Росс Макдональд: The Way Some People Die

Somewhere out of sight a punching-bag was rat-tat-tatting on a board. I stepped through a doorless aperture opposite the door I’d come in by, and found myself in the main hall. It was comparatively small, with seats for maybe a thousand rising on four sides to the girders that held up the roof. An ingot of lead-gray light from a skylight fell through the moted air onto the empty roped square on the central platform. Still no people, but you could tell that people had been there. The same air had hung for months in the windowless building, absorbing the smells of human sweat and breath, roasted peanuts and beer, white and brown cigarettes, Ben Hur perfume and bay rum and hair oil and tired feet. A social researcher with a good nose could have written a Ph. D. thesis about that air.

The punching bag kept up an under-beat to the symphony of odors, tum-tee-tum, tum-tee-tum, tum-tee-tum-tee-tum-tee-tum. I moved toward a door with a push-bar marked EXIT, and the beat sounded louder. The door opened into an alley that led to the rear of the building. A colored boy was working on a bag fastened to the corner of the wall. On the other side of the alley a Negro woman was watching him across a board fence. Her black arms rested on the top of the fence and her chin was laid on her arms. Her great dark eyes had swallowed the rest of her face, and looked as if they were ready to swallow the boy.

“Who runs this place?”

He went on beating the bag with his left, his back to me and the woman. He was naked to the waist; the rest of him was covered by a pair of faded khakis, and pitiful canvas sneakers that showed half his bare black toes. He switched to his right without breaking the drumming rhythm. The full sun was on him, and the sweat stood out on his back and made it glisten.

He was light-heavy, I guessed, but he didn’t look more than eighteen, in spite of the G. I. pants. With his height and heavy bone-structure, he’d grow up into a heavy-weight. The woman looked as if she could hardly wait.

After a while she called to him: “The gentleman asked something, Simmie.” All gentlemen were white; all whites were gentlemen.

He dropped his arms and turned slowly. The taut muscles of his chest and stomach stood out in detailed relief like moulded iron sculpture. The head was narrow and long, with a slanting forehead, small eyes, broad nose, thick mouth. He breathed through the nose. “You want me?”

“I wondered who runs this place.”

“I’m the janitor. You want something?”

“I’d like to talk to the boss. Is he around?”

“Not today. Mr. Tarantine is out of town.”

“What about Mr. Speed? Isn’t Herman Speed the boss around here?”

“Not any more he isn’t. Mr. Tarantine been running things since the beginning of the year. Before that.”

“What happened to Herman?” The surprise in my voice sounded hollow. “He leave town?”

“Yeah. Mr. Speed left town.” He wasted no words.

“He got shot,” the woman said. “Somebody riddled his guts. It broke his health. It was a crying shame, too, he was a fine big man.”

“Shut up, Violet,” the boy said. “You don’t know nothing about it.”

“Shut up yourself,” she answered in ready repartee.

“Who shot him?” I asked her.

“Nobody knows. Maybe he knows, but he wouldn’t tell the police, he was real tight-mouthed.”

“I said shut up,” the boy repeated. “You’re wasting the gentleman’s time.”

I said: “Where’s Tarantine?”

“Nobody knows that either,” the woman said. “He left town last week and nobody seen him since. Looks as if they left young Simmie here to put on the shows all by himself.” She laughed throatily. “Maybe if you talked to Mrs. Tarantine, she might know where he is. She just lives down the road a few blocks from here.”

The boy jumped for the fence on silent feet, but the woman was already out of his reach. “Stay on your own side, Simmie, I given you fair warning. Trim’s in his room.”

“You’re trying to get me in trouble, been trying to get me in trouble all winter long. Ain’t you? Why don’t you get out of my sight and stay out of my sight?”

She wiggled her heavy body disdainfully, and disappeared around the corner of the buildings; warped ply-board cubicles laid end to end like miniature ten-foot boxcars and fronting on another alley. There were dark faces at some of the windows in the row and after a while the woman appeared at one of them.

The boy was talking by then. I’d broken through his reserve by praising his muscles and asking about his fights. He had beaten the local talent, he said, and was grooming himself for his professional debut. He called it that. Unfortunately they hadn’t had fights in Pacific Point since he started to get his growth. Mr. Tarantine was going to try and get him on a card at San Diego one of these weeks. I suggested that Mr. Tarantine was a pretty good friend of his, and he agreed.

“I hear he married a beautiful wife.”

“Mr. Tarantine got no wife.”

“I thought Violet said something about a Mrs. Tarantine.”

“That’s the old lady. Violet don’t know nothing.” He cast a wicked glance across the fence at the woman in the window.

“What does she think about the trouble he’s in?”

“There isn’t any trouble,” the boy said. “Mr. Tarantine is a smart man. He doesn’t get into trouble.”

“I heard there was some trouble about the pinball collections.”

“That’s crap. He doesn’t collect on the pinball machines anymore. That was last year, when Mr. Speed was here. Are you a policeman, mister?” His face had closed up hard.

“I’m opening a place on the south side. I want a machine put in.”

“Look it up in the phone book, mister. It’s under Western Variety.”

I thanked him. The drumming of the bag began again before I was out of earshot. After a while he’d be a fighting machine hired out for twenty or twenty-five dollars to take it and dish it out. If he was really good, he might be airborne for ten years, sleeping with yellower flesh than Violet, eating thick steaks for breakfast, dishing it out. Then drop back onto a ghetto street corner with the brains scrambled in his skull.

I stopped for gas at a service station near the arena and looked up Tarantine in the phone book attached to its pay phone. There was only one entry under the name, a Mrs. Sylvia Tarantine of 1401 Sanedres Street. I tried the number on the telephone and got no answer.

Sanedres Street was the one I was on. It ran cross-town through the center of the Negro and Mexican district, a street of rundown cottages and crowded shacks interspersed with liquor stores and pawnshops, poolroom-bars and flyblown lunchrooms and storefront tabernacles. As the street approached the hills on the other side of the ball park, it gradually improved. The houses were larger and better kept. They had bigger yards, and the children playing in the yards were white under their dirt.

The house I was looking for stood on a corner at the foot of the slope. It was a one-story frame cottage with a flat roof, almost hidden behind a tangle of untended laurel and cypress. The front door was paned with glass and opened directly into a dingy living-room. I knocked on the door and again I got no answer.

There was a British racing motorcycle, almost new, under a tarpaulin at the side of the house. Moving over to look at it, I noticed a woman hanging sheets on a line in the yard next door. She took a couple of clothespins out of her mouth and called: “You looking for something?”

“Mrs. Tarantine,” I said. “Does she live here?”

“Sure thing, only she ain’t at home just now. She went to see her boy in the hospital.”