True Confessions (18 page)

“There’s a little good in everybody,” Tom Spellacy said.

Sammy Barron pulled himself from his chair. “Listen, I could use a little ink if you can see it that way, maybe mention me to the boys in the city room. ‘Her friend, Sammy Barron, the actor, wept when he heard the news,’ something along that line, and then a couple of credits. I cry on cue, the papers need a picture. It’s always been slim pickings in this business for a little person, is why. Stand-in work is all I get now. For screen tots.” A look of distaste crossed his features. “Cinemoppets. Roddy McDowall.”

Howard Terkel was being a pest.

Think of a nickname, Crotty said.

The Virgin Tramp, Tom Spellacy said.

Tom Spellacy stopped at a red light at the corner of Figueroa
and Seventh. The motor coughed and died. He held his foot on the accelerator until the engine caught and turned over.

“It idles funny,” Corinne Morris said.

“It idles funny because someone pinched the radiator cap and I’ve got a piece of cloth stuck in there,” Tom Spellacy said. “Right in the department parking lot there, they pinched it. They got a regular black-market ring working the lot there, pinching radiator caps from 1937 Plymouths with 110,000 miles on them, they’re such a desired item.”

“What’s it cost, a new one?”

“Nothing, you want to know the truth. I go to an auto-supply store and say I’m a servant of the people, a man in blue, and I hear he’s got some swell radiator caps, and it’s a shame he could lose them all in a fire, him having those greasy rags in a pail out by the back door and all. And he says take two, they’re small, as a matter of fact, take a box, and speaking of caps, here’s some distributor caps, I had a cap pistol, you could take one of them, too.” The light changed and he made the left turn across Seventh into Figueroa. “It’s the principle is all, why I don’t get a new one.” He shook his head. “The department parking lot.”

“Sometimes I think there’s more crooks in the department than on the street.”

“There’s them thinks the same way,” Tom Spellacy said. She ought to meet Jack while she’s at it, he thought. Brenda, too. It might make it easier to take, Mary Margaret coming home. He shuddered. He was going to have to tell her.

“Actually I meant a new car,” Corinne said.

“That’s what I thought you meant.” The traffic was backing up. Horns hooted. He made only one block on Figueroa before the light changed again. “I got my eye on one, as a matter of fact. An Olds 98. Fully loaded. Hydra-matic.”

Corinne smiled. “That’s terrific, Tom.”

He realized he had made a mistake. Everything he talked to her about carried so much freight, could be interpreted as meaning something else. The Olds 98 had the weight of making plans, looking to the future. Bail out. “And I bought my ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes. My horse comes in, I can make the down. Otherwise I got to hope Santa’s going to be good to me this year.”

Corinne stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. “You’re always complaining about money.”

“You don’t have any, you bitch about it, that’s the way it works, they tell me.” He did not like to talk to Corinne about money. Low down, monthly payments. They hinted at domestic arrangements he was not willing to make. Even if Mary Margaret weren’t getting out of Camarillo. Change the subject. A newsboy was working his way through the stalled traffic. Tom Spellacy gave him a nickel and handed the
Express
to Corinne. The headline read: THOUSANDS ATTEND VIRGIN TRAMP’S LAST RITES. He thought, Oh, shit, it never ends. The women in my life.

Corinne read, “ Thousands of curious mourners backed up downtown traffic for nearly an hour today as funeral services were held for Lois Fazenda, playgirl victim of a werewolf slaying that has shocked the free world.’ “ Corinne dropped the newspaper on her lap. “That is such shit,” she said.

“What else does it say?”

Corinne picked up the paper. “ ‘As reported exclusively in the
Herald-Express
, Miss Fazenda, twenty-two, was known as The Virgin Tramp . . .’”

“I still don’t believe that,” Corinne said. “They made it up.”

“They’ll do anything to sell newspapers, those people,” Tom Spellacy said. No need to tell her how Lois Fazenda got the name. No need to complicate my life any further.

Corinne continued reading, “ The last rites were conducted by Evangelist Jack Mayo, who under the name Cap’n Jack is pastor of the evangelical Good Ship Grace . . .’”

Corinne crumbled the newspaper and threw it on the floor of the car. “Shit, that’s all it is,” she repeated. “Why not let the poor girl go quietly. Instead of making it a circus.”

“Corinne, that dame is out of control,” he said quietly. “People are bored. The war’s over. They need something, sink their teeth into.”

