting in a faded armchair near the window, staring out at the rain and the wet streets below. He turned his head briefly to look at me, then turned it back again to the window. The stubby little pipe was between his teeth and the overheated air smelled of his tobacco, a kind of dry, sweet scent, like withered roses.

  "More questions?" he said.

  "Not exactly, Mr. Weaver. You mind if I sit down?"

  "Bed's all there is."

  I sat on the bottom edge of the bed, a few feet away from him. The room was small, neat-not much furniture, not much of anything; old patterned wallpaper and a threadbare carpet, both of which had a patina of gray. Maybe it was my mood and the rain-dull day outside, but the entire room seemed gray, full of that aura of age and hopelessness.

  "Hot in here," I said. "Furnace is going full blast down in the basement."

  "I don't mind it hot."

  "Nick Damiano did a better job of regulating the heat, I understand. He'd turn it on for a few hours in the morning, leave it off most of the day, turn it back on in the evenings, and then shut it down again by midnight. The night he died, though, he didn't have time to shut it down."

  Weaver didn't say anything.

  "It's pretty noisy in the basement when that furnace is on," I said. "You can hardly hold a normal conversation with somebody standing right next to you. It'd be almost impossible to hear anything, even raised voices, from a distance. So you couldn't have heard an argument inside Nick's room, not from back by the storage lockers. And probably not even if you stood right next to the door, because the door's thick and made of metal."

  He still didn't stir, didn't speak.

  "You made up the argument because you ran into Charley Slattery, didn't you? He might have told the police he saw you come out of the elevator around the time Nick was killed, and that you seemed upset; so you had to protect yourself. Just like you protected yourself by unlocking the alley door after the murder."

  More silence.

  "You murdered Nick, all right. Beat him to death with your cane-hickory like that is as thick and hard as three-quarter-inch steel pipe. Chancy told me you had it under your arm when you got off the elevator. Why under your arm? Why weren't you walking with it like you usually do? Has to be that you didn't want your fingers around the handle, the part you must have clubbed Nick with, even if you did wipe off most of the blood and gore."

  He was looking at me now, without expression-just a dull steady waiting look.

  "How did you clean the cane once you were here in your room? Soap and water? Cleaning fluid of some kind? It doesn't matter, you know. There'll still be minute traces of blood on it that the police lab can match up to Nick's."

  He put an end to his silence then; he said in a clear, toneless voice, "All right. I done it," and that made it a little easier on both of us. The truth is always easier, no matter how painful it might be.

  I said, "Do you want to tell me about it, Mr. Weaver?"

  "Not much to tell," he said. "I went to the basement to get my other radio, like I told you before. He was fixing the door to one of the storage bins near mine. I looked at him up close, and I knew he was the one. I'd had a feeling he was ever since I moved in, but that night, up close like that, I knew it for sure."

  He paused to take the pipe out of his mouth and lay it carefully on the table next to his chair. Then he said, "I accused him point blank. He put his hands over his ears like a woman, like he couldn't stand to hear it, and ran to his room. I went after him. Got inside before he could shut the door. He started babbling, crazy things about skeletons, and I saw that skeleton of his grinning across the room, and I… I don't know, I don't remember that part too good. He pushed me, I think, and I hit him with my cane… I kept hitting him…"

  His voice trailed off and he sat there stiffly, with his big gnarled hands clenched in his lap.

  " Why, Mr. Weaver? You said he was the one, that you accused him-accused him of what?"

  He didn't seem to hear me. He said, "After I come to my senses, I couldn't breathe. Thought I was having a heart attack. God, it was hot in there… hot as hell. I opened the alley door to get some air and I guess I must have left it unlocked. I never did that on purpose. Only the story about the argument."

  "Why did you kill Nick Damiano?"

  No answer for a few seconds; I thought he still wasn't listening and I was about to ask the question again. But then he said, "My Bible's over on the desk. Look inside the front cover."

  The Bible was a w
ell-used Gideon and inside the front cover was a yellowed newspaper clipping. I opened the clipping. It was from the Chicago Sun-Times, dated June 23, 1957-a news story, with an

  accompanying photograph, that bore the headline: FLOWER SHOP BOMBER IDENTIFIED

  I took it back to the bed and sat again to read it. It said that the person responsible for a homemade bomb that had exploded in a crowded florist shop the day before, killing seven people, was a handyman named Nicholas Donato. One of the dead was Marjorie Donato, the bomber's estranged wife and an employee of the shop; another victim was the shop's owner, Arthur Cullen, with whom Mrs. Donato had apparently been having an affair. According to friends, Nicholas Donato had been despondent over the estrangement and the affair, had taken to drinking heavily, and had threatened "to do something drastic" if his wife didn't move back in with him. He had disappeared the morning of the explosion and had not been apprehended at the time the news story was printed. His evident intention had been to blow up only his wife and her lover; but Mrs. Donato had opened the package containing the bomb immediately after it was brought by messenger, in the presence of several customers, and the result had been mass slaughter.

  I studied the photograph of Nicholas Donato. It was a head-and-shoulders shot, of not very good quality, and I had to look at it closely for a time to see the likeness. But it was there: Nicholas Donato and Nick Damiano had been the same man.

  Weaver had been watching me read. When I looked up from the clipping he said, "They never caught him. Traced him to Indianapolis, but then he disappeared for good. All these years, twentyseven years, and I come across him here in San Francisco. Coincidence. Or maybe it was supposed to happen that way. The hand of the Lord guides us all, and we don't always understand the whys and wherefores."

  "Mr. Weaver, what did that bombing massacre have to do with you?"

  "One of the people he blew up was my youngest daughter. Twenty-two that year. Went to that flower shop to pick out an arrangement for her wedding. I saw her after it happened, I saw what his bomb did to her.."