Damaged Goods (3 page)

There was no way to accelerate the process and truth be told, Jim Tilley (at least the piece of him that didn’t daydream about his son winning a world title) hoped that Lee would fail the ultimate test of boxing fitness. That one night, while he was still an amateur and young enough to find something else, Lee Tilley would meet an opponent with equal skill, that the contest would be reduced to a battle of wills, to the pure ability to endure pain and keep coming. He hoped his son would lose.

In the meantime, Jim was free to indulge an earlier, more primitive passion—a long-term love affair with the gym itself. He could listen to the squeak of his son’s shoes on resin-sprinkled canvas, smell the sharp, funky odor of sweat-soaked leather, submerge himself in the voices calling back and forth, in the gangsta-rap tones of the street, the raspy, half-bored instructions of thoroughly disillusioned trainers. In Tilley’s mind, the gym was its own place, as exclusive as a country club. Millions of people watched boxing regularly—big fights drew worldwide audiences of a half billion—but very few of those viewers had ever stepped into a ring. Boxing wasn’t tennis or basketball; you didn’t run out to box after watching a fight the way you snatched up your racket and headed for the courts after the Wimbledon finals.

Tilley closed his eyes for a moment, let himself drift back to a time when he’d been dubbed the hottest prospect on the amateur scene, when he’d been courted by the sharks who swim in the waters of professional boxing. Those were his glory years, before an injury ended a long amateur and very short pro career, before he’d joined the cops, become a detective. It wasn’t that he hated wallowing in the endless misery of New York City crime, just that sometimes he needed a quick vacation. He needed to inhale the odor of liniment, listen to the snap of a speed bag, watch the prospects and the opponents dance their peculiar dance.

“Hey, Pop. Better check this out.”

“Huh?” Tilley opened his eyes to find his son leaning out over the ropes.

“Uncle Stanley, Pop. Somebody busted him up.”

Tilley looked to his left, watched his old partner make his way across the gym. Moodrow looked pretty much the same, an enormous square body topped by an enormous, square skull, the skull dotted with tiny, expressionless features. Even the blood running along the back of his neck, from his scalp to his already soaked collar, seemed, given Moodrow’s determined stride and composed expression, reasonably appropriate.

“What happened, Stanley,” Tilley said, trying to suppress a smile. “You get mugged?”

“Ambushed is more like it.” Moodrow looked around the gym. “You seen Doc Almeda?” Jose Almeda, though he’d never seen the inside of a medical school, was the gym’s unofficial doctor. “Betty’s leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow and I don’t want her to see me like this.”

“Yeah, Doc’s around somewhere, maybe in the office.” Tilley stepped forward as his partner turned away, examined the cut more closely. “You positive you don’t wanna go to the emergency room, get it sewn up by a professional?”

“Almeda knows how to keep the scar tissue down. That’s his job.” Moodrow turned, began to walk away. “You wanna hear the story, Jim, you gotta keep up with me. Betty made a farewell dinner and I’m late already.”

Resigned, Tilley trotted along behind, waited patiently until Moodrow was seated on the trainer’s table, a lump of greasy coagulant stuck to the wound in his scalp.

“This was really stupid, Jim. I feel like a complete jerk.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

Moodrow looked at his ex-partner, wondered exactly how he was going to explain his bloody shirt and bandaged head to Betty. He did have faith in Doc Almeda’s skills, had seen Almeda work dozens of times, but a big part of his reason for coming to the gym for help had to do with Jim Tilley. He wanted to run the story by his best friend, see how it played before taking it home.

“The thing about it was it happened too fast. I didn’t …”

“Just the facts, Stanley. Save the excuses for later.”

Moodrow flinched as Doc Almeda pressed a square of gauze soaked with antiseptic into the wound. The reaction was pure reflex, gone almost as soon as it appeared, though the pain continued.

“There’s not all that much to tell. I was going into the liquor store, the one on Avenue B just off Fourteenth Street, to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner when this kid bumps into me.
Crashes
into me is more like it. A real punk, Jim, with a shaved head and four earrings in his nose, swastika tattoos on both arms.

“I think he expected me to fall down or something, because he looked surprised when he bounced off my chest. ‘Hey, pops,’ he says, ‘why don’t ya watch where the fuck ya goin’?’

