Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

Whammer Jammer by Mark Arsenault

Mark Arsenault has been making his living as a reporter since 1989, currently with The Providence Journal. He has also found time to write some attention-getting novels — four to date: Spiked, Speak Ill of the Living, Gravewriter, and the just published Loot the Moon (St. Martin’s Press), the second in a series that began with Gravewriter. All of his novels have met with critical acclaim, and he’s a past nominee for a Shamus Award.

July 20, 1973

Boston Garden arena, Boston, Massachusetts

Skating five hard crossover steps through the turn, I closed in on The Pack, a rolling gangfight of baggy tights, knee socks, and flying elbows on roller skates. The crowd rose in a blur when I shot down the next straightaway. Greasy faces shining in the stifling heat; their screams so loud I could barely hear my wheels on the oval. The fans hated me because I was the villain. They loved me because I was a star.

I caught up to the slowest zipperhead skating at the back of the pack. He was a lumbering white kid trying to pull off a soul patch and an Afro. I jabbed a knuckle into his kidneys. He grunted and clutched his back. I slid around him and rammed a wholly unnecessary elbow to his breastbone. His eyes slammed shut and he went down like he’d forgotten we were on wheels. The crowd moaned ohhhh!

Any cheese-weasel can skate for the Roller Rumble, but the stars were obliged to offer something more. Be the fastest. Hit the hardest. Something. A big chest was something, but that was the gals.

Me? I was the dirtiest skater on the tour. The one they called The Rat.

The opposing team’s captain, Charlie Hyre, glanced back at the commotion on the track. His rusty muttonchops were matted with sweat. “Jammer!” he screamed to his squad.

That’s right, Scooby, here comes the jammer.

Each Roller Rumble team had four blockers, one pivot man, and one jammer circling the oval track. Only we jammers scored any points. We scored by passing skaters on the other team. Sounds easy, but try skating through a bloc of antisocial 200-pounders who will employ every variety of felonious assault to put you off your wheels.

The pack rolled into the next turn.

My team, the Eastern Atoms, wore alien-green jerseys and tights, which made us look like bad-tempered, unripe bananas. My blockers bashed shoulders with Hyre’s squad, trying to clear a lane for me to pass. My thighs were smoking, but this was the last jam of the period and I let it fly, weaving past the red shirts and piling up points.

The Garden had no air conditioning, and the inside felt like a rainforest. The arena was the color of dried mustard, the crusty stuff under the cap, the color a cigarette will stain your fingernails. Blue smoke floated in the lights. The fans beyond the rail were close enough to sweat on. But the upper deck was mostly empty. What’s with the empty seats? I thought. We sold out this dump in ‘71. Back then, when Roller Rumble was at its peak, we outdrew Elvis in this building.

The trip back to Boston was a homecoming for me. I glanced up toward my old season-ticket chair. That old cheap seat. Up so high the concessionaires sold oxygen. The chair probably still had the wad of Bazooka Joe I stuck there the night Cousy and Russell won their first Celtics banner, back in ‘57. Yup. Game seven, overtime. Had tears in my eyes. I was in that same seat three years later when candidate JFK delivered his last homily before the vote.

I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come...

Had tears in my eyes that night, too. But that was a different me. That was Robert B. Culligan, Jr., the engineering student. Can’t say I miss him, because I barely remember the dude.

“Screw yooooou, Robbie!” a fan sang to me through the din. “Robbie the Rat!”

Wham!

I hip-checked a red-shirted blocker into the rail and zoomed past him for the score. Just Charlie Hyre left ahead. He skated hard, to make me work for it. I linked hands with my pivot man; he reared back and slingshot me forward. I chased after Charlie. In the turn, he drifted high up the bank and I thought I had him, but that was what he wanted me to think. As I approached, he swerved sharply and stabbed an elbow in my ribs. I grabbed him. We clung together, rolling on, whacking each other. The crowd begged him to floor me.

“Y’hear that Bruce Lee died today?” Charlie grunted, as he yanked my jersey and tried to throw me off the track.

“Say what?”

“In Hong Kong.”

“Get the hell outta here.”

“Just up and died.”

The women’s squad lined the rails, waiting to skate the second period. I didn’t see Tammy, but I figured she was watching me loving it up with Charlie Hyre and I felt self-conscious.

