The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Thomas H. Cook The Fix

From Murder on the Ropes

It could have happened anytime, on any of my daily commutes on the Crosstown 42. Every day I took it at eight in the morning, rode it over to my office on Forty-second and Lex, then back again in the evening, when I’d get off at Port Authority and walk one block uptown to my place on Forty-third.

It could have happened anytime, but it was a cold January evening, a deep winter darkness already shrouding the city at six P.M. Worse still, a heavy snow was coming down, blanketing the streets and snarling crosstown traffic, particularly on Forty-second Street, where the Jersey commuters raced for a spot in the Lincoln Tunnel, clotting the grid’s blue veins as they rushed for the river like rabbits from burning woods.

I should tell you my name, because when I finish with the story, you’ll want to know it, want to check it out, see if I’m really who I say I am, really heard what I say I did that night on the Crosstown 42.

Well, it’s Jack. Jack Burke. I work as a photographer for Cosmic Advertising, my camera usually focused on a bottle of perfume or a plate of spaghetti. But in the old days, I was a street photographer for the News, shooting mostly fires and water main breaks, the sort of pictures that end up on page 8. I had a front page in ’74, though, a woman clinging with one hand to a fire escape in Harlem, her baby dangling from the other hand like a sack of potatoes. I snapped the button just as she let go, caught them both in the first instant of their fall. That picture had had a heart, and sometimes, as I sat at my desk trying to decide which picture would best tempt a kid to buy a soda, I yearned to feel that heart again, to do or hear or see something that would work like electric paddles to shock me back to my old life.

Back in those days, working the streets, I’d known the Apple down to the core, the juke joints and after-hours dives. I was the guy you’d see at the end of the bar, the one in a rumpled suit, with a gray hat on the stool beside him. It was my seed time, and I’d loved every minute of it. For almost five years not a night had gone by when I hadn’t fallen in love with it all over again, the night and the city, the Bleeker Street jazz clubs at three A.M. when the smoke is thick and the riffs look easy, and the tab grows like a rose beside your glass.

Then Jack Burke married an NYU coed named Rikki whose thick lips and perfect ass had worked like a Mickey Finn on his brain. There were lots of flowers and a twelve-piece band. After that the blushing bride seemed to have another kid about every four days. Jack took an agency job to pay for private schools, and that was the end of rosy tabs. Then Jack’s wife hitched a ride on some other guy’s star and left him with a bill that gave Bloomingdale’s a boner. The place on Eighty-fifth went back to the helpful folks at Emigrant Savings, and Jack found a crib on West Forty-third. Thus the short version of how I ended up riding the Crosstown 42 on that snowy January night in the Year of Our Lord 2000.

The deepest blues, they say, are the ones you don’t feel, the ones that numb you, so that your old best self simply fades away, and you are left staring out the window, trying to remember the last time you leaped with joy, laughed until you cried, stood in the rain and just let it pour down. Maybe I’d reached that point when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night. And yet, I wasn’t so dead that the sight of him didn’t spark something, didn’t remind me of the old days, and of how much I missed them.

And the part I missed the most was the fights.

I’ll tell you why. Because all the old saws about boxing are true. There’s no room for ambiguity in the ring. You know who the winners and the losers are. There, in that little square, under the big light, two guys put it all on the line, face each other without lawyers or tax attorneys. They stare at each other without speaking. They are stripped even of words. Boxers don’t call each other names. They don’t wave their arms and posture. They don’t yell, Hey, fuck you, you fucking bastard, you want a piece of me, huh, well, come and get it, you fucking douche bag... while they’re walking backward, glancing around, praying for a cop. Boxers don’t file suit or turn you in to the IRS. They don’t subscribe to dirty magazines in your name and have them mailed to your house. They don’t plant rumors about drugs or how maybe you’re a queer. Boxers don’t come at you from behind some piece of paper a guy you never saw before hands you as you step out your front door. Boxers don’t drop letters in the suggestion box or complain to your boss that you don’t have what it takes anymore. Boxers don’t approach at a slant. Boxers stride to the center of the ring, raise their hands, and fight. That was what I’d always loved about them, that they were nothing like the rest of us.