“Forget their own crappy lives,” Corinne said.

He started to say, I was there, it was worse than you think, but he held up. He did not want to debate the morality of Lois Faz-enda’s funeral with Corinne. Especially since his dreaming up the name was one reason it was a circus. For an instant he wondered what they had to talk about outside of bed. It had been that way since Des told him about Mary Margaret. He erased the thought. The funeral. Fuqua’s brainstorm. Murderers show up at funerals sometimes. Me, I don’t think that’s such a hot idea, but Fuqua said it was a definite pattern. The Good Ship Grace was an experience. Des could pick up some pointers, next time he’s thinking of building a cathedral. Stained glass portholes instead of windows. The center aisle a fucking gangplank. No murderer showed up. Just a fairy who wanted to get into the casket with her.

“I heard part of it on the radio,” Corinne said. “McDonough & McCarthy sponsored it. They had some fucking thing called the Layaway Layaway Plan they were pushing.” She mimicked the announcer. “‘Our layaway plan allows you to lay away a loved one.’”

You have to hand it to Sonny, Tom Spellacy thought. “He planted her, Sonny. Free. Cap’n Jack was his idea. He’s got a big following on the radio is why he picked him. He’ll come out all right, Sonny, doing it for nothing, don’t you worry about that.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t try for the Cardinal,” Corinne said.

Tom Spellacy leaned on the horn. The traffic began to untangle. “He did. He was hoping she was a Catholic.”

“She would’ve been better off, the Cardinal said a Solemn High for her. ‘Ahoy, all sinners,’ Cap’n Jack says. ‘All fornicators to the poop deck.’ On the radio. Live. ‘Let’s pipe this virgin into heaven.’”

Tom Spellacy eased by the car causing the tie-up. It was an old Studebaker with a flat tire. A family of frightened Mexican children stared out the windows at the drivers shouting curses at them. Their father was under the car with a jack that did not appear to work. A traffic patrolman was screaming at him to move.

“Forget about it,” he said. “That’s why we’re going out tonight, forget about shit like that. See the fights, have a few drinks, relax. I got to worry about Lois Fazenda in the morning, is why I don’t want to think about her tonight. Okay? I’m home from the office, shaved, showered, clean socks, nice Jockey shorts, starched shirt, tie, I don’t want to think about her, let’s have a nice time, we haven’t had one lately. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He turned into the lot at the Figueroa Auditorium and parked in a space marked Matchmaker. In the shadows of the parking lot, a raucous crap game was going on. He turned on his headlights to see the game better. A uniformed police officer was standing over the kneeling players with a handful of dollar bills. The policeman told him to turn off his fucking lights.

“You can’t park there, buddy.” The voice belonged to a thickset Mexican with balloons of scar tissue over both eyes.

“Fuck off,” Tom Spellacy said.

The Mexican circled slowly, moving with difficulty, looking for an opening, his hands in the fighting position. Corinne clung to the automobile, afraid to speak. Tom Spellacy crouched, waiting. Suddenly the Mexican was inside his guard, pummeling him in the stomach. Tom Spellacy tied him up. The Mexican stepped back, a smile on his face.

“You always were a fucking petunia, Tom.”

“How’s it going, Polo?”

“Good, Tom, good.” He motioned toward the crap game. “I got the game. I hear things, I get a little down now and then.”

“Who’s going in the water tonight, Polo?”

“Anyone goes, it’s the
negrito
in the semi.” Polo looked at Corinne. She smiled at him tentatively. Tom Spellacy made no effort to introduce them. “You want a ticket? Give you two for a dollar. They’re two-fifty each at the box office.”

“Swell, Polo,” Tom Spellacy said. He gave him a dollar and took the two tickets. Polo limped off toward the crap game.

“He’s scalping for less than they cost,” Corinne said.

“To last week’s fight,” Tom Spellacy said. He tore up the tickets. “A big night, he gets away with it.” He shrugged. “Other nights, his friends help him out.”

They walked into the auditorium. It smelled of piss and liniment. The walls of the arena were covered with faded tinted photographs of old-time strongmen and wrestlers and fighters and announcers.

“Then he’s a friend of yours,” Corinne said.

“In a way,” Tom Spellacy said. “He took me out in the fourth round one night at Legion Stadium in El Monte.” They stopped in front of a tinted photograph of a welterweight skipping rope in trunks and a tank shirt. The identification marker said, “The Ever Popular Enrique ‘Polo’ Barbera.” There was no scar tissue over his eyes. “He didn’t even work up a sweat.”