Enough chitchat. I lifted my right skate and jammed it into Charlie’s ankle, like kick-starting a Harley. He cried out, staggered, and tumbled down ahead of me. I calmly hop-stepped over him.

The fans gasped ooh! as if they had each been poked with a stick.

A whistle ended the jam. I whipped off my helmet and coasted a victory lap, panting in the humidity, feeling sweat run down my neck and enjoying the boos that rained down from the crowd. I hoped to hell Charlie was kidding about Bruce Lee. Just up and died? Like Mr. Bojangles’ dog?

The women took the track for their warmups, and the crowd howled in appreciation. Each Roller Rumble team had a men’s squad and a women’s squad, which skated alternating periods. The fans adored the girls. Something about those young bunnies banging into each other...

That was when a tremendous scream slashed a dark, jagged gash through the arena.

From the tunnel ran “Lil’ Baby” Barbara Fleet, a backup jammer on our women’s squad. She was in street clothes, sporting a cast on her wrist from a pileup last week at a skate in Bangor. How could a woman five-foot-nothing make such a huge scream? She must have had four-foot lungs.

I met her eyes and I could tell this wasn’t about Bruce Lee.

“It’s Tammy!” she cried, and then fell to her knees. Adulthood seemed to melt off her in an instant. She was a lost child.

I raced down the tunnel on my skates, hopping electrical cables, shoving people out of my way. A small crowd had gathered at the door to Tammy’s dressing room. I forced my way through. The first thing I noticed was clothing strewn around: socks, tights, underwear, Tammy’s green Number 34 game jersey.

Then I saw her.

The toughest female skater in Roller Rumble — “Crashin’” Tammy Glassen — lay naked on a tan sofa. Her head and one arm dangled limp off the edge. A thin red wound, like a ribbon of blood, circled her throat. She was dead; nothing could have been more obvious. And even in death she drew my eyes all over her... long, powerful legs that could crack a man’s pelvis, bedroom eyes blazing from beneath a Cleopatra hairdo... I looked away and squashed an urge unfit for print.

Marty Papadakis, owner and manager of Roller Rumble, knelt at Tammy’s side, gingerly probing her wrist for a pulse. The smoldering Camel between his lips had an inch of ash at the tip.

“Mr. P?” somebody asked.

Papadakis pulled his hand away, passed a palm over his flaking bald scalp, and stared at the floor, without words for the first time anybody could remember.

In the hallway, Charlie Hyre was screaming. “Don’t you tell me not to go in there! That’s my wife’s dressing room!” He bulled his way in and gasped. The sight put him straight to the floor like an ice axe between the eyeballs.

That was when my brain unfroze from the shock, and I felt a tingle of dread for what was about to come. For the top female star of the Roller Rumble didn’t just up and die. Somebody had strangled her.

The first detective was a bony black guy with a neatly trimmed Fu Manchu. He was too tiny to beat up a horse jockey. His partner was a six-foot-six Irishman squeezed into a plaid blazer that was probably a 54 Long.

My interview was two hours after the body had been discovered, which had given the police plenty of time to pull papers on everybody. Their obvious contempt for me baked off them like heat waves rising from the Mass Pike on an August afternoon.

I asked them, “Which one of you is the brains and which is the muscle?”

Their brows wrinkled at what was an insult to the both of them. The little dude handled the introductions. “I’m Detective Sergeant Andrews. This is Detective Nangle.”

There were three chairs and a metal desk in this tiny office somewhere below the Garden’s parquet floor. The cops stood, so I stood. Nangle had to duck below a ventilation tube.

“I see you’re back home this weekend, eh, Mr. Culligan?” said Andrews. He picked a sheet of paper off the desk.

“Grew up in Dorchester,” I confessed. “Had season tickets to everything in this dump.”

“Then you moved to state housing at Concord in ‘sixty-six, as a guest of the taxpayers. Looks like you stayed three years.”

“Paroled a year early.”

“Grand larceny, auto,” Andrews confided to Nangle, as if Nangle didn’t already know. “Led police on a hundred-mile-per-hour chase over the Longfellow Bridge.”

“Never topped eighty,” I corrected. “The Chevy I boosted had a bad cylinder. People don’t take care of their vehicles.”

“Arrested for battery. Couple of drug busts. Vagrancy.” His eyebrow rose. “Assault on a police officer?”

I shrugged. “Spitting counts, apparently.”

