Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (62 page)

He slapped open the swing door, pushed into the noisy bar. The radio was on, and a dozen-odd men, standing at the bar, were listening intently. Donahue leaned on the end, said offhand: “Scotch and Perrier,” to the bartender.

Ken Teebolt, the new owner-manager of the club, came over, clicking a half dozen quarters together. He was a big man, blonde and clean-looking, with flat but thick pink cheeks and large, good-humored eyes.

“How’s she look, Donny?”

Donahue sent a glance roving casually about. “Nice.”

Both men paused to turn an ear towards the radio loudspeaker. Half a dozen shouts rose in the bar and were followed by lusty laughter, hard back-slapping.

Ken Teebolt grinned: “Kid Lenox out in the fourth. Well, Harlem’s getting it on the chin tonight! And me up fifty bucks. You betting?”

Donahue, drinking, looked at Ken above the rim of his glass, shook his head, said into the glass: “Uh-huh.”

Ken sighed. “Well, I got a grand on the Emperor Brown.”

“Sentiment?”

Ken frowned. “What do I look like?”

Donahue set his glass down, patted his lips with a handkerchief. He lit a cigarette and said out of the cup formed by his hands: “Got a hunch you’ll lose it.”

Ken smiled. “I’ve seen King Brown and I’ve seen Young Boston. It’s a push-over for the Emperor.”

“Okey,” Donahue said lightly, and tossed a fifty-cent piece on the bar.

“Say—” Ken put a hand on Donahue’s arm, searched Donahue’s face candidly with his round blue eyes. “What’s in the wind? You wouldn’t lay dough on Young Boston, would you?”

“Uh-huh.” Donahue took the cigarette from his mouth, added: “Or the Emperor.” He replaced the cigarette in his mouth, took a deep inhale, looked with a direct but provocative gaze into Ken’s eyes.

“Say, Donny—”

“I don’t know a thing,” Donahue said. “But if you can get that bet called off, put the dough in some bourbon.”

He turned from the bar, spurted a breath at the end of his cigarette, knocking the ash off. He made his way back to the lobby, walked down a wide corridor and entered an open elevator. Two men besides the operator were standing in it. One was Sam Beckert, King Brown’s manager, and the other Pete Korn, a small, slight man with a dry-skinned hatchet face and wet, red-lidded eyes. Sam Beckert was rotund, jovial, with a voice like a fog-horn, cheeks like red cherries and with a bulblike chin to match. In the center of his massive face was a small, pointed nose that seemed to have got there by mistake.

“Gonna see my Emperor clean up tonight, Donny?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope you laid all you got on him, Donny. He’ll take that Boston wildcat by the ears.”

“By the ears,” supplemented Pete Korn in a dry, cracked voice.

The car started upward.

Donahue looking at the ceiling, said: “He’s the fastest lightweight we’ve seen in this town since Benny, and a real champion.”

“You’re telling me?” boomed Beckert.

Pete Korn cackled: “Telling me?”

The car was slowing. Beckert slapped Donahue on the back and rumbled: “Yessir, boy, I hope you laid all you got.”

“I don’t bet on fights, Sam.”

The door opened and as they walked out Beckert laughed: “You oughtta, boy, when I’m telling you! Be seeing you, kid!”

“Seeing you, kid,” Pete Korn said.

Donahue, making his way up the corridor, could hear the din of the Arena crowd. When he opened a heavy door, the din bellowed at him. Moving on, he came to the upper tiers, saw the massed crowd below, howling and roaring, waving arms, hats, handkerchiefs. Far down, he saw the white pool of the ring; saw King Brown, the ebon lightweight champ, taking his bows. Donahue went down through the roars and cheers, took a seat ten rows from the ringside and pinched out his cigarette beneath his heel.

A little group was in the ring, talking. Brown and Young Boston were looking at each other, smiling tight, insincere smiles; the black boy showing a mouthful of dazzling teeth, the white boy curling his upper lip. They went back to their corners, and the ring emptied, the fighters stretched arms, gripped the ropes, braced toes on the floor. Quiet descended upon the Arena.

The bell shot them out. The black boy was not smiling now; he looked serious, with a scowl on his forehead, a catlike, stealthy look in his eyes. He struck. Young Boston landed on his back. Scattered shouts rose, uncertain. Boston got up, touched his nose with his left glove. He slid a blow up the Emperor’s left arm; the blow was tossed off snakelike. They clinched, but the black boy broke, pranced on his toes, swung his head beneath a hard overhand shot and went up under Boston’s guard. Boston tied him up. The referee broke them. Boston struck on the break and the black champ teetered, laughed aloud; the laugh was smothered by a crack on the mouth and Boston followed with hard body blows.

