Buzz-Saw Belter

Chapter Two Blood Feud

Max should have known that the syndicate would move in another direction. Max should have known that Stone Gowal didn’t know the meaning of the word loyalty.

I had coffee with Max Gleason on the afternoon of the day he heard what they were going to do to him. He had a beaten look.

He made me promise that I’d keep it off the record.

It was beautifully simple. Max stirred his cooling coffee and told me how he had turned down a cash offer for Stone’s contract. The next day he had received in the mail a photostat of a statement that was going to be sent to the Commission.

It was a notarized statement, signed by Stone Gowal, and it stated that during his entire relationship with Max Gleason, he had never been permitted to receive his full legal percentage of the purses. It further stated that he had received falsified expense accounts, and that it was only with great difficulty that he had prevented Gleason from “fixing” his fights, and from giving him “mysterious medicine” before some of his tougher bouts. Appended to the statement was a second one signed by a hanger-on who had sometimes been used in Gowal’s comer. It substantiated the statement by Gowal.

“Did you talk to Stone?” I asked.

“Yes. He did it for thirty-five thousand, cash. I’ve never handled a champion and this was my chance. If I don’t accept their price, the frame goes on and I get tossed out of the business. Gowal will get suspended temporarily, but they’ll get him reinstated under their management.”

“Can’t you fight?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Fight who? And for what? I’ve made a little. I’ve still got my health. They’ll give me twenty-five thousand. A gift.” His lip curled.

At that moment Billy Lee came in and slid into the booth beside Max. She was on vacation. “Hello; Mike,” she said to me. She put her fingers on her father’s arm. “I thought I’d find you here. Did you tell Mike?”

It was good to look at her. When I was a little kid I had a picture on my bedroom wall that I had cut out of a magazine. It showed one of those Viking ships with a blonde woman standing on the bows. Billy Lee sort of reminded me of that girl. Not as beefy, of course. But just as straight and clean and — shining.

Max said that he had told me. Her eyes flashed as she looked at me. “Did you ever hear of a more stinking trick, Mike? That Gowal is a prize louse. We’ve always known he was a stinker, but we didn’t know he was that bad.”

“When do you sign him over?” I asked.

Max glanced at his watch. “In about an hour.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m going out to the West and take another look at a boy I saw a month ago.”

“Heavy?”

“Right.”

“Bring him along to lick Gowal?”

Max doubled his fist. “I’d like to. But by the time I bring him along, Gowal will be out of the fight game.”

“Maybe I could help in that department,” Billy Lee said in a faraway voice.

I didn’t see what she could mean. Neither did Max.

Under new management, Stone Gowal did just as good. The things that Max had taught him had become such a part of his fighting pattern that he couldn’t lose them now that Max wasn’t handling him any more.

The syndicate lips, curled around cigar butts, wore wide, wet smiles. Sixty thousand is cheap for a champion.

Even so, Gowal nearly lost the big one. He stepped out when the champion was too fresh. He got arm weary before he started to land solidly, and some of the sting was gone. The champion began to cut him up. But in the closing moments of the tenth round Stone snapped back and floored the champion. The champion tried to keep out of trouble in the eleventh, but his legs were gone. Stone got him into a corner and slowly battered him to the floor. He had to do it a second time, and a third time. The third time the champion stayed down, though at the ten count he was trying to get his knees under him.

Syndicate publicity went to work on the new champion. They had pictures of him patting dogs and refereeing settlement-house bouts, and smiling at the camera. But over that wide-lipped smile, those gray eyes were as cold as the eternal tomb.

As champion he fought often, which made him popular with the folks. He did very little training. But the quality of the competition was pretty sketchy. Stone had a little gray tire around his middle and a spray of pimples on his gray back. But in the ring he stalked and killed.

Max dropped out of sight. I knew that Billy Lee had probably finished school. I wondered about the two of them. And one day they came back to town, and Max brought his new heavy with him. I met the kid and liked him at once. He had a nice grin and a good way of handling his big body. Max got him booked into the garden and I saw the bout.

Len Kennedy, his name was. For the first two rounds the excitement grew in me. He moved his hundred and ninety-something pounds with all the blazing speed of a lightweight. The opposition was Tubbs Warner, the wheelhorse who is always in there trying.

Len Kennedy was built just right. Lots of shoulders, a flat belly and dancer’s legs. And Max had brought him a long way. He could do an acceptable foot-feint, good enough to fool old Tubs. He could land his punches just where he wanted to, either coming in or going away. On defense he was something for the records. Once he let Tubs corner him and open up. Tubs swung three hard lefts, alternating with three hard rights. Two blows were caught on the arm, one on the shoulder, one in the glove, and two were clean misses.

Len slid out fast and nailed Tubs lightly behind the ear before he could turn himself around.

I noticed then that Len Kennedy had virtually no marks on him except for a straight nose which had a tiny slant toward left field.

But in the third round, I settled back in my seat in disgust. He had everything in the wide world but a punch. The punches looked good, looked as if they had the old zing, but Tubs shook them off the way a honey-bear shakes off bees. When Gowal had licked Tubs he had dropped him on his face with his arms spread wide and a beatific smile on his lips.

Len got the decision, of course, but it wasn’t a popular bout. For a fighter to have that indefinable something called “color” he has to start with a punch and a killer instinct. Those two things seem to go together.

I ran into Max a week later and he said, “What do you think, Mike?”

“You want the truth?”

“Would I ask if I didn’t?”

“Max, you got a nice clean boy. A wonderful boy. He ought to teach boxing in some nice clean Ivy League college. He could maybe smash a fly on the wall flat — if he hit it square.”

Max just grinned and said, “Come along. Want to show you something.”

