He lifted his left shoulder an inch. I moved the gun around in my pocket, enough. He grumbled:
“Where do you get that stuff about me not winning?”
“Just something I heard. I didn’t think there was anything in it, except maybe a ducat back to Philly.”
“I oughta bust your jaw, you fat crook.”
“Now’s the time to do it,” I advised him. “If you win tonight you’re not likely to see me again. If you lose, you’ll see me, but your hands won’t be loose.”
I found MacSwain in Murry’s, a Broadway pool room.
“Did you get to him?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s all fixed–if he doesn’t blow town, or say something to his backers, or just pay no attention to me, or–”
MacSwain developed a lot of nervousness.
“You better damn sight be careful,” he warned me. “They might try to put you out the way. He– I got to see a fellow down the street,” and he deserted me.
Poisonville’s prize fighting was done in a big wooden ex-casino in what had once been an amusement park on the edge of town. When I got there at eight-thirty, most of the population seemed to be on hand, packed tight in close rows of folding chairs on the main floor, packed tighter on benches in two dinky balconies.
Smoke. Stink. Heat. Noise.
My seat was in the third row, ringside. Moving down to it, I discovered Dan Rolff in an aisle seat not far away, with Dinah Brand beside him. She had had her hair trimmed at last, and marcelled, and looked like a lot of money in a big gray fur coat.
“Get down on Cooper?” she asked after we had swapped hellos.
“No. You playing him heavy?”
“Not as heavy as I’d like. We held off, thinking the odds would get better, but they went to hell.”
“Everybody in town seems to know Bush is going to dive,” I said. “I saw a hundred put on Cooper at four to one a few minutes ago.” I leaned past Rolff and put my mouth close to where the gray fur collar hid the girl’s ear, whispering: “The dive is off. Better copper your bets while there’s time.”
Her big bloodshot eyes went wide and dark with anxiety, greed, Curiosity, suspicion.
“You mean it?” she asked huskily.
“Yeah.”
She chewed her reddened lips, frowned, asked:
“Where’d you get it?”
I wouldn’t say. She chewed her mouth some more and asked:
“Is Max on?”
“I haven’t seen him. Is he here?”
“I suppose so,” she said absent-mindedly, a distant look in her eyes. Her lips moved as if she were counting to herself.
I said: “Take it or leave it, but it’s a gut.”
She leaned forward to look sharply into my eyes, clicked her teeth together, opened her bag, and dragged out a roll of bills the size of a coffee can. Part of the roll she pushed at Rolff.
“Here, Dan, get it down on Bush. You’ve got an hour anyway to look over the odds.”
Rolff took the money and went off on his errand. I took his seat. She put a hand on my forearm and said:
“Christ help you if you’ve made me drop that dough.”
I pretended the idea was ridiculous.
The preliminary bouts got going, four-round affairs between assorted hams. I kept looking for Thaler, but couldn’t see him. The girl squirmed beside me, paying little attention to the fighting, dividing her time between asking me where I had got my information and threatening me with hell-fire and damnation if it turned out to be a bust.
The semi-final was on when Rolff came back and gave the girl a handful of tickets. She was straining her eyes over them when I left for my own seat. Without looking up she called to me:
“Wait outside for us when it’s over.”
Kid Cooper climbed into the ring while I was squeezing through to my seat. He was a ruddy straw-haired solid-built boy with a dented face and too much meat around the top of his lavender trunks. Ike Bush, alias Al Kennedy, came through the ropes in the opposite corner. His body looked better–slim, nicely ridged, snaky–but his face was pale, worried.