Even so, I hadn’t seen a match in the Garden or anywhere else for more than twenty years when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night, and the whole feel of the ring, the noise and the smoke, had by then drifted into a place within me I didn’t visit anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a boxing story in the paper, or so much as glanced at Ring magazine. As a matter of fact, that very night I’d plucked a Newsweek from the rack instead, then tramped onto the bus, planning to pick up a little moo shoo pork when I got off, then trudge home to read about this East Hampton obstetrician who’d given some Jamaican bedpan jockey five large to shoot his wife.

Then, out of the blue, I saw him.

He was crouched in the back corner of the bus, his face turned toward the glass, peering out at the street, though he didn’t seem to be watching anything in particular. His eyes had that look you’ve all seen. Nothing going in, precious little coming out. A dead, dull stare.

His clothes were so shabby that if I hadn’t noticed the profile, the gnarled ear and flattened nose, I might have mistaken him for a pile of dirty laundry. Everything was torn, ragged, the scarf around his neck riddled with holes, bare fingers nosing through dark blue gloves. It was the kind of shabbiness that carries its own odor, and which urban pioneers inevitably associate with madness and loose bowels. Which, on this bus packed to the gills, explained the empty seat beside him.

I might have kept my distance, might have stared at him a while, remembering my old days by remembering his, then discreetly stepped off the bus at my appointed stop, put the whole business out of my mind until I returned to work the next morning, met Max Groom in the men’s room and said, Hey, Max, guess who was on the Crosstown 42 last night? Who? Vinnie Teague, that’s who, Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock. Mother of God, he’s still alive? Well, in a manner of speaking.

And that might have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t.

You know why? Because, in a manner of speaking, I was also still alive. And what do the living owe each other, tell me this, if not to hear each other’s stories?

So I muscled through the crowd, elbowing my way toward the rear of the bus while Irish Vinnie continued to stare out into the fruitless night, his face even more motionless when looked upon close up, his eyes as still as billiard balls in an empty parlor.

The good news? No smell. Which left the question, Is he nuts?

Language is a sure test for sanity, so I said, “Hey there.”

Nothing.

“Hey.” This time with a small tap of my finger on his ragged shoulder.

Still nothing, so I upped the ante. “Vinnie?”

A small light came on in the dull, dead eyes.

“Vinnie Teague?”

Something flickered, but distantly, cheerlessly, like a candle in an orphanage window.

“It’s you, right? Vinnie Teague?”

The pile of laundry rustled, and the dull, dead eyes drifted over to me.

Silence, but a faint nod.

“I’m Jack Burke. You wouldn’t know me, but years ago, I saw you at the Garden.”

The truth was I’d seen Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, quite a few times at the Garden. I’d seen him first as a light heavyweight, then later, after he’d bulked up just enough to tip the scales as a heavyweight contender.

He’d had the pug face common to boxers who’d come up through the old neighborhood, first learned that they could fight not in gyms or after-school programs, but in barrooms and on factory floors, the blood of their first opponents soaked up by sawdust or metal shavings in places where no one got saved by the bell.

It was Spiro Melinas who’d first spotted Vinnie. Spiro had been an old man even then, bent in frame and squirrelly upstairs, a guy who dipped the tip of his cigar in tomato juice, which, he said, made smoking more healthy. Spiro had been a low-watt fight manager who booked tumbledown arenas along the Jersey Shore, or among the rusting industrial towns of Connecticut and Massachusetts. He’d lurked among the fishing boats that rocked in the oily marinas of Fall River and New Bedford, and had even been spotted as far north as coastal Maine, checking out the fish gutters who manned the canneries there, looking for speed and muscle among the flashing knives.

