“I know what I’m doing, Jeremy,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed, “you are trying to get yourself killed. I’ll be there.”
Shelly was the toughest to convince. His excuses included: “Mildred wants me home to fix the oven”; “I have a sore toe”; and “My glasses are broken.” The thrill of playing detective had faded with the first corpse, but Shelly rose to the occasion and finally agreed when I threatened to turn him in to the dental society for malpractice.
There was a lot of time, and Lola was snoring pleasantly in the next room. I cleaned up, found some Quaker Puffed Rice and coconut juice. There was no milk so I poured the coconut juice on the cereal. It tasted pretty good. I ate and read the few pages of Lola’s newspaper that hadn’t been chewed up by massive Marco and me. The Japanese had bombed an Australian naval base, someone had caught a four-ton shark and the Frankie Carbo jury was deadlocked. Carbo was on trial for the killing of Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg. More important than all of this was the fact that Sugar Ray Robinson had TKO’ed Maxie Berger in the second round of their fight in Madison Square Garden in New York. Somehow that reassured me that the world was still sane.
With a few hours to go, I looked in on Lola, who snored away. I found a razor in her bathroom, shaved and washed up. I looked presentable if I kept my jacket buttoned to hide the torn shirt.
I read a few pages of Lola’s copy of
Carmen was as reliable as California rain. Al Pearce was just coming on when she stepped out of Levy’s, her coat drawn around her shoulders. She looked big and strong and sure, even after a day of work; the reverse of Lola Farmer. I pulled up and got out of the car, looking around for cops, robbers, cowboys or Indians. The sun was dropping toward San Pedro when I opened the car door for Carmen.
“This will be a night to remember,” I said.
“Oh, brother,” sighed Carmen and off we went.
The Hollywood American Legion Stadium was as safe a place to meet a killer as possible. More than half a million people came there every year to see boxing and wrestling. Los Angeles fight fans knew that the best place to see movie stars is not on Hollywood Boulevard but in the first six rows of the stadium, which was one of the reasons Carmen got excited about going to the fights. She also had an honest respect for men who wanted to get rich by battering the other guys into submission or shame.
Eastern states, including New York, don’t recognize championship fights held in California, where the state law limits all decision fights to ten rounds. But there is no lack of interest on the part of local fans. Henry Armstrong, ex-welterweight champ and former lightweight champ, lives in Los Angeles, but he never defended his title at home. Before 1915 boxing exhibitions up to twenty rounds were permitted in Los Angeles. I remember as a kid seeing a bloody one with Jack Johnson and a bald guy at Hazard’s Pavilion at Fifth and Olive with my old man. Jim Jeffries fought his first pro fight in the old Manitou Club on Main Street.
Most of my own fights, including the one this afternoon, had come in or around Los Angeles, but no one had ever paid to see me punch and be punched. Maybe this would be the night when I got a chance to go one-on-one with a killer in the Hollywood Legion. Maybe the ghost of Jim Jeffries would be over my shoulder. Maybe I had the imagination of a ten-year-old and the brain of a flea. Then I found a free parking space on El Centro and waited in line with Carmen, who stayed close and looked around for celebrities. I plunked down a few bucks for tickets and we went in.
The wonderful trap of Toby Peters was set. Nick Charles, eat your heart out.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There were waves of olive drab and dark blue in the crowd, and the place was packed. Soldiers and sailors swelled the stadium, though the nonuniformed spectators still outnumbered them. The war made boxing even more popular. Maybe it was the fact that a boxing match has a definite start and distinct end, and there’s a clear winner and loser. Violence, rules and no one gets killed. Boxing is war without the worst of war. I’d been at fights with servicemen before. There were two basic reactions. Before the fight they horsed around, spilled a little beer, argued about which was better-a fast-stepper or a slow, hard puncher. Then when the fight actually started, some of the boys went red-faced wild with every punch, their mouths open and moaning. Others sat back silent and serious, not knowing quite what it all meant to them, but knowing it meant a lot.
The crowd that night had the sound of fight crowds, a wave of sound pierced by an occasional loud, hysterical laugh or someone calling out to Maury or Al or Brian to bring back an extra hot dog or beer. Carmen craned her neck to see the ringside seats.
“I think I see Ann Sheridan,” she said excitedly.
“Ann Sheridan don’t come to no fights,” said a bulldog man sitting next to her, without looking up from his program.
“I ought to know Ann Sheridan when I see her,” Carmen insisted to the guy, who looked up from his program ready to fight and got his first look at Carmen, who was wearing her tightest red dress.
“Maybe Ann Sheridan changed her mind,” the bulldog said with a twisted smile.
Carmen accepted his apology.
“Babe Ruth is supposed to be here,” the bulldog said amiably.
“Toby knows Babe Ruth, don’t you?” she said, taking my arm without stopping her survey of the crowd for celebrities.
“Sure,” said the bulldog, eyeing me briefly and turning back to his program.
The hour hand on my watch was anchored now. It must have happened in the fight with Marco, but a firm grip on a small gear didn’t mean a firm grip on time. I asked the bulldog what time it was, and a soldier on my left told me it was just before eight-thirty. A few minutes later the heavyweights in the first fight came down the aisle. The crowd cheered. The crowd booed. The crowd didn’t know either one of the saps or their records, but they were big, and big guys gave out the hope of big punches. Both fighters looked scared. Both fighters looked young. One, a white kid with his hair cut short, was called Army John McCoy. The reason for the “Army” was made clear neither by the ring announcer nor our programs. The soldier next to me said he thought he was a soldier. Someone else corrected him behind us and said he knew he was a soldier. I doubted it but didn’t care. The other fighter was a Negro kid with the biggest arms I’d ever seen and legs to match that might make him a little slow. His name wasn’t even on the card, but the ring announcer introduced him as Archie “Black Lightning” Davis.
“I’ll put up ten on Black Lightning,” said the bulldog, looking around for a taker.
The soldier on my left dug into his pocket, and others rose to the challenge.
“Take the bet,” urged Carmen, as the fighters in the ring got their instructions.
“The Army boy hasn’t got a chance,” I said. “The Negro’s a ringer. I’ll bet ten his name isn’t Archie Davis. Look at those arms, scar tissue over the eyes. He’s been around, and the other kid can’t even look him in the eye.”
I tried to spot Babe Ruth but couldn’t. I sure as hell didn’t see anyone who looked like Ann Sheridan.
For the first few minutes the two fighters received cheers for dancing. When McCoy decided that things weren’t going too badly, he made a flat-footed rush and landed a right to Davis’s head that Davis slipped. In return, Davis put a short hard left into McCoy’s kidney that the crowd and the referee missed. The crowd went wild. It looked to them like McCoy had drawn first blood. The bulldog man looked over at me with a mean smile, and I nodded that I had seen what he had seen.
“Ten more says McCoy don’t go the four rounds,” the bulldog said.
Money came his way. Carmen dug into her purse, and I stopped her.
“He’s right,” I said.
I didn’t have time to see the end of the fight. I told Carmen to enjoy herself, that I’d be back soon, and headed up the aisle before she could ask any questions. When I glanced back, the bulldog man was leaning in her direction, explaining the finer points of the fight game to her.
In the corridor the sounds of the crowd seemed artificial, like someone had created them for a John Garfield boxing movie.
The corridor wasn’t quite empty. A woman rushed for the women’s room. A guy at a hot-dog cart was counting his before-the-fights take. I spotted Gunther without any trouble. It is hard to miss a midget, especially