“Jim, I should’ve stopped it right then and there, just backed off and forgotten about it. But what I actually did was slap him in the face. That’s when his buddy sandbagged me from behind with a wire trash basket.”

“Did you go out?” Tilley asked.

“Go out?”

“Out cold, Stanley. Unconscious.”

Moodrow blinked as he tried to absorb Tilley’s question. When he finally got it, he shook his head in contempt. “Are you crazy, Jim? I already told you these guys were punks.” He stopped as if expecting a reply, then continued. “What I did was stuff the second prick
into
the trash can. It was a tight fit, which is why I’m so late.”

“What happened to the first kid? The one with the earrings?”

“When I slapped him, he took off like a rabbit. Left his partner to face the heat alone. A real punk, Jim, and what bothers me is that two years ago, he would’ve been able to look at me and know enough to back off without gettin’ his face slapped. And, me, I would’ve never let a jerk like that get under my skin. Hell, two years ago I would’ve seen them coming.”

Tilley didn’t say anything for a moment. Moodrow was a couple of weeks short of his sixtieth birthday, the mention of which had been entirely forbidden. As was the fact that, two months before, a prostate infection had put a catheterized Moodrow in the hospital for several days.

“Ya know, Stanley,” he finally said, “you gotta stop being so hard on yourself. Last week I got sucker punched by a mutt as I went to put on the cuffs. The asshole turned and hit me before I could react. You know what I did? I beat the living shit out of him. You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t see it as the end of my youth, the loss of my manhood.”

It was a complete lie and Tilley knew it. He’d gotten drunk after coming off duty, pissed and moaned to his wife, Rose, for days. It was a complete lie, but James Tilley couldn’t think of anything better to say and the sight of Doc Almeda’s needle sliding in and out of Moodrow’s torn flesh was making him queasy. “Stanley,” he asked, glad to change the subject, “don’t you feel that?”

It was Jose Almeda who responded. “Jus’ a pinch,” he said. “An’ after, you look beautiful again. Like a young girl.” Almeda, short to begin with and shrunken further by a painfully curved spine, was standing on a milk crate. He continued to sew as he spoke. “You tole me you was a fighter, Jim, so you must’a been sewed up once or twice.”

Tilley took a stick of gum from his shirt pocket, began to unwrap it. “I admit it looks a lot worse than it feels,” he said. He popped the gum into his mouth, began to chew thoughtfully.

“
Mira,
Señor Stanley,” Almeda said. “I think you are a crybaby. I would give my sight to jus’ one time put a
pendejo
li’ that in a garbage can.”

Moodrow snorted. “I never said things couldn’t get worse.” What he didn’t add was that they were
already
worse, but that given Jim Tilley’s reception to his first story, he’d decided to save the second for Betty and dinner. “You almost finished, Doc?”

“I’m gonna bandage it now. Then you go home, take the penicillin I gave you, an’ stay quiet. You gotta watch out you don’t have a concussion.”

“Don’t make the bandage too thick, Doc. My girlfriend’s gonna flip as it is.”

Moodrow watched Lee Tilley, now wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, walk into the trainer’s room. “Christ,” he muttered, “this is gonna be worse than facing Betty.”

For the better part of two years, he’d been lecturing the boy about fighting on the street. “Sure,” he’d explained, “somebody starts up with you, it feels good to punch him out. I’m even willing to admit that, for the most part, it’s easy, too. Only you can’t live that way, Lee. Self-defense is one thing, but you can’t solve your problems with violence. People who solve their problems with violence never get anywhere in life. It’s like an anchor.”

“Uncle Stanley, what happened?”

Moodrow glanced at Tilley, noted the smirk on his friend’s face, knew he’d find no help from that quarter.

“Would you believe,” he said, “I was attacked by the entire New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club?”

“W
HAT I HAD TO
do was tell Lee the truth, Betty. Which is what I’d already told Jim. I swear, I felt like a complete schmuck.” Moodrow was sitting at a small table in his Fourth Street apartment, toying with the remains of a thoroughly overcooked leg of lamb, a bowl of pearl onions in a muddy cream sauce, and a wrinkled baked potato the size of a boiled egg.

