To show good faith, DeGraw had waived the “forty-eight-hour rule,” which gives a policeman accused of a crime the chance to arrange for representation without having to answer questions. But he had invoked his right to have his Policemen’s Benevolent Association representative present, so Ken Stanley sat off in a corner.
Not hearing a radio check from DeGraw and Mintz, Dounis had sent other officers onto the piers to look for them. When they arrived, unnoticed in the thickening fog, they watched DeGraw and Mintz pack Wild Willy into the barrel with the cinderblocks and then roll it into the drink.
What was worse, DeGraw soon found out, was the fact that Mintz had turned on him under the pressure of the questioning and was offering his full cooperation against DeGraw in return for a clean walk—which he was granted. It left DeGraw dumfounded.
“But how?” DeGraw asked. “How can he say I did the friggin’ murder? I was with him the whole time, and I swear, we didn’t kill the guy, we just dumped him.”
“’Cuz you were scared you’d be a suspect,” Bourne said, and DeGraw nodded.
“Not a bad story, but not good enough,” Gonzalez said. “Mintz told us everything. And they just raised the barrel, so I got a slam-dunk case against you. Do yourself a favor, pal, cop to a plea and I’ll cut you the best deal I can.”
“Be smart, Frank,” Bourne said. “Wait for your lawyer before you cut any deals.”
DeGraw hung his head and wondered how it all could have gone so wrong so fast.
* * *
At that same moment, Lou Mintz was a free man, cruising the streets of Brooklyn in his brand new Lincoln Navigator while singing off-key to a Dean Martin CD.
He hung a right on Bay Parkway and stopped on the corner of Cropsey Avenue, half-dancing his way into Bensonhurst Park. His feet felt like they were barely denting the grass as he approached two men sitting on a bench. One was an older gentleman named Bonfiglio, although Mintz knew him only as Big Fig.
“Nice new car, huh?” Bonfiglio said. “Pretty flashy.”
“That’s my new baby,” Mintz said. “Ride’s like a dream.”
Bonfiglio reached into his inner blazer pocket as Mintz sat next to him, then stuffed a bulging envelope into a copy of the New York Post and placed it on the wooden bench slats. Mintz picked it up and held the newspaper open while thumbing through a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills.
“Count it if you want,” Bonfiglio said.
Mintz sat back, putting the newspaper down again. “Looks about right.”
“Suit y’self, but later, when you do count it,” Bonfiglio said, “you’ll find more than we bargained for, just to show how appreciative I can be for a job well done.”
“’Preciate that,” Mintz said, and leaned forward to look at the other man. “Ya get the same appreciation, Nico?”
“More,” Nicky Donuts replied. “I got more.”
“Why him and not me?” Mintz said to Bonfiglio.
“He set it up,” Bonfiglio answered.
“But I did all the work,” Mintz said. “And damn good work it was.”
“Management always takes less risk and gets a bigger cut,” Dounis said. “Ain’t you hip to that yet?”
Bonfiglio laughed. “God rest him, but Willy never knew that, and now look.”
“Shit, I still gotta testify,” Mintz said. “Hardly seems fair that I get less.”
“Don’t worry, kid,” Bonfiglio said. “Cashflow won’t be no problem once we’re back to business in Red Hook. You’ll get everything what’s comin’ to ya.”
“Know what? I believe ya,” Mintz said, sashaying back toward his Navigator with the Post and envelope clenched under his arm. “Have yerselves a great day, gents.”
Five minutes later, Mintz turned off Shore Parkway onto Bay 17th Street, parked in the driveway of a quaint little white clapboard house, and went in through a side door. Without a word, he went upstairs to a bedroom.
Entering, Mintz tossed the Post and envelope onto the bed. Sandy turned away from the bureau and folded herself into Mintz’s arms.
“Went off without a hitch,” Mintz said, nuzzling her neck.
Mintz, the neurotic weasel who’d shy away from a dicey situation and whine about the danger, was now gone. Sandy gasped as this new Mintz balled her hair in his fist, tilted her head back, and took the front of her throat in his teeth. Then he trailed his tongue to her ear and took the lobe between his lips, all while she rubbed up against him.