“Whew,” Andrews said dramatically, as if my meager criminal record was so long he was exhausted from reading it. “So how’d you end up performing in the Roller Rumble?”

I reviewed the question in my mind for possible traps. Seeing none, I gave the truth. “Mr. Papadakis advertised for ‘skaters with attitude’ for his traveling exhibition. I got attitude, man. I figured I could fake the skating.”

“The victim was a big star in this show, yes?”

A clicking noise from inside the ventilation tube interrupted us. Nangle banged a fist on the tube and the noise scurried away. “Damn Boston Garden rats,” he said.

I answered, “Yeah, she was Crashin’ Tammy Glassen, Roller Rumble’s biggest draw. Bigger than me. Tammy flung the sharpest elbow on the team. It was her signature move. We called it the Whammer Jammer, because when she hit the other team’s jammer they went down hard. Tammy was our ace in the competition with Texas RollerGlam, that new all-bimbo league that’s been cutting into our action and taking our fans.”

Andrews grinned from the side of his mouth. “And she was sexy, was she?”

“Tammy? She could bust up a marriage with one sly look from sixty yards. Everybody loved her. Men, women — everybody.”

“Did you?”

“We worked together. Traveled together. That’s all.”

“Rumor is you were sleeping with her.”

I threw back my head and laughed. “That’s too stupid for words, man. She was married to Charlie Hyre. He’s captain of the Shockers.”

“We know who he is.” Andrews looked to Nangle and then flicked his thumb toward me. The big cop suddenly snatched my wrist, whipped my arm behind my back, and bent me facedown over the desk.

“Not cool!” I shouted. “Just maintain, man. Ow! Main... tain!”

He fished my wallet from my pocket, flipped it onto the desk, and then let me go. Andrews pulled a twenty from my billfold.

“I better get a receipt for that cash,” I warned.

“Crisp bill,” he said. “You see, Tammy Glassen cashed her check at the bank this morning. Eighty bucks. Got four brand-new twenties, in sequence. But we only found sixty dollars in the purse in her dressing room.” He opened a notebook. “I wrote down the serial numbers of the other bills... well, golly — this twenty from your wallet is part of the series.”

He let the accusation hang there.

Nangle pushed me down into a chair and stood over me. They were using all the cop props except the spotlight in my face.

“You guys hear Bruce Lee died?” I asked.

“This morning, yeah. Weird,” said Andrews.

“I loved that guy,” Nangle moaned. His big fists opened and closed.

We all frowned and shook our heads over the inexplicable loss. Such are the whims of the universe.

“All right, Scooby,” I said, “it’s like this...”

Tammy rolled to her feet and left me naked but for my tube socks on the swampy tan sofa in her dressing room.

“One more time for the road,” I pleaded. Drops of sweat ran down my chest. “Just gimme five minutes to recover.”

“You ain’t got five minutes, Robbie,” she scolded, in what was left of a Louisiana accent bastardized by cross-country living. “You’re skating first period. You wanna explain to my husband why you were tardy for the opening jam?”

I watched her unpack her uniform, socks, and skates and lay them neatly on a chair. “When I get out of the shower, you’ll be gone and I’ll have five minutes to myself,” she said.

“See you tomorrow?”

Her lips pressed tight. “See you when I see you,” she answered. “Vamoose.”

She shut the bathroom door behind her. I heard the shower running.

Reluctantly, I dressed and pocketed my wallet and watch. From my knees, I looked under the couch to be sure I hadn’t dropped anything for Charlie Hyre to find in his wife’s dressing room. Hmmm. Tammy had tucked her purse under the sofa. It was open and I could see the green.

The water was still running. The bathroom door was closed. I pulled out her bag and helped myself to twenty dollars, pretending in my mind that she was paying me for sex. So I had earned it, kinda.

That was when I noticed an airline ticket in her bag. First class to Austin. What the hell? Leaving Logan Airport Saturday afternoon... but we had another game to skate in Boston on Saturday night...

I put the purse back where I had found it and slipped out, wondering if I had seen the last of Crashin’ Tammy Glassen. As it turned out, I had.

The cops made a lot of notes during my story, but didn’t say much. “I left her alive,” I told them plainly, in case they were thicker than they looked. “Then I went back to the bus to dress for the game. I skated the first period, and then Lil’ Baby found Tammy dead.”

“Put it together for us, Robbie,” Andrews urged. “What happened?”

