Hush Money

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Hawk and I were sparring in the boxing room at the Harbor Health Club. There was no ring, just an open space to the left of the body bag and speed bag and the skitter bag that was so hard to nail that even Hawk missed it now and then. We had on the big fat pillow gloves that even if you got nailed wouldn’t hurt much, and we were floating like a couple of butterflies and pretending to sting like a couple of bees.

“So, Lamont is outing people,” Hawk said.

I put a left jab out and Hawk picked it off with his right glove.

“Un huh.”

I turned my head, and rolled back from a right cross and felt the big soft glove just brush past my cheekbone.

“And he got two hundred fifty thousand in his money management account at Hall, Peary.”

I tried a flurry of body punches which Hawk took mostly on his elbows, and then closed up on me and clinched.

“Un huh.”

We broke and moved in an easy circle around the ring looking for daylight.

“I not a thinker like you,” Hawk said, “being the pro-duct of a racist ed-u-cational system.”

“This is certainly true,” I said and threw a lightning fast left hook which Hawk seemed to catch quite easily on his hunched right shoulder. He countered with a whistling right uppercut which I managed to avoid.

“But if I a thinker,” Hawk said. “I be thinking that OUT plus money could equal blackmail.”

“That’s amazing,” I said as I circled him clockwise, bouncing on my toes to demonstrate that I wasn’t getting tired. “And you’re not even a licensed investigator.”

Hawk shuffled in suddenly and threw a short flurry of punches which I bobbed and weaved and rolled and ducked and mostly avoided. I countered with an overhead right which Hawk pulled back from. Hawk stepped back and leaned against the wall of the gym.

“You think we go fifteen and not get a winner?” Hawk said.

“Fifteen for real,” I said, “maybe we’d be trying harder.”

“Have to.”

We walked out of the boxing room and down to Henry Cimoli’s office.

“How long’d you go,” Henry said.

He was in his trainer’s costume, a very white tee shirt and white satin sweatpants. His small upper body looked like it might pop the weave in the tee shirt.

“Half hour,” I said.

“You need mouth to mouth?”

“Not from you,” Hawk said and put his hands out for Henry to unlace the gloves. When we were both glove free, Henry nodded at the small refrigerator next to his desk.

“Trick I learned when I was fighting,” he said. “Keep some good sports drinks handy so as to replenish the electrolytes.”

I opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of New Amsterdam Black and Tan.

“You can use my office, you want,” Henry said. “I got to go suck around the customers.”

“You too teeny to run a health club,” Hawk said. “The same people come here year after year, since the place stopped being a dump. Nobody lose weight. Nobody put on muscle. Everybody look just like they did when they signed up to get in shape.”

“One difference,” Henry said. “They are a little poorer, and I am a lot richer.”

Hawk grinned at him.

“Maybe you ain’t too teeny after all.”

Henry jumped up and kicked the palms of his outstretched hands with his toes, and landed easily and laughed and went out to the gym floor.

“Agile too,” Hawk said.

“Easy to be agile if you’re the size of a salt shaker.”

“Almost beat Willie Pep once,” Hawk said.

“I know.”

Hawk sat in Henry’s chair and took a pull at the beer. He swiveled the chair so he could look out Henry’s picture window at the harbor.

“You getting anywhere on Susan’s friend’s stalker.”

“I got a guy I like for it.”

“Time for me to go reason with him?” Hawk said.

“No. I’m not sure he’s the one.”

Hawk shrugged. He put his feet up on the windowsill and crossed his ankles and took another drink of beer.

“Thing I like about Henry,” Hawk said. “He keep the sports drinks cold.”

“That’s a good thing.”

We were quiet for a moment. One of the big harbor cruise boats eased past, all glass and sleek lines, on a luncheon cruise to nowhere. It loomed close to the window. We could see the people, mostly couples, seated at tables in the main cabin.

“You think Robinson connected to the Lamont kid?” Hawk said.

“I don’t know yet. I hope not. That thing shows every sign of being a mess.”

“See any connection with Abdullah?”

“Nothing you don’t know,” I said.

The cruise ship had moved out of sight. For a moment the only activity out the window was the wake of the cruise boat and the gulls that swooped ever hopeful behind it. I finished my beer and Hawk reached over without taking his feet down and got two more out of the refrigerator.

“What’s going on with Abdullah?” I said.

Hawk didn’t move. He continued to look out the window at the harbor. He raised the bottle and took another drink of beer.