“I can’t get enough of you,” she said, and when he moaned, she added, “Shush, the baby’s down for a nap.”
“I won’t wake him up,” Mintz whispered, leading her into the baby’s room. Watching the ten-month-old sleep, Mintz couldn’t help but smile.
“Looks just like his old man,” Sandy whispered.
Mintz beamed, patted the kid’s foot, and led her out of the room.
In the hall, Mintz kissed her and said, “Dress up nice and call the sitter, I’m takin’ us out tonight, special celebration.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Where?”
“Carmine’s, Italian place in the city,” Mintz said. “Food is absolutely to die for.”
* * *
Back at Bensonhurst Park, Dounis and Bonfiglio were still enjoying the high sun and the salt air that was wafting in off Gravesend Bay.
“The case against DeGraw?” Bonfiglio said.
“As much of a sure thing you can have against a cop,” Dounis said.
“Even with just the word of the guys you sent in there?”
“They watched the whole thing,” Dounis said. “Their testimony is all we need.”
“I don’t like the attitude on this Mintz,” Bonfiglio said. “The cocky ones like that, they’re trouble.”
“And spreading money around? This flashy car all of a sudden?” Dounis said. “Fuckin’ idiot don’t even know he’s forcin’ us ta be responsible here. And it’s too fuckin’ bad, I don’t care if he did do us a good job last night. He’s now officially dangerous.”
“Okay, so since we don’t need him for the case,” Bonfiglio asked, “where’s he gonna be tonight?”
“He told me he’s eatin’ at Carmine’s. Upper West Side.”
“Shall I let him have his meal first, or make sure they do him on the way in?”
“Mintzy’s a good kid,” Dounis replied. “Let him eat, drink his wine.”
“You old softy,” Bonfiglio said, laughing. Dounis didn’t laugh.
“When it might be my time,” Dounis said, “I hope I get the same consideration.”
“Cripes, yer goin’ all emotional in your old age,” Bonfiglio said.
“Guess I am.”
“It’s kinda sweet.”
“He did good work for us, Fig, helped us get Red Hook back. Give the kid his last meal, I happen to know he loves eatin’ Italian.”
“Hell, who don’t?”
They both nodded and thought of their favorite Italian dishes.
* * *
That night at the 76th, DeGraw still hadn’t been arraigned or made bail, but he didn’t have to stay cooped in a cell. Instead, the detectives gave him the professional courtesy of letting him wait it out in the relative comfort of an interrogation room. They even brought him pizza from Mario’s Place down the block, just the way he liked it: piping hot Sicilian slices with extra mozzarella cheese and spicy Italian sausage. Much as it pleased DeGraw’s palate, it still left him with indigestion.
* * *
After a sweaty hump and a few hours’ nap on DeGraw’s ex-bed, the babysitter came over and Mintz drove Sandy to Carmine’s Restaurant, Broadway between 90th and 91st Streets on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The large upper room was crowded and festive, as usual. People flocked to this place that prepared such sumptuous Southern Italian fare and served it in great, heaping platters. Folks didn’t just grab a bite at Carmine’s place, they ate big and left feeling like they’d participated in an event.
Mintz fingered the wad o
f hundreds in his pocket and ordered up more bottles of Carmine’s best Montepulciano D’Abruzzo to go with the seafood antipasto that was as large and fulfilling as most normal meals. He and Sandy swooned over practically every sip of the red wine in between bites of the calamari, baked clams, baccala, whiting, muscles, bay scallops, and butterfly shrimp, the tangy red sauce sopped up with fresh homemade garlic bread.
A middle-aged gent at the next table couldn’t help but notice them. “Excuse me, but it’s my first time here and it’s great to see you two look like you’re enjoying yourselves. That food as good as it looks?”
“Better,” Mintz said. “You eatin’ alone?”
