No One Rides for Free

by Larry Beinhart

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  I called Marlowe. It took him a day to get back to me. When he did, I explained that someone was pointing a finger at him. I didn’t see him as the killer, I claimed. But if it wasn’t him, who was it? He said he had no idea. I told him he better think about it.

  Klughorn was next. I asked him how come he had missed Wood’s embezzlement for all those years. He got huffy. I suggested that if another problem turned up, and if he, as comptroller, had missed that too, Over & East might start looking for replacement parts.

  I checked in with Diller, with Scott, Culligan and Shaw. No one was particularly eager to speak to me, or even pleased to hear from me.

  I was wondering whether or not to call Goreman when he called me.

  “Young man,” he said, “you are shaking people up.”

  “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “If it goes on too long, I will. In the short run, it’s interesting.”

  “You set this game up with your party, your introductions, your stories and confessions. What is your game?”

  “I won’t know until you play it out.” Then he said, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

  When I had Christina, it somehow made things work better at home. I was happy and dealt with Glenda and Wayne from that happiness. Without her, I grew restless and hungry. Glenda and I began to fight. Maybe the waiting for something to happen was part of it also. I’m not good at waiting. An argument over the profound matter of who did more shopping found its way down the spiral of every irritation we had ever felt. It ended with me storming out and sleeping in the office for two nights. I avoided Glenda’s calls as Christina avoided mine.

  Finally I called her back. She was ready to make peace. She never did quarrel for the sake of fighting. She was a fair and generous fighter. She never held a grudge.

  Friday morning I left home early, just to get out. I went to the office. Joey D’ was there, but there was nothing shaking. I went over to the courts, played badly and didn’t enjoy it. I worked on the machines for a while. It hurt. I took a long steam bath and a long shower. I went out, ate, drank a lot of coffee, did the crossword. When I left me restaurant it was drizzling with gusting winds. I decided to walk the forty blocks to the office with the windy rain slapping my face, the cabs splashing me and the umbrella wielders trying to put my eyes out.

  I shoved some people. Subtly and not too hard. But still I managed to provoke some antisocial behavior. One umbrella warrior got me in the ear. I reached out and knocked the thing away. When it tilted, the wind grabbed it and pulled it from his hand. It shot happily down the street, then died a messy but mercifully quick death under the wheels of a Daily News truck.

  The umbrella man turned on me. He was bigger than me and probably younger. He cursed. I just stared back, letting him know that I felt meaner than he did, that I was perfectly willing to let him come at me.

  “Asshole,” he said. That sounded right, so I said, “Yeah.” He hurried off, down into the subway.

  Joey was waiting when I got back to the office. He suggested we go out for a drink together.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause you’re being some kind of asshole,” he explained. There was a consensus forming.

  I dried myself with brown paper towels, the worst kind, and got into some drier clothes. We walked silent and solemn up the West Side. The hookers huddled in doorways, dashing out occasionally to ask if someone wanted a date. I thought of Christina.

  Come back when the policeman is in another street

  And Beatrice will let you see her thin soul under the paint.

  We went to Kevin Murphy’s place on Ninth, off Fifty-third Street. Kevin is long dead. They say his wake was something to remember. The new owner is a Puerto Rican named Angel. When he first took over, he tried to spruce the place up and attract the pimp trade. But the cops kept hanging out and people who have money don’t want to associate with policemen. Eventually the photos of ballplayers from mythical teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, the signed photo of Cardinal Cooke, and signs that said things like “The Lord created whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world” went back up on the walls. Kevin Murphy’s was born a cops’ bar, and as a cops’ bar it lives. We walked in among them.

  They were all right, the lot of them, it wasn’t up to them

  And they knew it; if somebody had come along and said,

  I’ve got a spot for a two-legged animal in the world I’m working on,

  They wouldn’t have made anything like they had been made.

  We sat in a booth and the waitress came over. Joey ordered scotch. I said make it two, and make it Johnny Black.

  “What’s bugging you?”

  “It’s just the waiting.”

  “It’s the broad. You’ve let yourself go bats over a broad.”

  “When that guy came after me in D.C., I busted up his kneecap so he’ll never walk right again. It bothers me how good I feel about that.”

  “Johnny Walker Black,” the waitress announced.

  “That’s self-defense,” Joey said.

  “I know what you mean,” the waitress said. “If I drink that bar scotch I wake up with a mean hangover. I mean mean.”

  “If it turns out that it was Charles Goreman that hit Wood, I’m not gonna like it. I like the man.”

  “Wallowing in ambiguity is like wallowing in self-pity,” Joey said. “It’s dumb, and you like doing it. You have a good mind, you’re a smart guy. You’re supposed to use that to help yourself, not punish yourself.”

  “There’s a real problem with this case. You know what it is? There isn’t gonna be any smoking gun. Down in D.C. the trail will just dry up when it gets to Wellby. If Wellby has to have the second man, whoever he is, hit, he will. Then there’s the gap between Wellby and the guy who asked for the hit. There’s only one person who can close that gap: Wellby. And there’s only one circumstance in which he would close that gap: to buy himself out of the chair. So if I find out whodunnit, whaddam I gonna do about it?”

