Who is Teddy Villanova? Read online

  It was as if some giant, even larger than Bakewell, seized my shoulders and shook me as though I were an empty suit of clothes. I was helpless in his grasp and under his gasp, and the eventual understanding, when he proved silent to my entreaties, that I pleaded to an apparition created by shock, did nothing to arrest my frenzy.

  How long I continued to quake I cannot say, but eventually I discovered that I had simultaneously retreated across the hall and through the inward-opening door of the cellarway and now stood among the trash cans on the landing there. Sam had presumably gone down the communicating stairs. I called to him, but got no response.

  Remembering his late agitation under the muzzle of my gun, I cried: “I won’t shoot you! I lost the pistol anyway!”

  His distant answer was heard: “I know. I took it and threw it away.”

  “Come on! There’s been a new development.” He remained silent. I started down the steps.

  “Stop!” he screamed. “You got a knife now? I got a club!”

  “I’m unarmed!” There was nothing for it but to descend all the way and confront him in his refuge behind the corroded boiler.

  Indeed he brandished a baseball bat, a rare instrument to see anywhere in Manhattan, where stickball, played with a broom handle between the sewer covers that serve as bases, is exuberant youth’s most popular game after the brutalizing of candy-store owners. Sam demonstrated that he was no athlete by holding it cross-handed, in the fashion that one is assured as a child will break one’s wrists.

  “Listen,” said I, straining to see him in the gloomy corner, “now be serious. There’s a body in the elevator. I suspect it is dead. It’s the great big man I asked you whether you’d seen.”

  Sam emerged slowly, clearing me from his projected route by threatening to use the bat as cattle prod. “So you found the gun?”

  “Forget about me except as victim! He savagely beat me.”

  “So he’s the one who’s dead?”

  I sighed. “He left my office alive. I didn’t see him again until his body came down on the elevator—dead, I believe. I do not know. I am not a physician. What does one do when not certain? Call the police or an ambulance?” Observe my lack of true concern for Bakewell; I confess I was relieved to see him downed. “And, listen here, as long as I’ve got hold of you: who’s the E. Newhouse listed on the board as occupying my office, 3A?”

  “So many questions!” Sam complained, lifting both arms, the bat still in hand. I seemed however to have allayed his fears, for he proceeded to put his back to me and smite the old boiler with a mighty blow of the Louisville Slugger. “Loosens interior rust,” said he as if quoting the language of an instruction manual, “which if allowed to accumulate clogs the valves, hence discoloration of water.”

  It took me some minutes to induce him to return to the ground floor, any sound from which was obscured, while we were below, by the clangor of wood striking galvanized steel, for he gave the boiler a succession of blows.

  On the way up, I asked him, over my shoulder, still another question, my attraction to trivia having survived thus far in the unfolding adventure: “You’ve never hurt your wrist with that grasp?”

  “An old wife’s sale,” said he. “Gives more power: you can hittem outaduh park, like Teddy Villanova. He always used crosshand.”

  Had I not at that moment reached the garbage cans on the landing, I might have fallen backwards upon him.

  “Teddy Villanova! I just asked whether you had heard that name. For God’s sake.”

  He gained the top stair. “Gonna let me up?” I stepped into the lobby, my back towards the elevator.

  “He’s a ballplayer?”

  “Years ago,” said Sam, shrugging. He lifted the lid of one of the cans. “Before your time. When the Dodgers were still at Ebbetts’. He peered into the container. “Who eats all the Blimpies? I should get me some franchise. Orange Julius! The coloreds drink that like water. But if I did, no nigger’d be thirsty, shit on me.”

  “I want to hear more,” I said. “But first, look at this body.” I turned and went to the elevator. Went in the elevator and walked unobstructedly about the entire floor of the cab. Bakewell was neither there, nor, as admittedly unlikely as that would have been, on the walls or ceiling; the trap door in the latter was firmly fixed, the turn buttons sealed in place with verdigris.

  “I got one answer,” said Sam, grimacing and rubbing the bald spot on his crown, across which he futilely directed strands of the canescing hair, barbered long for perhaps that purpose, from his temples. “Don’t call neither police nor meat wagon. Call the loony bin.”