“How did he take it?” Betty, even as she asked the question, was trying to decide how
she
was taking it. She was scheduled to depart La Guardia Airport at ten the following morning, her destination Los Angeles and her cousin, Marilyn, badly injured in a freeway accident. What she needed, in her own estimation, was a farewell dinner with her lover of the last six years, quiet (or maybe not so quiet, depending on how many drinks they had before they got down to business) sex, and a decent night’s sleep. Marilyn was her only living relative; the trip would be painful, perhaps devastating.

“He let me finish without saying anything,” Moodrow responded. “Then he gave me a lecture, told me these weren’t the ‘good old days,’ that everybody’s got a gun and I was lucky to get slammed with a puny trash basket.”

“Lee’s a smart kid,” Betty observed. “You could have been killed.”

Moodrow began to clear the table. He and Betty had a firm rule: One cooked, the other did the dishes. As a result, they ate dinner out more often than not. “It wasn’t like I planned it.” The excuse sounded lame, even to him.

“How many bodies did you see in thirty-five years on the job? How many homicides because somebody had to be
macho
?”

“Dozens,” Moodrow called over his shoulder. Having retreated to the sink, he began to scrape the remains of their dinner into the garbage pail. “Maybe hundreds. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be afraid every time I step out of my apartment. I can’t live that way.”

“Why not, Stanley? I do. And so do several million other New Yorkers. What makes you special?”

Moodrow stacked the plates in the sink, turned on the hot water, then calmly walked to the table where Betty was standing. He retrieved the leg of the lamb, strode back to the sink, wrapped the meat in aluminum foil, and dropped the platter into the sink.

“Fear or no fear,” he finally said, “the reason I reacted the way I did this afternoon was because of something that happened at ten o’clock in the morning. That’s when Jean Ressler fired me.”

Betty leaned back against the refrigerator. Her sharp black eyes bored into the bandages covering the shaved area of Moodrow’s head. “You’re telling me this came as a surprise? It’s been three weeks with no hint of progress. How long did you expect her to fork over two hundred a day plus expenses?”

Moodrow shrugged. Four months ago, Jean Ressler’s husband, Paul, had emptied the bank accounts, redeemed the certificates of deposit, looted the mutual funds, then taken off for parts unknown. Though Jean Ressler had no wish to see her husband again, she did want a piece of the roughly three hundred thousand he’d snatched. Moodrow had put in the hours, talked to friends, relatives, coworkers, waiters, bartenders, barbers. The results had been less than negligible.

“Getting fired was exactly what I expected,” Moodrow admitted. “The surprise came two hours later when she called to say the new firm she hired, Landis Security, managed to find her old man in thirty minutes.”

Betty, instead of yielding to impulse and putting her arms around Moodrow’s waist (they wouldn’t reach around his chest), simply asked, “How?”

“They did it with a computer.” Moodrow turned to face his lover.

“According to Jean, they put his social security number into some program and a half hour later they had him. Seems he got tired of dragging a suitcase full of cash everywhere he went and opened a checking account at the Greater Bank of Birmingham. The bank ran his social security number through a credit agency and that’s where the computer found it. Along with his address and telephone number. Now, Jean wants a refund.”

“Are you going to give it to her?” Betty stepped up to the sink, took a wet dish from his hand, and put it in the drain basket. Then she began to unbutton his shirt.

“Never. Jean Ressler’s an accountant. She makes more money in a week than I do in a month.” He dried his hands on a towel, hung the towel on a hook, ran his fingers through his lover’s hair. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“I want to lick your nipples.” She pulled his shirt open, let her tongue wander through the mat of hair on his chest. “You can talk about this depressing crap later. After I finish using you and fall asleep.”

Slowly, with extreme deliberation, she undressed him, following her progress with mouth and fingertips. After six years, she knew exactly what excited him. She also knew that Stanley Moodrow, when he was really hot, liked to draw the whole process out. To conserve his excitement like a miser hoarding a stack of shiny-bright Krugerrands.

They made love for the next forty minutes, worked their way from room to room, left a trail of clothing to mark their passage. Betty was on the bed, Moodrow kneeling on the floor beside her, when he finally hooked his fingers beneath the elastic band on her panties and began to slide them down. He caressed her exposed flesh with his lips and the tip of his tongue, didn’t relent until she called for him, until she half dragged him onto the bed, until their bodies were locked.