I looked at them like this was the most obvious thing in the world. “Dudes! She was bookin’ it to Austin and leaving Charlie Hyre. If I’m proof of anything, it’s that her marriage was sham-city. Charlie couldn’t stand to let her go. He sneaked into her room after I left and he killed her. Dig? You cats should talk to Charlie.”

“We’re going to talk to everybody,” Andrews promised. “Go straight to your hotel tonight. Don’t make it tough for us if we need to find you.”

“Right on, Scooby,” I said. Then, leaning closer, I asked in a low voice, “Uh... can we keep this thing with me and Tammy, you know, between us? People might get the wrong idea.”

The cops exchanged a glance that made my stomach roll. Andrews assured me, “I don’t think anybody’s going to get the wrong idea, Mr. Culligan.”

The “hotel” was a two-story drive-up out near Franklin Park. The two skate teams and the support staff headed there on the Roller Rumble tour bus, which was weighted down with about three tons of suspicion. Everybody knew that Tammy’s killer was probably on that bus. Nobody spoke. At least nobody spoke to me. We saw the new Hancock Tower, which had begun spitting its windows to the sidewalk on windy days. The locals had taken to calling it the Plywood Palace. At the moment, I was ready to forgive the building for a few imperfections.

The motel bartender who served me nine whiskeys understood my need to watch Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury on the television. I couldn’t believe they were both gone. Tammy and Bruce. Bruce and Tammy. Flush with the deep insight liquor provides after midnight, I wondered if their deaths were somehow connected. Hmmm... Jealousy boiled up from my gut. That kung fu S.O.B. better not have been sleeping with her...

I was not of the law and justice orientation, so I didn’t care what the detectives did in their investigation, so long as they kept my name out of it. I was the type who sighed and moved on whenever life swung the elbow of destiny in my eye. And that was what I had to do...

“What’s crackin’, Rat?” came a voice from behind.

I slowly spun on the barstool.

There stood Charlie Hyre, looking awful. Unshaven, ungroomed. Eyes red from tears and drink. Denim bell-bottoms two inches too short. White shoes, black socks. Mercy!

The silent pause that followed felt like that dreadful moment at a large wake, when you finally make it to the front of the line, and you instantly forget that profound thing you had been planning to say. My brain offered up something stupid. “I got two bucks in quarters,” I blurted. “Wanna play some Pong?”

He belted me in the mouth. I flew off the stool and crumpled to the floor.

“I’m looking forward to skating against you tomorrow,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Peace out, Rat!” Then he stomped away.

My face was numb. I tasted blood. Guess he’d found out about Tammy and me. That was when I realized those cops couldn’t keep a secret.

And that wasn’t even the worst part of my night.

The bartender gave me ice in a rag for my lip, and then shoved me outdoors before anyone else kicked my can in his establishment. I leaned on a wall and followed it toward my room. I recalled it was Room 11, on the first floor, with a lovely view of the parking lot. The ground looked smooth and level, but in my drunkenness I stumbled over invisible things in my path. Then the keyhole wouldn’t hold still and I had a hell of a time. I don’t remember how long I fiddled with the key, but I remember hearing roller skates across the asphalt.

I turned to see a silhouette glide through the darkness. Much too small to be Charlie Hyre, thank God. I shaded my eyes from the light above the door and squinted into the night.

Bang! A spurt of flame. The light fixture over my head shattered. Shards of glass fell on my skin. I mistakenly thought I was shot. I moaned and grabbed my heart and fell. Because that’s what shot people do. The sound of the skates rolled on and vanished into the city’s nocturnal growl.

The next morning was even worse. Those cops really couldn’t keep a secret.

From the front page of the Boston Herald-American:

Sex triangle? Yech. Was that supposed to imply Tammy, Charlie, and me at the same time?

I sat at the back of the bus on the ride back to the Garden. Nobody would sit within ten seats. People avoided me like a garden of radioactive poison ivy.

A would-be lynch mob had gathered outside the arena. They curled their lips, bared teeth at the bus, and screamed:

“We loved her, you MURDERER!”

“You WON’T get away with it, Robbie!”

“POISON the Rat!”

A beer bottle exploded against the bus just above my window. I sank in my seat.

The line for Roller Rumble tickets ran down Causeway Street and wrapped around the building.