  “I tell you he was here.”

  “Your winos come and go like a fart. You can’t count on them. That’s why I lock the inside door. See, it’s open again. You people never listen to nothing.” Indignantly Sam marched to the entrance, deftly kicked out the wedge that had defied me, and pulled the door to.

  I dogged him. “Where’d Villanova go after the old days? You sure you’ve got the right name?”

  “Household wade,” Sam said impatiently. “Went to hell second year inna majors, hit minus two hundred. Spring training the next, in Flaridar is killed by a shock inna water.”

  “Shark?”

  “Electricity,” said Sam. “That was before the portable radio took over the plug-in set. His fell inna tub while connected to the one-ten from the socket.”

  “A long time ago, then.”

  “Thirty-five or -six. A man named John Nance Garner was Vice President of the United States.” Showing vanity about his command of historical detail, Sam began to name the other members of Roosevelt’s cabinet: “Harold Ickes, Interior; James J. Farley, Post Office…

  I tuned out. My, or I should say rather Bakewell’s (and Washburn’s), Villanova must be the son or grandson of the ballplayer, if indeed there was a connection. Still, it was none too common a name. But it was comely, no doubt Italian, Villanuova originally, the u having been discarded for the convenience of American orthography. Slight variations would occur in the other languages derived from Latin: Villeneuve for a Frenchman, Villanueve to a speaker of Spanish; Vilanovo, if you wanted to go as far as that, in Portuguese. I was once a formal student of languages and have continued as an amateur, with a smattering of many.

  With Bakewell gone, and Sam disbelieving in his existence, there would be little point in summoning the police and of course none at all in calling an ambulance. I had only the name to go on, if indeed I wished to pursue this as yet totally absurd affair…Villanova. In German it would be Neuhaus. In English—

  I seized Sam’s sleeve, getting the French cuff, which was fastened with a link in the form of eyeball, a souvenir of his wife’s ophthalmologist brother, a horrible, cold ceramic thing to graze.

  “Newhouse!” I cried. “Who is he? Why is he listed at three A?” I had Sam’s shirt but not his arm: the fabric was strained as he made evasive action. I let him go.

  “Thanks for that,” said he, for some reason adjusting the other sleeve, that one I had not grasped. “I got news for you: I never heard of Newhouse. But I wish he was in three A, or anybody else instead of you. You stopped some time ago being my kind of guy. You want outa the lease, you just ask.”

  Notwithstanding these and like protests, I forced him through the inner doorway and pointed at the board.

  Not only was NEWHOUSE now gone; the names that preceded and followed it in the file were so closely arranged as not to allow an intervening space where it could ever have been. My first reaction was to ascertain whether FUCING and WERN were back, establishing a pattern of nomenclatural vandalism perhaps only coincidental with the Bakewell-Villanova-Washburn affair—but they were not.

  After this experience Sam washed his hands of me— literally, with air—and left by sidewalk, though not without giving me his plan for lunch: “I’m going for chinks.” Which was to say, chow mein. He added that, hoping to eat in peace, he would not disclose which of the local Oriental establishments he headed
for. He was safe: I don’t care for toy provender.

  I returned to the third floor by elevator, still staring around the cab; and of course I had adequate time for wonder, the conveyance rising with the speed of a backlash of taffy.

  Peggy was exploring her teeth with her finger as I entered my office. The crumpled Blimpie bag was before her, and a can of Tab, by now surely empty, stood at her elbow. If I knew her feckless habits, this rubbish would stay in place till she went home—three days from now. That sort of thing annoys me, though Lord knows I am guilty of it myself, but I am not a—I was going to say girl, but the feminist propaganda of a few years back had got to me (I am now consistently rude to women at doorways)—I am not an employee. Such neglect implies a lack of regard for the person who pays the salary, the mention of which reminds me that I hadn’t paid hers and therefore the point, otherwise a feasible one, must be dropped.

  “Gawd, I’m still hungry,” she said, with the same righteousness as that in which Zola penned the memorable J’accuse. “I couldn’t afford Blimpie’s Best. I had to take Number One, all roll.”

