My old man was delirious with joy about leaving the Lower East Side behind us for a new life in the North End, which is what you called the South Bronx back then.
“Can you believe it, Stanny-boy, I got us a big apartment with sun in the windows where rich people used to live,” he said to me that Saturday. He’d gone to the library to read about the new neighborhood. “Right on the Grand Concourse, copied off the Champs-Élysées in France and built in 1909 in the Bronx—by an immigrant. Imagine that. An immigrant just like me. You know, I was in Paris after the war, Stanny, and I painted. And I don’t mean houses.”
Right across the hallway from our sunny apartment I met a chubby girl my age with blue eyes and red cheeks and frizzy black hair.
Her name was Miriam Smart, which was perfect for her. Some people get named like that. Like Billy Strayhorn just had to be a jazz musician, and Johnny Stompanato had to be a wiseguy.
Anyhow, I called her Mimi. We were married on her nineteenth birthday.
Mimi and I were the first ones in our families to go through all twelve grades. After Morris High School, we graduated City College together in the days before tuition. I went on to law school and wound with a job in the domestic violence bureau at the Bronx D.A.’s office, where mostly I sent up slobs who fell in love with a dimple but couldn’t handle the fact that a whole girl came with it.
Mimi, she was the brains of the Katz family operation. She went to work in the real estate business on account of being sadly inspired by her grandfather, who had a little farm stolen out from under him back in Romania.
“You should never leave your place,” Mimi would say, repeating her grandfather’s stern counsel, “no matter how they try to run you out, which they will try to do over and over in different ways.”
Sometime in ’78 or ’79, when a Hollywood movie actor was running for president—such a gag, everybody thought—he brought a gang of reporters along with him to the South Bronx on a campaign tour. Which didn’t make sense to people in the neighborhood because we don’t vote for actors.
Up until then, I appreciated Hollywood for the movie memories I own, like the first time I held Mimi’s hand in the mezzanine of Loew’s Paradise up at 188th Street. But this mutt running for president, he said right in front of the cameras on the evening news that my own neighborhood was the worst place you could ever be in the United States of America.
Okay, we had problems. In those years, who didn’t? But scaring people so they’ll vote for you?
I was angry at this actor. Being the brains of the operation, Mimi figured something besides an insult was going on. “Aha! Now they send in the scary clowns to run us out,” she said. So we did not leave our place.
But just about everybody we knew did.
As the neighbors on our floor left, Mimi took over their leases one by one—at quite favorable terms, thanks to a landlord dumb enough to be scared by an actor who played second banana in a picture about a chimpanzee.
On our dime, Mimi kept our floor beautifully maintained and sublet to nice people who were just like the old neighbors except their skin was darker. She never worried how the dumb landlord let the other floors go to hell and generally ignored everything for years, including his unpaid property tax bill. By which time we could afford to buy him out at a distress sale.
Then Mimi put up the apartment house as collateral on a loan to acquire a few likewise distressed commercial spaces surrounding the courthouse, which we rented out to lawyers and bail bondsmen in order to pay our mortgage notes.
Plus, we had plenty left over for Wendy’s education, a proper storefront for Mimi’s real estate business, and a nice house on a few acres in the Catskills for summer weekends. Mimi loved the country place because of her grandfather’s stories about his farm in the old country. I thought about maybe buying a cream-colored horse but I never got around to it.
Also, we had money from not being scared so that I could switch teams and hang out a shingle as defense counsel. This was in one of Mimi’s buildings near the courthouse, so I have never had to pay rent. God bless America, as she used to say.
When you have somebody like Mimi Smart behind you, you don’t need to be too smart yourself. Or as she used to say, If law school is so hard, how come there are so many lawyers?
Mimi taught me to pick my clients right so I wouldn’t have to worry about revenues and so I could have a little fun besides—such as when I represented a guy with carnal knowledge of chickens, which is another story. Mimi taught me something every day, until she got sick.
