Len slid out fast and nailed Tubs lightly behind the ear before he could turn himself around.
I noticed then that Len Kennedy had virtually no marks on him except for a straight nose which had a tiny slant toward left field.
But in the third round, I settled back in my seat in disgust. He had everything in the wide world but a punch. The punches looked good, looked as if they had the old zing, but Tubs shook them off the way a honey-bear shakes off bees. When Gowal had licked Tubs he had dropped him on his face with his arms spread wide and a beatific smile on his lips.
Len got the decision, of course, but it wasn’t a popular bout. For a fighter to have that indefinable something called “color” he has to start with a punch and a killer instinct. Those two things seem to go together.
I ran into Max a week later and he said, “What do you think, Mike?”
“You want the truth?”
“Would I ask if I didn’t?”
“Max, you got a nice clean boy. A wonderful boy. He ought to teach boxing in some nice clean Ivy League college. He could maybe smash a fly on the wall flat — if he hit it square.”
Max just grinned and said, “Come along. Want to show you something.”
Len was working out at Dannegan’s. But it wasn’t the usual workout. I saw that at once. Len grinned at me. The sweat was running down his face. Max had him turn his back to us and pull the sweat shirt up around his neck. It was a smoothly muscled back.
“Move your arm, kid, your right. A slow motion punch.”
Max pointed to a little oval pad of muscle just below the right shoulder blade. “Mike, you watch that muscle right there.”
I did. It was smooth at first and then as Len’s arm got out further it bunched up.
“I don’t know the right names of the muscles, Mike. All I know is that on every slugger I ever see, that little fella is oversize. It gives the snap to the punch.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Sure you do. On Len here, the muscle is small. Okay, we find the workout to make it big.”
Len pulled down his shirt and began to work again on the heavy bag. His lips were moving. He was arm weary.
“How many?” Max asked.
“Over half,” Len grunted.
As we walked away Max said, “He can throw fifty a minute. Three thousand an hour. I got him on a four-hour workout. Six thousand with each arm.”
“Won’t he get muscle-bound?” I asked.
“Not with the rest of the workout.”
“What’s that?”
Max grinned. “I make him swim two hours a day. You ever see a muscle-bound swimmer?”
That is why the record book looks so odd when it gives the statistics on Len Kennedy. All those decisions in a row and then the beginning of the string of knockouts.
I saw the third one in the string. Everything was exactly the same as in the Tubs Warner bout. The punches looked just the same. Tubs had shaken them off. The kid that Len fought tried to shake them off, too. He shook off a few and then he wilted at the knees. When he got back up he was an angular, dancing scarecrow, blundering in windmill fashion around the ring. When Len got close enough he chilled him with a short, right, overhand chop. He had his back to me. I saw the little pad of muscle stiffen. Only it wasn’t so little.
Stone Gowal had been on top of the heap for two years. I was in a Village club one night and the master of ceremonies had one of the spots switched to a table on the other side of the floor. Stone gave the folks his party smile. A little table for two, he had.
Seeing the gal at the table with him almost made me bite a piece out of the rim of my glass. When the show was over and the house lights went back on, I made certain.
Yes, it was Billy Lee Gleason. Her shoulders were bare and smooth and they were the shade of ice tea with milk.
Ignoring the glare of the gal I was with, I excused myself and went on over to their table. Stone’s shoulders were so wide they were grotesque.
“Hi ya, Mike,” Gowal said in his husky fighter’s voice.
I nodded to him, spun a chair around from a nearby table with a “reserved” sign, sat down and said, “Imagine seeing you here, Billy Lee.”
To tell the truth, she didn’t look too out of place. With a touch of aqua eye shadow, a bit too much goo on the ripe lips and an extreme hair-do, she looked like any other club chick.
“How have you been, Mike?” she asked, using the tone of voice that said she didn’t care how I’d been. Even thick-head Gowal got the chill and beamed with delight.
“Max know who you’re out with?” I asked.
“What’s that to you?” Stone rasped, his eyes narrowing. A big gray fist on the table top slowly tightened.
Billy Lee slipped her arm through his, ran her finger tips back and forth, up and down his hand. She leaned closer to him and said, “Don’t get steamed, honey-bun. He’s a newsboy. Remember?”
“I don’t care who the hell he is,” Stone Gowal said without taking his eyes off me. “Crack wise and I break his mouth.”
Billy Lee looked at me and lifted her chin. “I don’t remember asking you to sit down here, Mike.”
“Nice to have seen you folks,” I said. I went back to my gal. But my heart wasn’t in the evening. I kept remembering Billy Lee at ten. Without reaching too far for the comparison, seeing her with Gowal was like seeing an Easter lily floating down an open sewer. I wondered how Max was taking it. And at the same time I thought I could see why Billy Lee was chumming up to Gowal. There was something in every woman that responds to brutality, just as there is a streak of brutality in even the mildest of men. I thought of the two of them together and nearly gagged on a perfectly good Scotch and water.
The next day I looked up Max. He had a bleak look. I didn’t have to open my mouth. He saw the look on my face and turned his back. “A lot of people been telling me,” he said. “She was twenty-one last Tuesday. What can I do?”
Len Kennedy was within earshot, working on the heavy bag. With his next punch he nearly busted the seams and let out the sand.
It was just another sordid story. The big city has a lot of stories like that. In my game you’re supposed to get used to it. Somehow, I’ve never been able to grow a thick enough shell. Something always knifes through and gets hold of me deep down inside.
Max Gleason should have had to wait another three or four years before getting Len up into the big time. But a month later Len was booked to fight Gowal. The whole distance for the title. I was on vacation when the deal was made and when I got back I started to dig out the angles. It was something that shouldn’t have happened — but it did. The syndicate doesn’t play that way. But they did.
I picked up a rumor here and a word there and a hint the other place. All of them steered me right to Billy Lee. We sat across from each other in a drug store and she drank a coke while I tried to get the facts from her.
Finally I understood. I stared at her and said, “You fool! You wonderful damn fool!”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“But how did you know it was going to work? How did you know that if you broke a bunch of dates with Stone Gowal and went out with Len that Stone would force his managers to make a bout with Len?”
She shrugged. “I told Gowal that I thought Len could lick him. And that this little girl was going to go out with the best man, bar none. It was as simple as that.”
“You could have gotten in a terrible mess, Billy Lee.”
Her level eyes were on mine. “Mike, ever since Stone crossed dad, I’ve been planning this. It had to work. And I was able to handle Stone.” Her eyes looked haunted. “But just harely. Now I keep my door looked nights and a gun under my pillow. I had him running around in mad little circles. It isn’t love with him. It’s just wanting to destroy. And now his pride is hurt. It’s up to Len, now. Len has to win.”