  “I haven’t had the leisure for lunch, myself,” said I. “I was savaged by the gigantic hoodlum you nonchalantly admitted. I called for help, but—God’s blood!—you were already gone.”

  “I don’t have to take that type language,” she asseverated in her fire-siren voice, her plump breasts bouncing. “My brother’d pound you to a pulp if he heard you.” I didn’t know to which brother she referred, the sanitation-union functionary or the one who was a petty timeserver in Queens Borough Hall, sans power to fix a traffic ticket, or perhaps merely the inclination to exert it: earning him, at any rate, a deafening blow on the ear from an offended cousin at one of the Tumulty family’s Thanksgiving Donny-brooks.

  However the statement suggested something. “You don’t have a relative who’s a cop, by chance?”

  She was immediately mollified by the personal note. “How about a fireman?”

  “What I need, you see, is somebody to assist me in an investigation.”

  “So call the precinct.”

  “Remember that detective who came last year when your typewriter was stolen?” This had happened when she was down hall at toilet, I in back office on phone—the crime, I mean; the syntax however refers to that of the dick, who had said little else, sneeringly disregarding me, leeringly studying her bosom; he had never been heard from since. What I meant now, to Peggy, was that he had been useless. “Anyway, I don’t want this on record, at least not yet.”

  A smirk was peculiarly unattractive on Peggy’s visage, which was rather pretty when totally, egglike, without expression, and nearly beautiful when truly lugubrious, probably in imitation of the Pieta, an ever available model for Catholic women and greatly preferable to, say, a motion-picture trull.

  “I thought”—she simpered here—“I thought he was kinda cute.” She soon frowned. “He was wearing a wedding band.”

  In her sexual attitudes Peggy dated from a bygone age. Despite the public harangues of polymorphous perverts and their tracts on venereal liberation, she still looked first at a man’s third finger and not at the swell of his groin. My fancy could not cope with the image of Peggy at the act of darkness—though my mind’s eye could easily enough depict her in the shower, shaving her calves, or trimming her toenails.

  “I gather,” I said, “that you have absolutely no interest in my troubles of the preceding twenty minutes.”

  I must have expressed this with a feeling more plangent than the skin-deep sardonicism I intended, for Peggy, who like nurse or nun ignored mere peevishness but rallied round at the suggestion of weightier agonies, gave me a gathering of eyebrows and the pursed mouth of formal compassion.

  “Aw, Russ…”

  She had first-named it from the beginning, even when I paid her regularly, even when I tried calling her Miss Tumulty.

  However, the current display of sympathy was enough to use as a cue for bravado. “I’ve taken my knocks before. I’m not down yet. I’ve only begun to fight.” I realized I was speaking in the hackneyed idiom of Washburn’s letter, but it proved an effective one with Peggy, who looked at me with an admiration I had never before identified. For my part, on the instant I began to find her desirable.

  “Have your eyes always been bright green?” I asked.

  But this was the wrong string to pluck. She quickly drew back in spirit, while leaning forward, like a hungry truck driver at a lunch counter, on crossed forearms.

  “Why,” she asked, “are you giving me that bull?”

  “This is serious,” I quickly barked. “I’ve got three identities to track down. Get your pencil: Bakewell, Christian or for that matter Hebraic or Islamic name unknown. Had you ever seen or heard of him before he lumbered in that door?” A misapplication of verb; when passing through portals the man was, as we know, as adroit as an eel undulating through seaweed. “Don’t rely on memory: check the files. Next, Teddy Villanova.” Pronouncing that name had begun to give me a weird thrill. “There was a baseball player by that name in the nineteen thirties. Call one of the newspaper sports departments and find out whether he had a son who would be alive. A grandson would not be out of the question. Criminals begin young these days: I know a girl whose wallet was filched in a supermarket and swears she had been near nobody but a child in a stroller. The ballplayer incidentally was accidentally electrocuted in the bathtub. He played for Brooklyn.”

  Peggy had put pencil to paper as ordered. Now she raised the former, put the eraser to her lips and withdrew it with an osculatory sound. “That was Eddie Villiers,” said she. “If a Teddy Villanova ever played for Brooklyn, I never heard of him.”

