night close up on you like that.” He stopped dancing and punching for a second. “They say it’s hard for a man to live with himself after he gets stopped. I heard tell of one man was lying on the dressing room table after he got knocked out and started to see visions of baby Jesus fighting and boxing with the angels. Imagine that. Baby Jesus, gettin’ in the ring. Man got so scared he ran out naked on the street.”
“Why’d he do that?” I asked, feeling a peculiar chill on the back of my neck.
“I guess he must’ve lost faith,” Elijah said gravely, staring at the ceiling like he’d just seen a ghost flying by up there. “Man spends his whole life fighting, telling himself he’s the baddest man alive. He gets knocked out, he can’t be that way no more.”
He grew still and quiet. No matter how you came at it, this man was forty-three and had been in a lot of fights. There was even scar tissue on the back of his thick, rolled-up neck. But that was part of the beauty of Elijah. In a way, he was just an ordinary middle-aged man trying to chase down his lost youth. Like millions of other paunchy middle-aged men across the country. A fair percentage of whom might be inclined to watch pay-per-view fights on cable TV. I could even imagine a slogan: “If there’s hope for Elijah Barton, there’s hope for the rest of us.”
“So have we got a deal?” I said. “I get twenty percent as your manager for covering your training expenses and sanctioning fees up front.”
“Twenty percent.” Elijah shook my hand. His grip was surprisingly loose and delicate, like an old lady’s.
I started to leave. “Sounds like a helluva thing,” I said. “Getting knocked out.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Elijah sat back down on the couch and took two pills. “It’s never happened to me.”
It was only later that I learned that he’d been stopped cold before the third round in two of his last three fights.
6
JUST AFTER TEN that night, Pigfucker walked into a bar called the Irish Pub, put a fifty-dollar bill on the counter and began drinking whiskey until a halo of colored lights appeared around the bartender’s head.
“Keep pouring,” he warned when he saw the kid hesitate after the seventh drink. “Keep pouring, or I’ll take out my gun and shoot you right here.”
The bar was a little sanctuary of nostalgia. Its dark-paneled walls were covered with pictures of scenes from yesteryear: Lillian Russell in petticoats, Cagney in
“Hey,” he asked the bartender. “Where’s my goddamn halo?”
A trio of cops came in and sat down at the table five feet behind his stool. Even in his drunken haze, he recognized one of them, Earl Mack, a black patrol sergeant he’d argued with frequently in the last few years. The other two he didn’t know. One looked exactly like a baby, with light, thin hair and wide, innocent eyes. The third was tall and swarthy, with black curly hair. Pigfucker couldn’t tell if he was Italian or Puerto Rican.
“You know,” said P.F., turning halfway on his stool to face Earl and the others. “I feel sorry for you.”
“And why’s that?” Earl Mack’s eyes barely left the list of mixed drinks on his brown place mat.
“Because you are condemned to clean up after federal gang bangs like this DiGregorio homicide, while I enter the vibrant and exciting world of casino management.”
“Is that so?” Earl bit down on his lips.
“It is,” said P.F. with a sage nod, the whiskey making him boisterous and arrogant.
He saw Earl and his tablemates smirking and thought: To hell with them, the lowly beasts. Let them think he was kidding. His ego was rising as free and lofty as an untethered parade float on Thanksgiving Day.
“In eight months I’ll have twenty years on the job,” he said. “And I’ve already spoken to my good friend, Father Bobby D’Errico, vice president in charge of operations at the Doubloon hotel-casino, about his hiring me as head of security.” He leaned over and winked at Earl. “Maybe I could even take on one of you boys as a square badge. You know, as an act of charity.”
“Really?” Earl flashed a very small smile and gave the waitress his drink order.
P.F. saw the halo of colored lights turning counterclockwise around Earl’s head.
“Do you all know Mr. Pigfucker?” Earl asked his tablemates above the din of the Clancy Brothers singing “The Unicorn” on the jukebox.
The baby and the Puerto Rican shrugged.
“Detective Peter Farley,” he said, leaning off his stool to shake their hands. “Pigfucker, number one.”
“You’re all aware why he’s called the Pigfucker, right?” Earl steepled his fingers.
“It’s from the old Republican political campaigns,” explained P.F., glad of the chance to hold forth. “You call your opponent a Pigfucker and then sit back and wait for him to deny it. Same thing that we do at the station house. Throw the perp in the cell and ask him when he started beating his wife. Presumption of guilt. It’s the cornerstone of our legal system.”
Earl sniffed. “Too bad old P.F. here ain’t done a lick of work in about twelve years. He’s been relying on uniformed officers to find his witnesses and boost his clearance rate since I came in the department.”
P.F. saluted him dismissively. Sour-graping from the small people. Typical. Soon all of this would be behind him anyway. He’d have his own office at the Doubloon with a long-legged secretary and a view of the ocean. He’d walk the casino floor, shaking hands with the high rollers and granting favors to the cocktail waitresses.
“Say, P.F., what was the name of that case?” Earl taunted him.
“Which one?”
“You know. The one you couldn’t clear from ’bout twenty years ago. Paulie Raymond was the detective on it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit you don’t. You kept that file on your desk until about five years ago. It was that Irish guy that was mixed up with Teddy and the Mafia. Mike something.”
“Michael Dillon,” P.F. said quietly.
He stared down at his drink as if calculating the different kinds of sorrow it could cause.
“That’s it!” Earl snapped his fingers and turned back to his tablemates. “Good-lookin’ hustler, they probably buried him out in the Pinelands somewhere. P.F. used to get all misty-eyed because he left a little kid behind and his widow was too crazy to look after him. He even kept the kid’s picture in his drawer.”
“Hey, Earl.” P.F. looked up. “Smoke my joint, all right?”
Earl raised his right hand up to his mouth like a poker sharp figuring how to play a bank-breaking hand. “You know what they say, right? They say you and Paulie couldn’t clear that case because you-all were on Teddy’s payroll.”
“Bullshit, all bullshit,” P.F. muttered, finishing his drink and signaling for the bartender to bring him another. “What do you know about Teddy anyway?”
“I know all about Ted,” Earl said expansively, putting his hands on top of the table. “I grew up in the Virginia Avenue Court projects and when they started dealing reefer and heroin in the courtyard, we all knew it came from Ted. But what blew my mind was coming out of there and finding some of my brother police officers were on his payroll too.”
P.F. gave them his back and tried to think of something to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead he was left staring at the mirror behind the bar. His face looked somehow strange but familiar. The tired eyes, the down- turned mouth, the crooked nose bending away like it was ashamed to be seen with the other features. No question about it, he was starting to look like his father. In fact, it couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven years ago, he’d walked into a bar like this one and found his father drinking the same brand of scotch, with a hooker named Sally Jessy Mayfield on his lap, while he was supposed to be on duty. Captain Andy, who used to be his hero. It turned out he’d been drinking, whoring, taking protection money from the old man who ran the rackets from Philadelphia.