But Spiro hadn’t found Vinnie Teague in any of the places that he’d looked for potential boxers during the preceding five years. Not in Maine or Connecticut or New Jersey. Not in a barroom or a shoe factory or a freezing cold New England fishery. No, Vinnie had been right under Spiro’s nose the whole time, a shadowy denizen of darkest Brooklyn who, at the moment of discovery, had just tossed a guy out the swinging doors of a women’s shelter on Flatbush. The guy had gotten up, rushed Vinnie, then found himself staggering backward under a blinding hail of lefts and rights, his head popping back with each one, face turning to pulp one lightning fast blow at a time, though it had been clear to Spiro that during all that terrible rain of blows, Vinnie Teague had been holding back. “Jesus Christ, if Vinnie hadn’t been pulling his punches,” he later told Salmon Weiss, “he’d have killed the poor bastard with two rights and a left.” A shake of the head, Spiro’s eyes fixed in dark wonderment. “I’m telling you, Salmon, just slapping him around, you might say Vinnie was, and the other guy looked like he’d done twelve rounds with a metal fan.”

Needless to say, it was love at first sight.

And so for the next two years Spiro mothered Vinnie as if he were a baby chick. He paid the rent and bought the groceries so Vinnie could quit his prestigious job as a bouncer at the women’s shelter. He paid for Vinnie’s training, Vinnie’s clothes, Vinnie’s birthday cake from Carvel, an occasion at which I was present, my first view of Irish Vinnie Teague. He was chewing a slab of ice cream cake while Spiro looked on, beaming. Snap. Flash. Page 8 over the lead line, UP-AND-COMER BREAKS TRAINING ON HIS 24TH.

He’d continued upward for the next four years, muscling his way higher and higher in the rankings until, at just the moment that he came in striking distance of the title, Irish Vinnie had thrown a fight.

There are fixes and there are fixes, but Irish Vinnie’s fix was the most famous of them all.

Why?

Because it was the most transparent. Jake La Motta was Laurence Olivier compared to Vinnie. Jake was at the top of the Actors Studio, a recruiting poster for the Strasburg Method, the most brilliant student Stella Adler ever had... compared to Vinnie. Jake La Motta took a dive, but Irish Vinnie took a swan dive, a dive so obvious, so awkward and beyond credulity, that for the first and only time in the history of the dive, the fans themselves started swinging, not just booing and weaving their fists in the air, not just throwing chairs into the ring, but actually surging forvard like a mob to get Vinnie Teague and tear his lying heart out.

Thirty-seven people went to Saint Vincent’s that night, six of them cops who, against all odds, managed to hustle Vinnie out of the ring (from which he’d leaped up with surprising agility) and down into the concrete bowels of the Garden where he sat, secreted in a broom closet, for more than an hour while all hell broke loose upstairs. Final tab, as reported by the Daily News, eighty-six thousand dollars in repairs. And, of course, there were lawsuits for everything under the sun so that by the end of the affair, Vinnie’s dive, regardless of what he’d been paid for it, had turned out to be the most costly in boxing history.

It was the end of Vinnie’s career, of course, the last time he would ever fight anywhere for a purse. Nothing needed to be proven. The Daily News dubbed him the “Shameful Shamrock” and there were no more offers from promoters. Spiro cut him loose and without further ado Vinnie sank into the dark waters, falling as hard and as low as he had on that fateful night when Douggie Burns, by then little more than a bleeding slab of beef, managed to lift his paw and tap Vinnie on the cheek, in response to which the “Edwin Booth of Boxers,” another Daily News sobriquet, hit the mat like a safe dropped from the Garden ceiling. After that, no more crowds ever cheered for Vinnie Teague, nor so much as wondered where he might have gone.

But now, suddenly, he was before me once again, Irish Vinnie, the Shameful Shamrock, huddled at the back of the Crosstown 42, a breathing pile of rags.

“Vinnie Teague. Am I right? You’re Vinnie Teague?”

Nothing from his mouth, but recognition in his eyes, a sense, nothing more, that he was not denying it.

“I was at your twenty-fourth birthday party,” I told him, as if that were the moment in his life I most remembered, rather than his infamous collapse. “There was a picture in the News. You with a piece of Carvel. I took that picture.”

A nod.

“Whatever happened to Spiro Melinas?”

He kept his eyes on the street beyond the window, the traffic still impossibly stalled, angry motorists leaning on their horns. For a time he remained silent, then a small, whispery voice emerged from the ancient, battered face. “Dead.”

“Oh yeah? Sorry to hear it.”