  “Maybe that’s not your job.”

  “What? … Oh yeah, that’s true,” I said, “but who is going to do something about it? I’m going to sit there and know, and watch nothing happen about it?”

  “That comes with the territory,” Joey said.

  “Well, well, if it ain’t the world’s prize fuck, Tony Cassella,” another voice said.

  I looked up. Jack Whelan was standing over me, drunk and sneering. I shrugged and looked away.

  “Wazzamatta, cocksucker, don’ wanna talk to me? … Well, I don’ care, I wanna talk to you, fuckface.”

  “Go home,” Joey said to him.

  “Fuck off, old man,” Whelan told him. “This is the little cocksucker who stuck a knife in my back. I just want to tell him that I’m looking forward to pissing on his grave.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, Whelan. You ain’t gonna do anything to me and you know it. Stop the noise and get out of here,” I told him and went back to my scotch.

  The Corrections Department does not attract the highest caliber of recruits, mostly Jack Whelans. I knew how to read, write and pass tests. By their standards, a shining star. So they made me an investigator.

  The Corrections Department takes the Whelans and gives them inadequate training, inadequate supervision and inadequate motivation. The corruption comes easy. I became aware of it very quickly and wrote memos. Nothing was done.

  Then one day an inmate, flying on coke and infirmary morphine, went on a rampage and killed three other inmates before he was stopped. One was a nineteen-year-old, serving a year and a day for a barroom brawl, who was due to get out in two days. The family made noise. It came out in the investigation that the killer had gotten the drugs from a guard. That made the New York Times. The commissioner decided to mount an internal investigation before the outside world handed him his own Knapp Commission. My memos were remembered. I went in undercover. Whelan was on
e of the people I put away.

  When it started I was clean and righteous. It seemed simple. But I was putting people away who had been my friends, some of them. And I was learning about them. For Whelan, who I never liked, the extra money he made doing favors for inmates was the difference between public school and parochial school for his daughters. When he was indicted, his wife filed for divorce and he lost the kids as well.

  I saw how easy it was for me to keep my nose clean. I didn’t have the financial responsibilities of a family. I had only applied for the Corrections job because there was a hiring freeze in the Police Department. When the P.D. started hiring again, my name figured to be high on the list. I was not stuck as a prison guard for life. My righteousness began to feel like a cheat.

  I thought that the drinking helped. Fighting seemed to help too, when I was doing it. In the morning I began to realize that it was called assault and disturbing the peace. Some of the people I went drinking with, and some of the women I was sleeping with, liked a little cocaine. So did I once I tasted it. Simple possession was a felony.

  Sometimes, when I was hurting and hungover, I’d use some coke to get me through the day. When a day costs an extra fifty or hundred dollars, a salary doesn’t stretch the way it used to. One way to deal with that is to deal enough to cover costs.

  Gradually I built a string of felonies as good as Jack Whelan’s. The only difference left was that he had one arrest and one conviction. That wasn’t different enough for me to live with putting him in a cage. If we had been that different to start with. I lost perspective on that question.

  The center couldn’t hold, and the pieces of me began to scatter farther and farther apart. I didn’t have any trouble understanding why Whelan hated Cassella. At the time, it was something we could agree on.

  “Maybe I will do something about it,” Whelan said.

  “You won’t,” Joey replied, “if for no other reason than you’d be scared to have an old man like me after you.”

  Whelan looked at Joey, then spit in Joey’s drink.

  I backhanded him across the table. Glad of the excuse to do it. It was a good shot. It sent him stumbling a half-step back. He slipped and sat down on his ass on the floor. It gave me time to get out of the booth. He was on his feet by the time I was out, but still off balance.

  If he had backed off, I would have let it go. He came at me in a clumsy rush. I watched his move with pleasure, stepped in and hit him in the gut. My right hand sank deep in the soft belly. He began to fold, but I put two more in me same spot.

  By then the room had responded. Five cops were around to break us up. I just stepped aside and let Whelan sink slowly to the floor, vomiting on himself.

  Joey came out from the booth. He knew a couple of the cops and told them it was all right and it was all over. They backed off, and Joey said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Sure,” I said, shaking with anger and the adrenaline rush. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “He requested it,” Joey shrugged.

  Somebody was helping Whelan up. He shook them off and started toward me.

  “Don’t,” I said, raising my fists.

  “I don’t have to, fuckface,” he said backing up, “there’s a big fat fucking contract on you, fuckface. And somebody is gonna collect. When they do, I’m gonna shake their hand and go and piss on your fucking grave.”

  28

  FAMILY

  ANGEL CAME OUT OF nowhere and stepped between us with his baseball bat.

  I wanted to go for him, but Joey was pulling me back, Whelan’s friends were pulling him back and half the cops from Midtown North were on their feet ready to play peace officer.

  “I gotta find out what he’s talking about.”

  “We’ll find out,” Joey told me. “Go take care of Glenda. Make sure she and the kid stay in the house.”