  “You’re a baseball fan?” But already I had the awful conviction that whether she was or not, she had exonerated Teddy V. from the charge of being a professional athlete—to my taste, a very grave one. Sam and his tin ear!

  “Fanatic,” said she, “a real nut on the subject. A buff.”

  “O.K., then forget Villiers,” which I could already see, upside down from my perspective, on her notepad. “Check our files for Villanova, Teddy. Also Newhouse, E., which may be a translation of it.”

  “Of what?”

  I had to explain in some detail. Scholarship, unless applied to some practical end, had never impressed her in the past. She was skeptical of its value now.

  “But maybe it isn’t.”

  “All right. But do it. The last name on my list is Donald Washburn the Second.” I watched her pencil. “No, don’t write ‘the Second.’ Make a Roman numeral Two.”

  But she thought she had me there. “You say ‘Second,’ though, on the phone, don’t you? ‘Two’ sounds snobbish.”

  “The call was supposed to be about Villanova. As he’s not the ballplayer, you don’t have to make it.” I said this with less exasperation than I felt, for she might have bridled at much acerbity. “However, it would be a good idea to search the phone book, in fact all the directories for all the boroughs including Staten Island—especially Staten Island, now that I think of it: a traditional lair for Mafiosi.”

  “Then Jersey too.”

  “Jersey absolutely! You’re picking up the rhythm now.” “Though Bakewell and Washburn aren’t wop names by far.”

  I had put Washburn’s letter in my right rear pocket, transferring the damp handkerchief to the left. Oddly enough, in view of the recent disappearances, the folded missive was yet there.

  “What do you make of this?”

  Peggy pushed it to arm’s length: at twenty-nine her vision was middle-aged, but she was too vain to wear glasses.

  “It’s certainly well written, I’ll say that. From his way with words, I’d say he’s a college professor or newspaperman.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But here’s my hypothesis, as of now: Washburn is a kid, by which I don’t mean literally a child, who may or may not be of good family, but he ran up quite a gambling debt with Teddy Villanova, which must surely be the name of a m
obster. He cannot pay it. Therefore Teddy has threatened him. Bakewell might be an old retainer of the Washburn family, a butler or the like, but formerly wrestler or strong man in the circus— perhaps a hired goon, but in this theory Washburn would be too broke to hire one. Bakewell at any rate comes here to warn Villanova to call off the hounds. He gets to my office by mistake, or by some cunning misdirection— there’s a mystery there, all right.” I told her how “New-house” had come and gone from the board.

  She threw her open palms at me, the pencil secured on one with a crossed thumb. “That’s a P.R. delivery boy does that.”

  “That’s your theory, anyway,” said I.

  “I’ve seen ‘em at work.”

  “Done nothing?”

  “Get a switchblade in my breadbasket?” Peggy horse-laughed at her stolid Tab can.

  “Anyway, assuming that I was in the employ of Villanova, Bakewell delivered his threat to me, driving it home with a hammer blow to my cranium.”

  Peggy’s lip curled. “What good is that gun of yours, then?”

  “How do you know about that?” I was furious. “How dare you sneak around when I’m away. Yes, sneak! You won’t set foot in that room when I’m there. I suppose you think I’ll throw you on the couch?” My anger with a woman often takes a sexual turn, of its own energy as it were, whatever inspired it. “I’ve got nothing better to do than rape a frigid spinster from Queens?”

  Peggy had closed her eyes and composed her face into a pious mask, maintaining it until I finished, which was immediately thereafter that below-the-belt remark, unforgivable from employer to employee, whether or not she herself respected the hierarchical code.

  “Please forgive me,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I was ferociously assaulted only twenty minutes ago. I may have a concussion of the brain.”

  She was coolly smiling in what seemed blatant vanity. “But you were asking about the gun. I saw it once when looking for a dictionary. Knowing you as I do”—she had the effrontery to waggle a finger at me here—“and I certainly do know you, I know that it’s legally registered. You’re an obedient little boy when it comes to the rules of society, though you’re immoral with girls.”