Mistaken Identity

match and men using the equipment. The thumping, thudding, and pounding sounds made a constant drumbeat as glove met bag, body, and headgear. A man on the heavy bag shouted “Hah,” “Hah,” each time he connected with a jab, syncopating the rhythms. Judy kept an eye on the boxers as she adjusted her stance. “Better, Mr. Gaines?”

“Good. Right. Now, when you gotta move, you keep your feet in that stance. Got it? Gotta have the foundation or the house gonna fall down.”

“Okay.” Judy obeyed, but it was hard to move in the awkward position and she ended up with her right foot in front. “Damn.”

“S’all right. S’all right, you’ll get it. You gotta work on this. Gotta get this right. Com’ere, lemme show you what I mean.” Mr. Gaines grabbed Judy by her sweatshirt and led her over to a table outside the ring. Paint peeled off the table, which was actually a front door onto which someone had hammered splayed legs, and on the table sat a folded Daily News, a bottle of Mr. Clean, and a plastic jug of water with a dirty glass. Mr. Gaines grabbed the jug and glass from the table, then held both over a steel wastecan full of trash. “Pay attention, now. You payin’ attention?”

“Sure.”

“You gotta be in the right place in the ring. See this?” Mr. Gaines poured water from the jug beside the glass and it splashed into the wastebasket. “See what I mean? Ain’t in the right place. Won’t work. Not he’ppin’. Not doin’ nothin’ for you. Now watch.” Mr. Gaines moved the glass under the stream of water and it filled the glass. “See now? It’s in the right place. All ready. Doin’ the right thing. You gotta be in the right place. Got it?”

“Got it.” Judy smiled. She had already noticed that Mr. Gaines had a way to explain even the simplest principle. She wished he had a way to catch a killer.

“Now let’s get back to work,” he said, and led her back to the mirror. “Get your stance, now. Remember what I told you.”

Judy stood in position, foot-conscious as a girl at her first dance, and checked the mirror. From this angle she spotted something she hadn’t seen before. An attractive young woman sitting against the far wall, knitting. The woman’s hair hung in moussed waves around a delicate oval face, with dark and penciled brows. She wore tight jeans and a waist-length leather jacket with black spike-heeled boots.

“What you lookin’ at?” Mr. Gaines asked, and Judy snapped to attention.

“That woman, knitting. Who is she?”

“One of the wives.”

“Whose wife?”

“Boy on the bag. Danny Morales.”

“She’s here a lot?”

“All the time. Now, keep your mind on your job here. You come to gossip or box?”

“Box.”

“Then box, woman.”

Judy didn’t have much time. Her boxing lesson was over and she had to get back to the office. She was stretching plausibility with her story of a two-hour doctor’s appointment, even with a gynecologist. They overbooked with less guilt than an airline, but there was a limit. Judy crouched next to her gym bag and packed it slowly, watching the young woman with the knitting. Her husband pounded the speed-bag next to her. Mr. Gaines had said Connolly hung with the wives. Maybe Mrs. Morales knew something.

Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, went the speedbag, smacking the plywood backboard and swinging back for more punishment. Morales punched the bag with the outside of his gloves, his tattooed arms high and his elbows spread sideways like wings. His wife glanced up from her knitting to watch him, though the boxer concentrated on the drubbing he gave the speedbag, lost in a trance sustained by the rhythms of his own violence.

Judy zipped her gym bag closed, straightened up, and walked casually in their direction. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum; the sound grew louder. She walked past Morales and stopped next to his wife, who didn’t look up from her knitting. “I always wanted to learn to knit,” Judy said loudly.

The young woman looked up in surprise, her lacquered fingers frozen at her row of tight stitches. Morales stopped hitting the speedbag, which flopped back and forth on the squeaking chain, and glared at Judy. “What did you say to her?” he demanded.

“Uh, nothing really,” Judy answered, taken aback. Behind Morales she saw Mr. Gaines, who had stopped coaching another fighter and was watching vigilantly. “I was just trying to learn about knitting.”

“Oh, yeah?” Morales blinked perspiration from his eyes, revealing a prominent brow that crumpled with the force of his anger. “Buy a book.”

“Danny, Danny,” Mr. Gaines called out, shuffling bandy-legged to Morales. He waved an arm in the air as if he were hailing a cab. “Ain’t no call for that now. Tha’s Judy, Judy Forty. She one of my students.”

Morales grinned crookedly. “A chick, takin’ lessons here?”

“She a boxer to me, tha’s all,” Mr. Gaines said. “You should rightly be sayin’ welcome to her. He’p bring her along.”

Judy felt a guilty pang. Mr. Gaines was standing up for her, and she had lied to him. “That’s all right, Coach.”

“No, Danny here can introduce himself, he want to be polite. You might like meetin’ a famous boxer. Danny has twenty-five fights, twenty-four by knockout, only one by decision. He’s comin’ up to his first twelve-rounder in a coupla months.”

Morales relaxed, apparently soothed by his credentials, and nodded at Judy. “Danny Morales. You a friend of Mr. G’s, I’m happy to meet you. Anythin’ you wanna know about this sport, you ask. History, pointers, whatnot. I don’t mind.”

“Thank you, Danny. I didn’t catch your wife’s name,” Judy said, and the young woman smiled, apparently pleased at the unaccustomed attention.

“Ronnie, Ronnie Morales,” she said. “Anytime you want to know about knitting, you just ask.”

Judy took a step closer. “What are you making?”

“A scarf, for Danny.” She put a slim finger to her lips. “But don’t tell him. It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

Morales almost smiled. “Like I didn’t know. She knit me two scarves and a sweater already.”

“You’re a lucky man,” Judy said, and the conversation stalled. She couldn’t talk to Ronnie with her husband there. They had to go where no man could. “Uh, Ronnie, do you know where a ladies’ room is? I know they have a locker room, but we can’t wash up there, can we?”

“It’s around the back. You have to use the janitor’s closet.”

“I didn’t see it. Is it hard to find?”

“Kind of. You want me to show it to you?” Ronnie asked, setting her knitting aside.

“Sure,” Judy said, as casually as possible. “Lead on.”

37

Bennie hustled into her office with a freshly poured mug of coffee and pushed aside her phone messages, correspondence, and other case notes. Connolly had become the only priority. It was Thursday, for God’s sake. Bennie slipped out of her jacket and caught sight of the Band-Aid in the crook of her elbow, then fingered the bumpy red blot in the middle. Her blood; Connolly’s blood. In a week she would know if they were the same. The possibility seemed more likely since the test, though Bennie knew her thinking wasn’t completely rational.

She sat down in her padded desk chair, and the sun streamed through the window behind her, reminding her like a tap on the shoulder that the day was almost over. She went through her papers to find the police chronology. It was the weakest part of the prosecution’s case, and she intended to weaken it to the breaking point.

“Incident Report,” read the slip of white paper. These were the papers that Carrier had applied to the court for and which had been released, albeit in severely redacted form. The documents looked as insignificant as