One Sunday morning after a long bad night, I was holding hands with Mimi again. This was in our bedroom in the country. She’d been resting up there for months, lying mostly on her side in order to see her flower garden through the window, and the pond. She was so thin. She said to me, for the last time she said anything, “We did all right, Stanley, you and me.”
Now every morning, no matter what I have going, I think about Mimi while I’m walking to the office. In my line of work, it’s good to have a pleasant thought to begin the day—as opposed to what I had to think about next.
It should impress the hell out of my Rosary Maldonado, my secretary, that Blake Lewis, big-time television producer, is supposed to drop by. Rosary watches television like most people breathe.
“Don’t say a word,” Lewis said to me last night, before he’d take an answer on his proposition. “Sleep on it. We’ll talk in the morning. I’ll be around.”
I didn’t sleep so good.
Just thinking about this guy in my office, I get itchy like I’m coming down with hives on my back. Never do I have such a feeling before talking to some wiseguy who I know from previous experience is hinky as Halloween, and if I displease him he could jump across my desk and bust my face; or some mook with one eyebrow who goes off his nut and picks up a tire iron when he finds out Sweetie-pie’s been playing hide-the-salami with his best friend.
Which is not to mention the celebrity trade of pea-brained rappers and politicians who think with their little heads.
But now here with Lewis, the territory is unfamiliar to me. The pols and the rappers are forever paying the stupid tax. The mook and the wiseguy do what they do for honor, even if their sense of what’s honorable is a little cracked. But Hollywood’s about money, so you never know what’s coming at you.
Speaking of which, half a block away my secretary is flying out the door of Katz & Katz and running up the street at me like a Puerto Rican banshee, waving her hands and hollering n Spanish. Lucky for her she gets to me, because she breaks a heel and almost goes ass-over-teakettle, but I break the fall.
“What’s—?”
“Mr. Katz,” Rosary interrupts, using the name she reserves for important occasions. Otherwise she calls me Poppy. “J’you know who come to see you?”
I take a wild guess. “Blake Lewis?”
Rosary has newfound admiration for me. She says, “J’you know hing?”
I lay a steadying arm around her shoulder and she hobbles back to the office with me.
It’s not just Lewis who’s there. It’s the steak-eaters and a contingent of polyester suits. Also Slattery.
“Consigliere!” Lewis says as I walk in. Slattery writes this down in his notebook.
I cock my head and say, “Let’s go,” and the steak-eaters and Slattery follow me into my private office. Rosary, who is flush in the face, stays outside with the polyester.
“What the—?”
Nutsy Nunzio cuts me off from dropping the f-bomb. “Jeez, Stanley,” he says. Clear from the other side of my desk I smell the breath. Like a doggy bag you bring home in a taxi. “You think it’s okay we do this TV job?”
Nutsy is wide-eyed like an innocent kid. Though knowing of his problems with anger management, it is hard for me to imagine Nutsy ever being a squirt. The Orphan Annie expression also goes for Pete the Pipe and Charlie the Pencil Man.
Lewis is sitting there like the cat that ate the canary. Today he’s in one of tho
se outfits like the TV hair helmets wear in war zones: blue denim shirt, safari jacket, starched dungarees.
I ask him, “What did you tell my clients?”
He shrugs. “I hung around the Palomino after you left. I met some people. I gave them the elevator pitch.” He turns to Slattery and explains, “That’s when you have to put across your big idea to a studio exec before the elevator gets to where he’s going.”
Nutsy and Charlie nod as the Pipe passes judgment: “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Pete does not get his moniker from smoking a meerschaum. It’s from rumors when he started off his career and was seen around leaky gas valves that caused industrial accidents around the city. Nowadays he considers himself a good citizen for being involved in the political life of his country. Meaning he takes bets on elections, sometimes doing things to improve the odds in his favor.
“The putz we got in the White House,” says the Pipe, “we should do everybody a favor and put Charlie on him.”
Which prompts the Pencil Man, alleged to have erased people, to chime in with, “How about I explode his freakin’ mountain bike?”