The crowd inside the Garden was equally blood-parched. They jeered me mercilessly, threatened my life, roared with primitive pleasure whenever somebody put me down. My own blockers were complicit. They allowed Charlie Hyre’s thugs clear shots at me throughout the jam. Near the end of the period, Charlie personally forearmed me in the turn, and drove me up and over the rail. I flew into a trio of wooden folding chairs, which clattered and snapped shut around me like giant mousetraps.

Lying on my back, I stared up at the solution — what I should have figured out after the murder. Spectators had stuffed the Garden to the beams. The overflow stood in the aisles just to cheer for my injuries.

I still had some nettlesome questions about Bruce Lee.

But I knew who killed Tammy.

Marty Papadakis sat alone in a dimly lit conference room beneath the Garden. He chain-smoked Camels while a rattling 8mm film machine projected silent images of Crashin’ Tammy Glassen’s greatest hits.

I stood in the doorway for a few minutes and watched Tammy smash people on the screen. She would wait until an opponent had come up just behind her, and then unleash her Whammer Jammer elbow. Devastating.

I missed her. And I would have done anything to save her life... But that was in the past and ashes cannot be unsmoked.

I said, “She was something else, wasn’t she?”

Marty whirled around and dropped his cigarette in his lap. “Cripes, Robbie, you startled me. Jeepers creepers, I burned my crotch. This is new polyester, Mr. Culligan.”

I took a seat beside him. “Mind if I watch with you?”

“Yes, I do mind.”

“My blockers tried to get me killed today.”

“What did you expect? They were all in love with Tammy. Uh, the door is over there, by the way. Use it.”

“Just because I was sleeping with her doesn’t mean I killed her.”

He snorted with bitter laughter. “You don’t know anything. Tammy was sleeping with half the team. You’re the only jelly-brain who admitted it to the police. Hell, she was even shagging Lil’ Baby.”

I was dumbfounded. Tammy and Lil’ Baby Barbara Fleet? I thought back to the small-framed skater who had taken a shot at me. “That explains a lot,” I said, more to myself than to Marty.

“Now do you mind, Mr. Culligan?” he said with impatience. “I’m trying to say goodbye to Tammy in my own way.”

I changed the subject. “Quite a crowd in the Garden tonight.”

The corners of his lips turned up and he brightened. “Biggest gate of the year.”

“Tammy’s murder has been good for your business.”

The eyes narrowed. “What are you implying? You’re the chief suspect...”

Oh, that burned me...

I jumped up and swatted his ribcage with the palm of my hand. Just a slap. Not hard enough to injure him. But Marty gasped and twisted in pain.

I yanked up his shirt. The huge bruise on his ribcage was the color of a cold plum. It looked about a day old.

Grabbing his collar, I snarled in his face: “You sneaked up behind Tammy yesterday, and you choked her dead!”

“Not me,” he pleaded, weakly.

“The proof is on your ribs, Marty. At her last breath, Tammy hit you with the Whammer Jammer. Hurts, don’t it?” I pressed my fingers on the wound to make him squirm. “Tammy wasn’t jetting off to Austin just to get away from her husband. She was running away from you. She was leaving Roller Rumble to join Texas RollerGlam.”

He gaped at me in fear and wonder.

“Losing your most popular skater to a rival league would have finished you. So you stopped her. And I’m getting the rap.”

His eyes were huge and round. I cocked my fist to strike his ribs, and he surrendered. “Enough, Robbie!” he begged. “I couldn’t have known the police would blame you in the press. Nobody else was supposed to be involved. Just an unsolved crime to create an atmosphere of danger, a hint of the unspeakable to revive a fading business.” He looked me square in the eye and said, with no irony, “It wasn’t a murder, it was a sales promotion.”

I let him go and sat back down. Neither of us said anything for a minute. The movie ended and the loose film flapped around the projector.

“The police leaked the story because they don’t have enough evidence to charge me,” I said. “Though I’ll always be a murderer in the eyes of the public.”

“I’m sorry, Robbie.”

“Did you see that crowd, Marty? They bought up every ticket to cheer against Robbie the Killer Rat.” I sighed for innocence lost, and then moved on. “I’m gonna be bigger than Bruce Lee, and from now on, Scooby, you’ll be working for me.”

© 2009 by Mark Arsenault. Black Mask Magazine title, logo and mask device copyright 2009 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Licensed by written permission