“Uh, well, blind date,” the professorial gent said. “Internet kind of thing. I guess either something went wrong or she got cold feet.”
“Tough stuff, buddy,” Mintz said. “Might as well go ahead and order. This shit’s too good not to eat once yer here.”
The gent shrugged and nodded with a sad smile.
“Fuck ’er,” Sandy added. “She don’t know what she’s missin’, does she? Might as well enjoy your evenin’.”
“I’d invite you to join us,” Mintz said, “but this is kind of a special occasion, and, well, you understand.”
“Oh, by all means,” the tweedy gent said. “Enjoy your meal.”
He thanked them with a nod when Mintz had the waiter put a glass of their Montepulciano on his table and then raised the glass in a silent toast.
After that, while the gent ate alone, he took sidelong glances to see Mintz and Sandy happily tucking into entrees of Lasagna Bolognese, Fettuccini Alfredo, penne in olive oil with broccoli, gnocchi, bragiole, veal Parmesan.
The gent was amazed when Mintz and Sandy ordered dessert: espresso, tiramisu, spumoni, and chocolate-covered mini-cannoli. Then they topped it all off with large snifters of Sambuca Romana, a sweet anise-tasting Italian liqueur sipped with three coffee beans floating in it.
They had of course ordered far more food than they’d consumed, and had the leftovers wrapped to take home with them, good Italian food always tasting even better the next day. The containers filled two shopping bags, which Mintz carried in one hand as they rose to take their leave. He turned to say goodnight to the gent, but the guy wasn’t at the table and Mintz couldn’t remember seeing him go.
The cool night air made their bodies glow with the alcohol and the great food, as Mintz and Sandy sauntered back around the corner toward where the new Navigator was parked. Just when the world seemed like a perfectly lovely place and Sandy hooked her hand around Mintz’s arm, the gent stepped out from behind a van, raised the gun with a silencer attached, and began pumping shots into them.
Head-shot, Sandy was dead before she hit the sidewalk. Unable to grab his off-duty gun and already hit in the chest, all Mintz could do was swing the shopping bags at the gent, who raised his free arm to fend them off. The bags burst open and the containers rained great food all over the sidewalk.
When Mintz also fell dead, the gent plucked a piece of penne from the shoulder of his cashmere overcoat and popped it into his mouth. Then he pocketed the handgun and walked away.
Within seconds, a big black stray mutt happened upon the bodies of Mintz and Sandy and straightaway began to enjoy the best Italian meal he’d ever had, although truth be told, he really didn’t care much for the broccoli.
THURSDAY
BY KENJI JASPER
Bedford-Stuyvesant
There’re a lot of ways to deal with what “The Stuy” doles out. Some drink. Some get high. Some beat the shit out of the spouse within closest reach. But me, I fuck. This is not to say that I do not engage in the act of making love. Nor is it to imply that I’m one of those dudes who suffers from that meeting-in-the-ladies’-room catch phrase known as emotional unavailability. I just know that when you’re bending her legs back as far as they go, aiming a stiff rod toward the uterus while her head indents the drywall, as your sweat lines the valley that runs from between her shoulder blades to the crack of her ass, that it cannot be considered an act of intimacy
They like it because what I have to give isn’t as watered down as what they get at home, the sum of what’s left after their men’s hard days at bullshit 9-to-5s. I don’t care if she leaves traces of my semen on her kids’ cheeks. I don’t care if she picks up another ten pounds from eating Doritos and watching Divorce Court. I only ask that she leave before I start caring.
* * *
“You got any more of that tea?” Jenna asks.
She’s the only one I’ve ever let stay, because I love her, or at least I used to, until she left me for another dude after she caught me in a three with Sarah and Dahlia, these two bi-broads I’d met at The Five Spot the night of one of my little book things. They were in the mood for dick and I had one, not to mention a dub of weed and a queen-size mattress with fresh sheets.
Jenna didn’t live with me but she had keys, the unavoidable side effect of my dislike for feminine whines and complaints. Nothing gets to me more, not even the inevitable loss of privacy that comes with giving someone carte blanche access to your home. One night she started missing me just as I wasn’t missing Dahlia’s g-spot, with Sarah adding a little tongue to the mix.