A blast of wind hit the side of the bus, slamming a wave of snow against the window, and at the sound of it Irish Vinnie hunched a bit, drawing his shoulders in like a fighter... still like a fighter.

“And you, Vinnie. How you been?”

Vinnie shrugged as if to say that he was doing as well as could be expected of a ragged, washed-up fighter who’d taken the world’s most famous dive.

The bus inched forward, but only enough to set the strap-hangers weaving slightly, then stopped dead again.

“You were good, you know,” I said quietly. “You were really good, Vinnie. That time with Chico Perez. What was that? Three rounds? Hell, there was nothing left of him.”

Vinnie nodded. “Nothing left,” he repeated.

“And Harry Sermak. Two rounds, right?”

A nod.

The fact is, Irish Vinnie had never lost a single fight before Douggie Burns stroked his chin in the final round on that historic night at the Garden. But more than that, he had won decisively, almost always in a knockout, almost always before the tenth round, and usually with a single, devastating blow that reminded people of Marciano except that Vinnie’s had seemed to deliver an even more deadly killer punch. Like Brando, the better actor, once said, he “coulda been a contendah.”

In fact he had been a contender, a very serious contender, which had always made his downfall even more mysterious to me. What could it have been worth? How much must Vinnie have been offered to take such a devastating dive? It was a riddle that only deepened the longer I pondered his current destitution. Whatever deal Spiro Melinas had made for Vinnie, whatever cash may have ended up in some obscure bank account, it hadn’t lasted very long. Which brought me finally to the issue at hand.

“Too bad about...” I hesitated just long enough to wonder about my safety, then stepped into the ring and touched my gloves to Vinnie’s. “About... that last fight.”

“Yeah,” Vinnie said, then turned back toward the window as if it were the safe corner now, his head lolling back slightly as the bus staggered forward, wheezed, then ground to a halt again.

“The thing is, I never could figure it out,” I added.

Which was a damn lie since you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to come up with the elements that make up a fix. It’s money or fear on the fighter’s side, just money on the fixer’s.

So it was a feint, my remark about not being able to figure out what happened when Douggie Burns’s glove kissed Vinnie’s cheek, and the Shameful Shamrock dropped to the mat like a dead horse, just a tactic I’d learned in business, that if you want to win the confidence of the incompetent, pretend to admire their competence. In Vinnie’s case, it was a doubt I offered him, the idea that alone in the universe I was the one poor sap who wasn’t quite sure why he’d taken the world’s most famous dive.

But in this case it didn’t work. Vinnie remained motionless, his eyes still trained on the window, following nothing of what went on beyond the glass, but clearly disinclined to have me take up any more of his precious time.

Which only revved the engine in me. “So, anybody else ever told you that?” I asked. “Having a doubt, I mean.”

Vinnie’s right shoulder lifted slightly, then fell again. Beyond that, nothing.

“The thing I could never figure is, what would have been worth it, you know? To you, I mean. Even, say, a hundred grand. Even that would have been chump change compared to where you were headed.”

Vinnie shifted slightly, and the fingers of his right hand curled into a fist, a movement I registered with appropriate trepidation.

“And to lose that fight,” I said. “Against Douggie Burns. He was over the hill already. Beaten to a pulp in that battle with Chester Link. To lose a fight with a real contender, that’s one thing. But losing one to a beat-up old palooka like—”

Vinnie suddenly whirled around, his eyes flaring. “He was a stand-up guy, Douggie Burns.”

“A stand-up guy?” I asked. “You knew Douggie?”

“I knew he was a stand-up guy.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Meaning what?”

“That he was an honest guy,” Vinnie said. “A stand-up guy, like I said.”

“Sure, okay,” I said. “But, excuse me, so what? He was a ghost. What, thirty-three, four? A dinosaur.” I released a short laugh. “That last fight of his, for example. With Chester Link. Jesus, the whipping he took.”

Something in Irish Vinnie’s face drew taut. “Bad thing,” he muttered.

“Slaughter of the Innocents, that’s what it was,” I said. “After the first round, I figured Burns would be on the mat within a minute of the second. You see it?”

Vinnie nodded.