“You’re completely pragmatic,” I said. “You don’t care what people call you. You don’t care if people are annoying. You don’t care about color. You don’t get mad, you don’t get sentimental. You don’t hold a grudge. You don’t get scared, or confused, or boisterous, or jealous. You don’t hate anyone. You don’t love anyone. You don’t mind violence. You don’t enjoy violence.”

“Kind of like Susan,” Hawk said.

“Okay,” I said. “You don’t love many. My point stands. You taking a run at Amir Abdullah because he called you a Tom is bullshit. You don’t care about insults any more than you care about fruit flies.”

Hawk drank the rest of the beer in his bottle and put the bottle on the desk. He dropped his feet off the windowsill, swiveled around, and got another two bottles out of the refrigerator. He put one on the desk in front of me, opened the other, and leaned back in Henry’s chair facing me. His face had no expression. His black eyes were bottomless. I waited. I was barely into my second beer.

“I got you into this,” Hawk said.

I nodded. One of the water taxis from Logan Airport plodded past. Few couples in this one. Mostly men, a scattering of women. Both genders dressed for business, carrying briefcases, paying no attention to each other, too busy to flirt, or too tired, or it might mess their hair.

“I was about fifteen,” Hawk said, “making a living as a mugger. Used to go to the Joe Louis gym to use the bathroom. Joe Louis didn’t have anything to do with it, of course, but half the black boxing clubs in the country were using his name. Got so I’d hang around in there, watch the fighters. Sometimes when there wasn’t much going on they’d let me hit the bag. I figured if I was going to make a living beating people up, I might as well practice. I got good at it. Make the body bag jump, make the speed bag dance. Had trouble in those days with that little jeeter bag, but even some of the fighters had trouble with that.”

“I still have troubles with that,” I said.

Hawk smiled.

“Naw, you don’t,” he said. “Neither one of us do. So one day Bobby Nevins comes in, sees me working on the bag, asks me have I got a manager? I say no. He says ‘You ever fight in the ring?’ I say no. So he says, ‘You want to try it?’ And since I been making a living beating people up I figure why not? So I say sure, and he puts me in with some tall skinny Puerto Rican guy probably don’t weigh more than a hundred fifty pounds. And I’m thinking how smart Bobby is to start me off easy, so I lace ‘em on and get in the ring and of course the guy cleans my clock.”

“Knowing how helps,” I said.

“It do. But Bobby sees something he likes and he takes me on, and when he finds out I’m not living anywhere special he takes me in, and I learn to fight and maybe along the way to use a fork when I’m eating. Stuff like that. Robinson was a little kid then, maybe twelve, and his mother kept him away from the fighters, so I see him, but I don’t know him much. So one day Bobby say to me, ‘I think you need to get a little schooling.’ And I say why, I gonna reason with people in the ring? And Bobby say, ‘You should take an English class and a math class.’ And pretty soon I’m in night school at the community college. And my English professor is a brother name of Dennis Crawford. Young guy maybe four, five years older than me. He talk like Walter Cronkite, and he wear horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets and English brogues and all around, he about the smartest brother I ever saw. I never saw a black man with an education. Bobby’s wife was a schoolteacher, but she didn’t spend no time with the fighters so I didn’t really know her either, and besides she was a woman. So we reading Othello and we reading Invisible Man and we discussing them and Professor Crawford, he smarter than the white boys and even the white girls in the class. Never saw nothing like it.”

Hawk tilted the beer bottle back and drank some more and held it up to the light and looked to see how much was left. I stayed quiet. Then he took another swallow and put the bottle down.

“‘Course I never say nothing in class. Those days I only know six words if you count mother fucker as two. But I listened. One day after class Professor Crawford asks me to come to his office.”

Hawk had turned so he was staring out at the now empty harbor where the ocean moved in its directionless way.

“When I get there he say he notice me in class and don’t think I’m your usual night school student and he ask what I do. And I tell him I’m a fighter and he says well tell me a little about that, so I do.”

I was as still as I was able to be and still breathe. The air in the room seemed to have gotten suddenly very dense. I wanted to drink some beer but I didn’t want to move. Hawk swung slowly around and let his feet rest on the floor.

“And while I’m telling him, he hit on me,” Hawk said with no discernible change in his voice.

“Shit,” I said.

“I got up and left. Never went back to his class again. Never told nobody about it.”

“Professor Crawford get caught up in the black power movement?”

“Yeah.”

“He change his name?”

“Yeah.”

“Amir Abdullah?”

“Yeah.”