Everybody enjoys a nice wet laugh, including Slattery, who is no doubt dreaming up a streamer for the cover of tomorrow’s paper, something cute like, CAN A KILLER TV SHOW CANCEL BUSH?
“You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?” I ask Lewis. “For instance, what’s Slattery doing here?”
“He’s my whole advertising budget—zero down for an exclusive on The Assassination Show,” says Lewis. “One story in one New York paper and—whammo!—everybody and his brother are providing us free publicity.”
Nutsy gets excited.
“The dough he don’t spend for ads, it’s that much more for us,” he says. “Jeez, I’d like to see the frat boy meet up with some permanent violence. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’m not going there,” I tell Nutsy, who now has a pair of blue veins throbbing on his temples. “And I’m surprised you’re all speaking to me like you are. In the past, you’ve been circumspect. Which I appreciate.”
“If I catch your drift,” says the Pipe, “you shouldn’t worry, because Blake here says free speech is legal under the First Amendment to the Constitution.”
Charlie says, “We come here this early in the a.m. out of respect for you, Mr. Katz. We don’t want to do nothing without your blessing. Besides which, we’re cutting you in.”
Blake makes like the canary again. With all that’s going for him, he doesn’t need my blessing and he doesn’t need to make an elevator pitch. Hollywood’s going to be showering him with money for the honor of underwriting the minimal costs of The Assassination Show.
I put my head in my hands.
* * *
The deal that’s making my scalp hurt is this: Starting with George W. Bush, a couple of hand-held cameras record the pungent conversations of three alleged hoodlums from the Bronx who are plotting to assassinate the president of the U.S. of A., maybe with advice and counsel from their consigliere, which I haven’t decided yet.
Such a gag, everybody out there in TV Land is going to think. Which it is: a great circular joke starting with the misnomer “reality TV” and winding up right back to the truth of the phrase, which is a lie.
But since we don’t pay attention to the criminal whoppers that Monkey Boy and his crew tell us every day, why get our national panties in a twist over television fibs? Maybe you’ve noticed that from coast to coast, every TV news anchorman and giggly lady has the same sign-off nowadays: “We’ll see you here tomorrow night.” Really?
Some newspaper critic is bound to call Blake Lewis a hip, groundbreaking genius. I suppose he is. A smart person knows what smart people want. A genius knows what stupid people want.
Let’s say my clients don’t advance the plot anywhere near Monkey Boy during the ten weeks Lewis has got by way of network commitment to his groundbreaker. Tension will mount just the same. The Secret Service will go ballistic. The Christers will go as bonkers as Nutsy Nunzio. And you can rely on the members of Congress for their usual discernment and maturity in dealing with public controversy that gets them air time.
And at the end of an unsuccessful ten weeks’ hunt for Monkey Boy, Lewis simply recruits another pack of “technical advisors” to see about snuffing some other annoying potentate someplace else in the world. The tension mounts all over again. Pure genius.
As I mentioned, I have seen the series contracts Wendy has drafted. Five-percent commission on the tens of millions that Lewis stands to accrue for the worldwide premiere, followed by hundreds of millions more on the succeeding ten-week collections, followed by millions more for repeat performances and millions more for spin-off rights…
…Well, doing the math, even on Wendy’s small-fry projects, I just about fainted.
No wonder the kid wants in on the racket. I’m thinking Mimi would be proud. But when she’s got all the dough anybody would ever need, will Wendy come home?
* * *
It’s now late afternoon and it’s a matter of hours before the bulldog edition of the Post is on the streets and the s-bomb hits the fan.
Lewis and his advisors and polyesters have gone to lunch at the Palomino and come back, to where Rosary is entertaining them with the story of chicken man that I mentioned.
“Sometimes I think there’s a very big neon sign floating over this office,” she says, flirting shamelessly with Lewis. “It reads, Strange people—welcome.”