I can’t even say that I remember their faces, only a fleshy set of buttocks and thick nipples harder than granite. One Cuban, one Jewish, and both light on their feet when Jenna started swinging the antique coat rack.
My friends in other boroughs don’t believe me when I tell them stories like this one. They dismiss them as something like the fodder passed off as correspondence in the pages of Penthouse Letters But they don’t live in The Stuy. They don’t understand that anything out here is possible as long as you believe it is, a crisscross grid of blocks and corners waiting to be remade just the way you want them, as long as you got juice, dough, or even better, both.
I’m a writer, if you haven’t figured it out yet. The words are the way I live, except when the freelance checks come late, or sometimes not at all. Then I’m left to the mercy of the streets, and a pile of manuscript I’ll probably never sell. But this isn’t about writing, this is about money, money on a Thursday, and how I ended up with it. The “what” I needed it for comes six graphs away from this one.
Flakes of jasmine in the metal ball you drop into boiling water. Add exactly three tablespoons of honey and let it steep. This is what makes Jenna happy. She comes to see me whenever her man’s away, or when there happens to be a hole in my busy schedule, which is rather often. By the time I get the cup back to the bedroom, she’s already clasping the bra behind her lovely back.
“It’s gonna take a second for this shit to cool,” I say as she takes the cup. Her skin is the color of coal and without a single blemish. Narrow shoulders and torso spread into wide hips and delicious quads that could choke a small animal. I still love her, even though she ain’t mine no more.
“I might have to take it with me,” she says, tucking the cranberry blouse into jeans of the deepest blue. “I got people in the chair all day.”
Of all the women to fall in love with, I had to pick a braider. Twelve-hour days and one Saturday a month off. Her man sees less of her than I do, even though he works at the home where they now live, three blocks over on Marcy and Jefferson.
If you have to know, I stay on Halsey and Bedford, though everyone will say it’s Hancock and Nostrand, where the more famous author happens to live. We’re both the same age and from the same town, and yet we’ve never been in the same place at the same time. But perhaps that’s a good thing. I read his last book and would be really tempted to hurt his feelings if he happened to ask me for a critique.
“He wants to take me to Brazil next month” she says, after sucking the hot liquid down to half. Her tongue has always been made of fire-retardant foam.
She says this only to make me jealous, knowing that I hate when she goes away, not to mention with him. It is my punishment for that night two years ago. I can have her body for t
he rest of eternity, but someone else will always hold the title to her soul.
“I’m sure he wants to do a lot of things,” I say. “But that kinda trip costs the kinda cake he has to save up for a year for.”
She zips her bag and wraps the butter-smooth leather I bought her around the blouse, and then smiles. She knows something that I don’t.
“He doesn’t have to save anything. He put his tax return in a nine-month CD at seven percent. He’s gonna cash it in on Monday.” And after that bit of data she departs, down the three flights of stairs to the inner door, followed by the outer, and then to the street.
She still knows the tender spots, especially in the after-glow. Brazil was the only place she’d ever wanted to go that she hadn’t made it to yet. I’d sold a big article and used the check to get us advance tickets and a good hotel. I couldn’t even get a refund because she backed out too close to the departure date.
And now she is going with Mr. Right, a four-inch one-minute man who a few of my homegirls have sampled over the years, all less than impressed. She is doing it just to spite me. Jenna does everything just to spite me.
She has no intention of going on that trip in those weeks ahead. If that’s what she wants, she never would’ve told me about it. She knows how determined I am. And she knows that even though I write, I am also a man of action when it comes to handling my business. So she also has to know that there’s no way in hell I’m going to let her roll anywhere below the equator with that clown. I’ll have this sewn up by the end of the day, no problem.
* * *
“Twenty-three-hundred, forty-seven, ninety-six,” Winston utters, his eyes never leaving the calculator on his computer screen. “You want me to book it now?”
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