“Then Douggie comes back and takes a trimming just as bad in the second,” I went on, still working to engage Irish Vinnie, or maybe just relive the sweetness of my own vanished youth, the days when I’d huddled at the ringside press table, chain-smoking Camels, with the bill of my hat turned up and a press card winking out of the band, a guy right out of Front Page, though even now it seemed amazingly real to me, my newspaperman act far closer to my true self than any role I’d played since then.

“Then the bell rings on Round Three and Chester windmills Douggie all over again. Jesus, he was punch-drunk by the time the bell rang at the end of it.” I grinned. “Headed for the wrong corner, remember? Ref had to grab him by the shoulders and turn the poor bleary bastard around.”

“A stand-up guy,” Vinnie repeated determinedly, though now only to himself.

“I was amazed the ref didn’t stop it,” I added. “People lost a bundle that night. Everybody was betting Douggie Burns wouldn’t finish the fight. I had a sawbuck said he wouldn’t see five.”

Vinnie’s eyes cut over to me. “Lotsa people lost money,” he muttered. “Big people.”

Big people, I thought, remembering that the biggest of them had been standing ringside that night. None other than Salmon Weiss, the guy who managed Chester Link. Weiss was the sort of fight promoter who wore a cashmere overcoat and a white silk scarf, always had a black Caddie idling outside the arena with a leggy blonde in the back seat. He had a nose that had been more dream than reality before an East Side surgeon took up the knife, and when he spoke, it was always at you.

Get the picture? Anyway, that was Salmon Weiss, and everybody in or around the fight game knew exactly who he was. His private betting habits were another story, however, and I was surprised that a guy like Irish Vinnie, a pug in no way connected to Weiss, had a clue as to where the aforementioned Salmon put his money.

“You weren’t one of Weiss’s boys, were you?” I asked, though I knew full well that Vinnie had always been managed by Old Man Melinas.

Vinnie shook his head.

“Spiro Melinas was your manager.”

Vinnie nodded.

So what gives? I wondered, but figured it was none of my business, and so went on to other matters.

“Anyway,” I said. “Chester tried his best to clean Douggie’s clock, but the bastard went all the way through the tenth.” I laughed again.

The bus groaned, shuddered in a blast of wind, then dragged forward again.

“Well, all I remember is what a shellacking Douggie took.”

Vinnie chewed his lower lip. “ ’Cause he wouldn’t go down.”

“True enough. He did the count. All the way to the last bell.”

Vinnie seemed almost to be ringside again at that long-ago match, watching as Douggie Burns, whipped and bloody, barely able to raise his head, took punch after punch, staggering backward, fully exposed, barely conscious, so that it seemed to be a statue Chester Link was battering with all his power, his gloves thudding against stomach, shoulder, face, all of it Douggie Burns, but Douggie Burns insensate, perceiving nothing, feeling nothing, Douggie Burns in stone.

“Stayed on his feet,” Vinnie said now. “All the way.”

“Yes, he did,” I said, noting the strange admiration Vinnie still had for Douggie, though it seemed little more than one fighter’s regard for another’s capacity to take inhuman punishment. “But you have to say there wasn’t much left of him after that fight,” I added.

“No, not much.”

“Which makes me wonder why you fought him at all,” I said, returning to my real interest in the matter of Irish Vinnie Teague. “I mean, that was no real match. You and Douggie. After that beating he took from Chester Link, Douggie couldn’t have whipped a Girl Scout.”

“Nothing left of Douggie,” Vinnie agreed.

“But you were in your prime,” I told him. “No real match, like I said. And that... you know... to lose to him... that was nuts, whoever set that up.”

Vinnie said nothing, but I could see his mind working.

“Spiro. What was his idea in that? Setting up a bout between you and Douggie Burns? It never made any sense to me. Nothing to be gained from it on either side. You had nothing to gain from beating Douggie... and what did Douggie have to gain from beating you if he couldn’t do it without it being a... I mean, if it wasn’t... real.”

Vinnie shook his head. “Weiss set it up,” he said. “Not Mr. Melinas.”

“Oh, Salmon Weiss,” I said. “So it was Weiss that put together the fight you had with Douggie?”

Vinnie nodded.