The champ took them, absorbed them, came into them with his shiny black arms driving. He began to beat Boston back across the ring. His neck was taut, the nape like a gleaming column of gun metal. Sweat flew from the wet gloves. The boys were exchanging blows furiously at the bell. The challenger could take it. Most people knew King Brown could.

They came out fast for the second. The crowd was settling down with an attitude of satisfaction. It was a fast, good fight. The fighters hammered each other through the second round, and the counts looked even. The Emperor had a split lip and Young Boston had a bad eye. Half of black Harlem was in the Arena rooting for the local boy who was lightweight champion of the world.

The Emperor came out for the third with an elastic bound. He grinned broadly, feinted, ducked, cut viciously into Boston’s guard. He cut through Boston’s guard, carried him to the ropes, hammered his blows in with terrific speed—a cross-fire of body blows and snapping shots to the face. His teeth were bared, his lips flattened back, his breath whistling and hissing out. The crowd murmured. Cries rose here and there. It was as if the black boy had played tag during the first two rounds and was now getting down to business.

Pain contorted Boston’s face. He writhed and squirmed against the ropes while the black boy grunted, crowded him with an endless fusillade of smashing blows. The scattered cries rose to shouts and the shouts welled in volume; the voice of the radio announcer was crackling into the microphone. The judges looked at one another. The black boy’s seconds grinned.

Boston managed to clinch, to hold at last. The referee jumped in to break them, and the Emperor fell back, his mouth bursting open to suck in a great lungful of air. One leg sagged. His neck muscles bulged and his eyes rolled as he started in again, Boston, looking through eyes that were almost closed, swung mightily. The blow hit the black boy on the chest; it stopped him for an instant but then he was driving in again. But now Boston seemed to be taking the blows with ease, and he began fighting back. He began driving the Emperor back across the ring. The shouting wavered, became a low, distant hum.

The Emperor was covering up as he hit the ropes, and Boston, his lip curled, was hammering him. The black boy did not clinch. He struck back, but his arms lagged, his knees wabbled. Boston covered the black face with blows and with blood. He was still swinging blindly when King Brown fell to his knees. The referee jumped in. The Emperor fell on his face.

He was counted out.

“Ladi-e-e-e-s-s-s… Gen-tul-men-n-n-n… the new cham-p-e-e-e-e-n….”

Young Boston fell down trying to help, in the established custom, his vanquished foe. The Emperor’s seconds brushed him aside, picked up the black boy. Boston’s seconds rushed him to the microphone.

“Hello, folks. I’m d’ new champeen. Hello, Ma…!”

The Emperor was standing, looking very dazed and solemn. “Whut happened?” he muttered. Then he scowled, when they told him to shake hands with the new champion. “Wha’ fo’? Dat boy’s no champeen. He can’t fight wo’th a damn.”

“This way, King.”

He shoved them off, climbed through the ropes, a glaze in his eyes. He trotted up the aisle, shaking his clasped hands above his head, grinning with his great white teeth.

Donahue made his way out of the madhouse, took the private elevator to the Suwanee Club, strolled into the bar and ordered a Scotch and Perrier. The bar was boiling with the fight news.

Ken Teebolt touched Donahue’s arm. “What happened, Donny?”

“Happened?” Donahue picked up his drink, looked over it at Ken, said: “The Emperor was decrowned.”

He put the glass to his lips as a man rushed in shouting: “Hey! King Brown just died!”

Twenty-odd voices exclaimed: “What!”

The informer threw up his arms. “Died!”

Donahue kept the glass to his lips, but did not drink. After a moment, he drank.

Kelly McPard, the plain-clothes sergeant, finished with his pearl-handled penknife, held up his left hand, with the fingers splayed, and eyed the pared fingernails critically. Then he looked through his splayed fingers at Donahue.

“Fifty,” he said.

“Some day you’re going to learn not to bet.”

“The Emperor looked good to me.”

Donahue turned and scowled at the floor. “Boston cut him down like hay.”

“Listening on the radio, the beginning of that third round, I was counting my winnings already.” He took his hand down, closed the fingers into his palm and laid the fist on his office desk. “What’d he die of, Donny?”

Donahue jerked a thumb to his chest.

“H’m,” mused Kelly regretfully “Heart.” He sighed. “Too bad. The Emperor was a real champion.”

Donahue stood up, stared down at Kelly and said firmly: “Get an autopsy, Kel.”