Len was working out at Dannegan’s. But it wasn’t the usual workout. I saw that at once. Len grinned at me. The sweat was running down his face. Max had him turn his back to us and pull the sweat shirt up around his neck. It was a smoothly muscled back.

“Move your arm, kid, your right. A slow motion punch.”

Max pointed to a little oval pad of muscle just below the right shoulder blade. “Mike, you watch that muscle right there.”

I did. It was smooth at first and then as Len’s arm got out further it bunched up.

“I don’t know the right names of the muscles, Mike. All I know is that on every slugger I ever see, that little fella is oversize. It gives the snap to the punch.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Sure you do. On Len here, the muscle is small. Okay, we find the workout to make it big.”

Len pulled down his shirt and began to work again on the heavy bag. His lips were moving. He was arm weary.

“How many?” Max asked.

“Over half,” Len grunted.

As we walked away Max said, “He can throw fifty a minute. Three thousand an hour. I got him on a four-hour workout. Six thousand with each arm.”

“Won’t he get muscle-bound?” I asked.

“Not with the rest of the workout.”

“What’s that?”

Max grinned. “I make him swim two hours a day. You ever see a muscle-bound swimmer?”

That is why the record book looks so odd when it gives the statistics on Len Kennedy. All those decisions in a row and then the beginning of the string of knockouts.

I saw the third one in the string. Everything was exactly the same as in the Tubs Warner bout. The punches looked just the same. Tubs had shaken them off. The kid that Len fought tried to shake them off, too. He shook off a few and then he wilted at the knees. When he got back up he was an angular, dancing scarecrow, blundering in windmill fashion around the ring. When Len got close enough he chilled him with a short, right, overhand chop. He had his back to me. I saw the little pad of muscle stiffen. Only it wasn’t so little.

Stone Gowal had been on top of the heap for two years. I was in a Village club one night and the master of ceremonies had one of the spots switched to a table on the other side of the floor. Stone gave the folks his party smile. A little table for two, he had.

Seeing the gal at the table with him almost made me bite a piece out of the rim of my glass. When the show was over and the house lights went back on, I made certain.

Yes, it was Billy Lee Gleason. Her shoulders were bare and smooth and they were the shade of ice tea with milk.

Ignoring the glare of the gal I was with, I excused myself and went on over to their table. Stone’s shoulders were so wide they were grotesque.

“Hi ya, Mike,” Gowal said in his husky fighter’s voice.

I nodded to him, spun a chair around from a nearby table with a “reserved” sign, sat down and said, “Imagine seeing you here, Billy Lee.”

To tell the truth, she didn’t look too out of place. With a touch of aqua eye shadow, a bit too much goo on the ripe lips and an extreme hair-do, she looked like any other club chick.

“How have you been, Mike?” she asked, using the tone of voice that said she didn’t care how I’d been. Even thick-head Gowal got the chill and beamed with delight.

“Max know who you’re out with?” I asked.

“What’s that to you?” Stone rasped, his eyes narrowing. A big gray fist on the table top slowly tightened.

Billy Lee slipped her arm through his, ran her finger tips back and forth, up and down his hand. She leaned closer to him and said, “Don’t get steamed, honey-bun. He’s a newsboy. Remember?”

“I don’t care who the hell he is,” Stone Gowal said without taking his eyes off me. “Crack wise and I break his mouth.”

Billy Lee looked at me and lifted her chin. “I don’t remember asking you to sit down here, Mike.”

“Nice to have seen you folks,” I said. I went back to my gal. But my heart wasn’t in the evening. I kept remembering Billy Lee at ten. Without reaching too far for the comparison, seeing her with Gowal was like seeing an Easter lily floating down an open sewer. I wondered how Max was taking it. And at the same time I thought I could see why Billy Lee was chumming up to Gowal. There was something in every woman that responds to brutality, just as there is a streak of brutality in even the mildest of men. I thought of the two of them together and nearly gagged on a perfectly good Scotch and water.

The next day I looked up Max. He had a bleak look. I didn’t have to open my mouth. He saw the look on my face and turned his back. “A lot of people been telling me,” he said. “She was twenty-one last Tuesday. What can I do?”

Len Kennedy was within earshot, working on the heavy bag. With his next punch he nearly busted the seams and let out the sand.

It was just another sordid story. The big city has a lot of stories like that. In my game you’re supposed to get used to it. Somehow, I’ve never been able to grow a thick enough shell. Something always knifes through and gets hold of me deep down inside.

Max Gleason should have had to wait another three or four years before getting Len up into the big time. But a month later Len was booked to fight Gowal. The whole distance for the title. I was on vacation when the deal was made and when I got back I started to dig out the angles. It was something that shouldn’t have happened — but it did. The syndicate doesn’t play that way. But they did.

I picked up a rumor here and a word there and a hint the other place. All of them steered me right to Billy Lee. We sat across from each other in a drug store and she drank a coke while I tried to get the facts from her.

Finally I understood. I stared at her and said, “You fool! You wonderful damn fool!”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“But how did you know it was going to work? How did you know that if you broke a bunch of dates with Stone Gowal and went out with Len that Stone would force his managers to make a bout with Len?”

She shrugged. “I told Gowal that I thought Len could lick him. And that this little girl was going to go out with the best man, bar none. It was as simple as that.”

“You could have gotten in a terrible mess, Billy Lee.”

Her level eyes were on mine. “Mike, ever since Stone crossed dad, I’ve been planning this. It had to work. And I was able to handle Stone.” Her eyes looked haunted. “But just harely. Now I keep my door looked nights and a gun under my pillow. I had him running around in mad little circles. It isn’t love with him. It’s just wanting to destroy. And now his pride is hurt. It’s up to Len, now. Len has to win.”

I shook my head. “Yeah, he certainly has to win this one — or else!”