They made their way through the jostling crowd. Their seats were at ringside, on the aisle in the second row. On the other side of the ring, George Brent was signing autographs.

“I thought sure he was going to get the shot in the ball park, Polo, the night he beat that colored guy here. The one it was like punching fog, trying to hit him. Mercury. Mercury Johnson. He punched his ticket, Polo. He was a great fighter that night.”

Corinne said, “What happened, he didn’t get it?”

“He was supposed to go in the water, it turns out. There was a lot of money riding on it. He just got carried away, Polo. And a lot of people got burned.”

“And?”

“They broke his knees with a baseball bat.” George Brent was wearing a camel’s hair blazer and a white shirt and a yellow ascot. He wondered if he could ever dress that way. “You’ve got to wait your turn. He should’ve known that, Polo.”

Corinne sucked in her breath. “I’m glad you’re out of that,” she said.

“You’re seven-seven-and-two after sixteen fights, you don’t have much choice, you still got your brains left.” He ordered two beers from a vendor and handed one to Corinne. “You don’t get a main event in Yankee Stadium with seven-seven-and-two.”

The fighters in the first four-round preliminary were shuffling down the aisle toward the ring. The ropes parted. They scuffed their feet in the resin. Bantamweights. Romero and Napoles. Each seemed lost in his robe. The gloves dwarfed their caved-in chests. They met in the center of the ring. The referee gave his instructions in English, then in Spanish. Romero had a tattoo of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on his right arm. Napoles had acne. The pimpled whiteheads spread over his back. Each fighter crossed himself in his corner.

The bell rang.

He remembered his first fight. A four-rounder at Ocean Park. He got twenty-five dollars and a pasting from Jackie Ahearne. He knocked out Jackie two years later in San Bernardino when the syphilis was eating away at his brain. The truth of the matter was he couldn’t fight worth a shit. He was always the first to say it. It made it a little easier. He never laid it on his bad hands. He just said, I couldn’t fight worth a shit, and let it go at that. It was his cousin Taps Keogh who put him in the ring. And his mother. He had never told anyone that. Taps had a grocery store picked out. The two of us could knock it over easy, Taps said. No job, no money, why not. He had always wanted to tell the old lady that God had intervened. In the person of the old lady herself. Nutty as a fruitcake ever since the old man went to sleep on the trolley tracks. It was Holy Thursday and like always she climbed up the stairs on her knees, saying a rosary every step. Except this year she fell and broke her hip. He had to take her to the hospital. Taps went alone. The beat cop caught him in the cellar. They sent him away for two years. He had to do something after Taps went away, so he went in against Jackie Ahearne. No job, no money, the old man dead, the old lady crazy and Des in the sem. He would’ve murdered Des, Jackie Ahearne, even with the syph.

There were no knockdowns in the first preliminary. When the four rounds were over, he put his arm around Corinne. “Who’d you pick?”

The ring announcer was collecting the judges’ cards.

“The Sacred Heart,” she said.

“No, it’s Pimples easy.”

The boy with acne was squeezing a whitehead. The announcer lifted his arm.

“Another beer?”

“I’d love one.”

“I like the way you lick the foam.”

She stuck her tongue in his ear. The featherweight champion of Yucatan was climbing into the ring. A long wait. Then the two-fisted slugger from Bakersfield was announced. The two-fisted slugger from Bakersfield was wearing a robe lettered The Modesto Kid. The robe made Tom Spellacy smile. The Modesto Kid must have backed out. He ran over the possibilities. Knife fight. Drug overdose. Something like that. The Modesto Kid wouldn’t miss a paynight for a cold. Or a broken arm, if he could get away with it. Leave it to Marge. She could always find a replacement. Marge Madragon was the matchmaker at the Figueroa. Large Marge. A 257-pound lesbian. She was too fat to drive, which was why he always took her parking place. Her friend Skinny Minny Esposito had failed her driving test fourteen times. Minny was nervous. Minny was also the bookkeeper at the Figueroa. They always took cabs, Marge and Minny.

The replacement from Bakersfield went down thirty seconds into the first round. He was up at the count of eight, legs wobbly.

“He looks like he’s going to die,” Corinne said. “He can hardly move. He must be forty years old.”