“Huh?”

Kelly looked up quizzically, half-humorously. Donahue said nothing, but kept staring at the sergeant.

Kelly drummed with his fingers on the desk and stared vacantly at the desk’s surface, chewing his lower lip reflectively. “What’s the idea?”

“I may be bad-minded, but that fight ended, not too suddenly, but up the wrong alley. Get an autopsy. If you don’t, I’ll go over your head and make a squawk.”

Kelly grinned, showing his neat white teeth beneath his neat, clipped mustache. “My old pal Donny again!”

“I’m serious,” Donahue muttered. He began knocking with a knuckle on the desk, and spoke to fit the rhythm: “That—dinge—went—down—too—fast.”

Kelly lit a cork-tipped cigarette. “I’ll look into it, kid. But I wish to hell you’d break with the Boxing Commission. You’re always imagining things.”

“You just imagine I imagine.”

Kelly polished the nails of one hand on the heel of the other. “Where d’ you think things are crooked?”

Donahue put on his hat, went to the door. “Get that autopsy and maybe we’ll see.”

He took a cab uptown, got off in one of the East Sixties and entered a tall, narrow apartment house. A cream-colored elevator lifted him to the fourteenth floor, and getting out he swung his long legs leisurely down the corridor, drawing off gray capeskin gloves. He rapped on the door of 1412, and as it opened a babble of voices rushed out at him.

“Yeah?” said Pete Korn.

Donahue looked over his head, walked past him and, passing through the foyer, entered the large and ornate living-room of Sam Beckert’s apartment. Six men besides Sam were in a noisy, talkative huddle: men in the fight game, well-dressed hangers-on. To one side, a medium-sized Negro wearing decent evening clothes and horn-rimmed spectacles, stood wiping his hands on a handkerchief.

“Hello, Donny!” Sam Beckert boomed.

“Sam,” Donahue said offhand; and then: “Tough about the Emperor.”

Beckert’s big face got very mournful, his thick voice shook: “Donny, that boy—that boy—” He wagged his head dolefully. “I brought him up in the fight game, Donny. Need I tell you how I feel about all this here?” He spread his bough-like arms, his broad palms. “I’m kinda busted up, kid.”

“Kinda busted up,” Pete Korn said, his dry lips twitching.

Donahue said: “I just dropped in on my way home. I hear they’re going to ask for an autopsy.”

“Yeah?” Sam Beckert said; he looked around goggle-eyed at the men, then looked back at Donahue, nodded. “I guess that’s their privilege. Sure. Why not? Unless”—he waved to the Negro—“George there objects. That’s King’s brother.”

The Negro dipped his head. “Of course, if the police want to perform an autopsy”—he shrugged—“I shan’t object. My brother’s”—his lip shook—“death was sudden and unexpected, but in that sport—well, those things happen—”

“That was an awful sock to the heart Boston handed him in the third,” Beckert boomed in. “You seen that, Donny—huh?”

Donahue nodded. “Yeah.”

Beckert stood back on his heels, threw out his stomach. “O’ course, I ain’t got nothin’ to say about if they c’n or can’t pull an autopsy. King’s brother it’s up to—him being the head of the heirs or something. Smart guy. Teaches school, huh, George?” He added: “O’ course, take it was blood o’ my blood, I’d kinda hate to see them autopsy him. But”—he shrugged hugely—“it ain’t up to me here.”

The Negro poked his handkerchief back into his breast pocket. “I have no objection. After all, King—King’s dead and—well, what’s the use?” He turned, picked up his hat.

A tall, slim man with white hair and black eyebrows came strolling in from an adjoining room. He was idly polishing a pair of rimless nose-glasses.

Beckert said loudly: “Oh, Les, meet a pal. Meet Donahue here.”

“Hello,” said the thin man absently, without looking up. Then he held his glasses up to the light, seemed satisfied and placed them on his nose.

“My lawyer, Lester Paisley,” Beckert explained.

Paisley yawned: “Yes—Donahue; I know the name. How do you do.” He went to a table, turning his back, and poured a drink.

Donahue said negligently: “Any truth, Sam, in the rumor the Emperor was going to change managers?” A match flamed off his thumbnail, rose to a cigarette in his mouth.

Beckert guffawed. “If there was, I sure ain’t been around. Who gave you that hooey?”

Donahue deprecated his own statement with a frown, a shrug. “Speakeasy gossip…. Well, I’ll roll along, Sam.”

Beckert tossed up a big hand, yelled: “Glad to seen you!”

“I’ll go along too,” George Brown said. “Good night, Sam.”