Anyhow, she relates the referred case of a cash-paying client from Westchester who was nabbed in a naughty motel by the Bronx vice squad. The cops found him bare naked under the covers and happy about it. There were no girls in the cheap room with him, or boys. But there were maybe a dozen chickens from La Marquéta under the Queensboro Bridge.
“The live birds are there to boil and pluck,” says Rosary, blushing in Lewis’s gaze. “It’s against the sanitary laws of the city, but there you are.”
“Is your name actually Rosemary?” Lewis asks her.
“Oh, it used to be. I go to mass every day, so I changed to Rosary. J’you like it?”
“It’s charming.”
Rosary continued with the story of the suburban geek, a CEO called Bill Cunningham. What Cunningham did to violate his secret aviary caused the sheets and walls and carpeting to become sticky with chicken blood, tomato-red turning to rust-brown. Little chicken heads were in a heap by the bathroom doorway, where Cunningham’s pinstripes were carefully hung on the knob.
The birds had put up a spirited fight, especially the roosters. There were feathers everywhere.
The D.A. indicted Cunningham for animal cruelty. The geek was sorely embarrassed in front of his golf club buddies, but they rallied around him in support of a sick man. Cunningham kept his mouth shut like I told him.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said at the concluding day of trial. Then I said what I always say: “I’ll be short. No—I’m already short, I’ll be brief.”
A laughing jury is not a hanging jury.
I had earlier produced the sole defense witness—Juan Baltasar, proprietor of a chicken stand at La Marquéta. Baltasar testifled that Cunningham had been particular about his purchase, insisting that the chicken heads be severed before paying.
“Thus, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Cunningham had his way with dead chickens—not live chickens. Therefore, he violated no law, because a man cannot commit cruelty against a fowl corpse.” I spun around on my heels to address the assistant D.A. at the prosecution table, a sallow-faced guy with the likeability factor of an IRS auditor. “Case closed,” I said.
Then I addressed the good jurors and the judge.
“I would only add my personal promise, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Cunningham—with not so much as a speeding ticket heretofore and who is, as you have heard, innocent before the law—will nevertheless enroll in psycho-sexual counseling at a mental hospital in White Plains. He is a deeply disturbed man, my friends. Yet wh
o among us would care to stand before the scales of justice to hear of our own sins of thought—and actions for which we were never ourselves apprehended. For what it is worth, Mr. Cunningham will dwell among his own disturbed kind as he seeks redemption, beyond the reach of the dear hearts and gentle people of the Bronx. This I promise, on the grave of my own sweet wife.” I turn to the bench. “How’s that, judge?”
He raps down his gavel and Cunningham scrams out of court, never to be seen in the Bronx again, right as the judge says, “Whatever.”
Hearing Rosary tell the story again gives me an idea for the limited counsel I suddenly decide to give Nutsy and the Pipe and Pencil Man. I hand one of their polyesters a couple of hundred bucks and tell him, “Buy some groceries, then hit the mattresses. Capice?” Then I give a nod to Lewis to come with me. And before the polyester leaves my office, I tell him, “Send me another button and I’ll return him with Blake here—blindfolded, so he can’t spill the location where he can film. Same goes for me if I decide to show up. I don’t want to know from the mattresses.”
Lewis and I walk around the corner to the Palomino, which is mentioned as the genesis of Slattery’s story that is now all over town. He’s very proud of himself, this Hollywood producer. My friends buy him drinks.
I tell Lewis I need a minute to make a discreet phone call. So I slip out into the street with my cell. But I don’t call right away.
I wait for the cars I know are going to show up. The dark blue, unmarked Chryslers with the no-nonsense guys inside. They get out of the cars with their hands firmly inside of their coats, where they’re wearing shoulder holsters and federal badges.
I dial my kid’s number out in Los Angeles.
She’s on the line right when Lewis is bum-rushed out of the Palomino Club.
“You should come home, kiddo.”
“We’ve been all over that—”
“Your big client, Blake Lewis, he’s been arrested.”
“Where are they taking him?”
New York City Noir Page 82