  He was right about what was important. The phone in the bar was busted again. I went outside. The phone on the corner was occupied, a hooker phoning home. She was smaller than me but looked meaner, so I moved up the block to find another phone. It was on the far side of the avenue. I ran through the rain, dodging cars, cabs, trucks and one mad bike messenger. I still found it unbelievably aggravating that they had gone up 150 percent to a quarter, but it was an emergency, and I paid.

  The first thing I wanted to know was whether Wayne was home. I was relieved to hear that he was.

  “What’s going on, Anthony?”

  “I’ll explain when I get home. Don’t open the door for anyone but me. In fact, come to think of it, don’t open the door for anyone. I have my keys.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t lose your keys. That’s very reassuring. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Sit tight. I’ll be there soon.”

  I tried to find a cab, surrendered and went underground, but the subway wasn’t in a hurry either. It took forever to get home, and almost the minute I walked in the door the intercom rang. I jumped. It was Joey.

  He was bursting to say whatever he had to say but didn’t want speak in front of Glenda, so he just stood there and twitched like a man trying to shut the valve on his bladder after it’s started to leak.

  “We will not,” I explained to him, “somehow succeed in sending Glenda out of the room so we can discuss this in private.”

  “That is correct,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, all right then. What we did was, we took Whelan out back. Nobody’s interested in filing charges or makin’ a case or nothing like that, so we did not discuss Miranda or anything of that other legal procedure. This is me, Chic—that’s Tommy Ciccollini—and his partner, you saw them in me bar.

  “ Whelan’s story is that he got into a conversation at a Blarney Stone down in me thirties, his regular hangout, with a guy named Bruno. Whelan doesn’t know if that’s his real name, never having met him before. But this so-called Bruno knew Whelan and asked him about you. Your habits, hangouts and such. Whelan wanted to know why. Bruno, who apparently knew that Whelan was somewhat hostile about you, says something to the effect of ‘someone is looking for Cassella, cause they wanna bid him a fond farewell.’ Whelan was, as we know, happy to hear that, so he pressed Bruno for confirmation ‘in a discreet manner,’ that the phraseology had been interpreted correctly. Whelan thinks he got that confirmation. That was last night, and we are lucky we ran into him when we did.

  “It’s a little thin,” Joey concluded, “but maybe we should treat it like it’s serious. Taking precautions and such. Chic is gonna hit the streets and talk to some informants and such. I assure you that we have obtained all the information from Whelan that could be obtained.”

  “I think, tonight, Joey should stay here with us,” I said to Glenda, “mostly to make him feel better about things, because it is not really necessary.”

  “Yeah, indulge an old man.”

  “Now what might be a good idea is, tomorrow, if you want to, Glenda, take Wayne and go visit your mom. Or even take a mini-vacation up in the country or at the beach. Just while we check things out.”

  “Tony, can we cut the crap? Is this serious or not?”

  “When did you start talking like that?” Joey said.

  “When I started living with him,” Glenda told him.

  “It’s really not a question of whether it’s serious or not. I just want to know that you are out of harm’s way while I’m finding out.”

  “You told me that there have been threats before, and they never came to anything.”

  “Glenda,” Joey said, “if something were to happen, to you or Wayne, Tony could not live with that. You gotta see that. So if you stay or Wayne stays, it means you gotta be cooped up in the apartment with one of us tied up here too. Until this thing shakes down.”

  “Is this one of those macho things,” she said, “where the women and children hide while the men go out and play with guns?”

  “Yeah, if you gotta put it that way, yeah,” Joey said.

  “I think I’m
glad I have a macho man,” she said, coming close to me, “at least about this.”

  In bed we talked about, argued about, how to handle things with Wayne.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, “kids love to play hide-and-seek.”

  “Don’t be flippant.”

  “Look,” I said, “I know, I’m a kid.”

  “That’s part of the problem, not a solution.”

  When Wayne got up and saw Unc’e Joey snoring on the couch he knew something ’citing was happening. He jumped around while I made breakfast and tried to explain, with delicacy and restraint, the way Glenda would have done it, that he and his mom were going to Grandma’s because someone had threatened me.

  “Oh wow! Did they put out a contract on you?”

  “Well, it’s nothing as dramatic as that, Wayne.”

  “Wow! Wow! Wait’ll I tell the kids at school,” he said and ran into the living room. “Unc’e Joey, Unc’e Joey,” he yelled, bouncing on top of Unc’e Joey, “we’re going to the mattresses. We’re going to the mattresses.” He bounced off and rolled under the convertible. He came up on the other side with his hand folded in the shape of a pistol. He fired his finger at point-blank range, yelling, “Pow! Pow!”

  “I’m glad,” Glenda said, “that this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often.”

  I left the building first, through me front door. Joey, Wayne and Glenda went out the service entrance. The street was quiet; nobody shot at me, threatened me or even gave me a dirty look. I walked down to the deli on the corner and bought some beer, just to look like I was doing something. Then I went upstairs and waited for Joey to get back from Grand Central. While I waited I rang Christina. I didn’t leave a message on her machine. Then I put on a fresh pot of coffee.

  “You got what you want? You got what you were after?” Joey said when he got back.

  “Well,” I said, “I meant to shake somebody up, but not to the point where they would pay to see me dead.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. I know you better than you know you.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you saying I want a contract out on me?”