I pretended that the infamous stage play that had resulted from Weiss’s deal had been little more than a tactical error on Vinnie’s part and not the, shall we say, flawed thespian performance that had ended his career.

“Well, I sure hope Weiss made you a good offer for that fight, because no way could it have helped you in the rankings.” I laughed. “Jesus, you could have duked it out with Sister Evangeline from Our Lady of the Lepers and come up more.”

No smile broke the melancholy mask of Irish Vinnie Teague.

I shook my head at the mystery of things. “And a fix to boot,” I added softly.

Vinnie’s gaze cut over to me. “It wasn’t no fix,” he said. His eyes narrowed menacingly. “I didn’t take no dive for Douggie Burns.”

I saw it all again in a sudden flash of light, Douggie’s glove float through the air, lightly graze the side of Vinnie’s face, then glide away as the Shameful Shamrock crumpled to the mat. If that had not been a dive, then there’d never been one in the history of the ring.

But what can you say to a man who lies to your face, claims he lost the money or that it wasn’t really sex?

I shrugged. “Hey, look, it was a long time ago, right?”

Vinnie’s red-rimmed eyes peered at me intently. “I was never supposed to take a dive,” he said.

“You weren’t supposed to take a dive?” I asked, playing along now, hoping that the bus would get moving, ready to get off, be done with Vinnie Teague. “You weren’t supposed to drop for Douggie Burns?”

Vinnie shook his head. “No. I was supposed to win that fight. It wasn’t no fix.”

“Not a fix,” I asked. “What was it then?”

He looked at me knowingly. “Weiss said I had to make Douggie Burns go down.”

“You had to make Douggie go down?”

“Teach him a lesson. Him and the others.”

“Others?”

“The ones Weiss managed,” Vinnie said. “His other fighters. He wanted to teach them a lesson so they’d...”

“What?”

“Stay in line. Do what he told them.”

“And you were supposed to administer that lesson by way of Douggie Burns?”

“That’s right.”

“What’d Weiss have against Douggie?”

“He had plenty,” Vinnie said. “ ’Cause Douggie wouldn’t do it. He was a stand-up guy, and he wouldn’t do it.”

“Wouldn’t do what?”

“Drop for Chester Link,” Vinnie answered. “Douggie was supposed to go down in five. But he wouldn’t do it. So Weiss came up with this match. Between me and Douggie. Said I had to teach Douggie a lesson. Said if I didn’t...” He glanced down at his hands. “... I wouldn’t never fight no more.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to lose that fight with Douggie. I was supposed to win it. Win it good. Make Douggie go down hard.” He hesitated a moment, every dark thing in him darkening a shade. “Permanent.”

I felt a chill. “Permanent,” I repeated.

“So Weiss’s fighters could see what would happen to them if he told them to take a dive and they didn’t.”

“So it wasn’t a fix,” I said, getting it now. “That fight between you and Douggie. It was never a fix.”

Vinnie shook his head.

The last words dropped from my mouth like a bloody mouthpiece. “It was a hit.”

Vinnie nodded softly. “I couldn’t do it, though,” he said. “You don’t kill a guy for doing the right thing.”

I saw Douggie Burns’s glove lift slowly, hang in the air, soft and easy, drift forward, barely a punch at all, then Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, hit the mat like a sack of sand.

The hydraulic doors opened before I could get out another word.

“I get off here,” Vinnie said as he labored to his feet.

I touched his arm, thinking of all the times I’d done less nobly, avoided the punishment, known the right thing, but lacked whatever Irish Vinnie had that made him do it, too.

“You’re a stand-up guy, Vinnie,” I said.

He smiled softly, then turned and scissored his way through the herd of strap-hangers until he reached the door. He never glanced back at me, but only continued down the short flight of stairs and out into the night, where he stood for a moment, upright in the elements. The bus slogged forward again, and I craned my neck for a final glimpse of Irish Vinnie Teague as it pulled away. He stood on the corner, drawing the tattered scarf more tightly around his throat. Then he turned and lumbered up the avenue toward the pink neon of Smith’s Bar, a throng of snowflakes rushing toward him suddenly, bright and sparkling, fluttering all around, like a crowd of cheering angels in the dark, corrupted air.