“You bet,” she said. “It is about time the old order passed on.” She had a glass in her hand. Not her first. She raised it. “To the old order. May its passing be swift, but painful.”
“You take this personally.”
“You bet,” she said. “Read my lips.”
“Bitter, aren’t we?”
“Aren’t we, ” she said. “How did they treat you? When you stood up for what was right, and did your job, did they back you up? Give you subsequent promotion and reward? Elevate your status? Either your own people or the D.A.?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They fucked me over.”
“Right,” she said. “Bastards.”
“They are not the best of people,” I said. An alliance forming. You and me against the world, baby.
She put her hand on my arm, speaking confidentially, warm blears of wine breath coming with her words. “Very petty people.”
“That’s exactly the word. Petty.”
Alicia and I left together.
From a distance, and even more with darkness, Manhattan is a movie set. So, too, the river. Get close and you see the oily scum. Look over the edge. Garbage is collected in the shore’s nooks and crannies the way butter, Thomas’ boasts, fills their English muffins.
The River Café sits below the Brooklyn Bridge. Mostly it sells the view. Alicia was into the gin and tonics.
She lived a few blocks away, in the Heights, in a studio, which was overpriced, pricey as Manhattan, but walking distance to the courthouse and the office. Where they hated her and denied her her proper rungs on the ladder, she told me, again, because she was a woman.
“But Fernando told me you were put out on loan to Stanley Fenderman for the special prosecutor’s staff. … I mean, that puts you in the public eye, you the only one selected—”
“Is that how Fernando made it sound?”
“Yes,” I said. Her glass was empty. I waved for the bartender and pointed at her glass. What the hell. I ordered one for me as well.
“Fenderman went to the Manhattan D.A. first,” she said. Bitter about it. “The Manhattan D.A. wouldn’t give him anyone. You know why? Caseload. Everyone has a caseload would kill a normal person. Same over here. We have as much crime as Manhattan, you betcha. You think that was an honor? A special commendation? … Read my lips. N. O. It was a way to get rid of me.”
“We gotta do something about that,” I said.
“We sure do, and we will,” she said. She leaned forward and told me, as Gene Petrucchio had, that the current D.A., Reuben, was on his way out.
“Ahh,” I said. “So things are gonna change?”
“Not if they have their way. But yes if I have my way.”
“What’s your way?”
She nodded significantly.
“Ahh,” I said.
“Their way, they got Landsman.” She put her hand on my arm and wet her lips. “Landsman’s been Reuben’s assistant forever. Waiting his turn. He sits there in his office, waiting, sort of like a cross between a basset hound and a vulture. If I were married, I wouldn’t let Landsman handle my no-fault divorce. He’s a disgrace to the reputation of the Jew lawyer. If Landsman is in, I stay one of the outs. You know what they got me on? They got me on DWI. Why am I doing drunk drivers?”
“It’s a shame,” I said, “that you didn’t nail Gunderson. … ”
She scowled.
“ … If you had nailed Gunderson,” I said, “it would have given you a rep. Like the man who shot Liberty Valance. … I’m trying to figure out some way you can deal with the assholes. … How come Gunderson got off the hook?”
“Fenderman,” she said with a sneer.
“He was in Gunderson’s pocket?”
“No,” she said, with contempt. “Mr. Fenderman is a corporate attorney, which means—read my lips—a jerk. An emasculated, no-ball masturbator … Oh, I’m certain he’s as tough as polished steel, hard as a marble bathroom stall, when he’s negotiating bond declivities or whatever they do over there … ” She pointed, and yes, we could see it. “Wall Street.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tony, read my lips: Fenderman is not a prosecutor. He takes testimony like he’s taking depositions from corporate vice-presidents. The kind of people, they take an oath and someone tells them the penalty for perjury, they actually think they have to tell the truth. Not just Fenderman; all the Park Avenue clones he recruited. A witness says something, some guinea wise-guy punk tells Fenderman, ‘I don’t know nothing,’ Fenderman believes him. Fenderman even believes Vincent Calabrese. He believes Vinnie the Hook. Who came to us as a perjurer.”
New York Times
Witness Fails Polygraph
WASHINGTON Dec. 5 (UPI)—
… An alleged organized figure, Mr. Calabrese had testified that he “did not know this Gunderson,” had “never met this Gunderson,” and that “I ain’t got no knowledge of no one else’s knowing Gunderson, or having dealings with him, especially not ‘Tony Provolone’ not having dealings with him or knowing him.” “Tony Provolone” is the street name for Raymond Anthony Prozzini, ex-president of New Jersey Teamsters Local #331, alleged underboss of the Gonzoni family, currently under indictment for murder, extortion, and loan sharking.
“And if you don’t believe me,” Mr. Calabrese said, “I’ll take a lie detector test to prove it.”
According to FBI sources, Mr. Calabrese failed the polygraph. At the subject’s request, the tests were repeated six times, with the same results.
“Did Calabrese finally testify about Gunderson?” I asked her.
“This is typical Fenderman. What he should have done is a couple of days of depositions from Calabrese. Comprehensive but not tough, you know. Taking him over territory you know about, stuff you can prove. Because you know Vinnie; he’s gonna lie. Then, when you got him on perjury, cold, nailed, then you cut a deal.
“But no, not Fenderman. Fenderman takes him before the grand jury. Starts to ask him about Gunderson and Tony Provolone. This is about three in the afternoon. On Friday. At four we recess. Fenderman is certain that Calabrese is gonna sing, something, I don’t know what, so he subpoenas him back for next week and sends a subpoena to Provolone.”
NEW YORK POST, JANUARY 14, 1984
______________________________
SLAUGHTER ON 10TH AVENUE
Mob Rubout on the West Side.
Vinnie “The Hook” Calabrese, missing mob witness, found in the trunk of his own Coupe de Ville, 10th Ave./45th St.
“The way you nail someone like Gunderson, you get someone else cold. Someone in fear of his asshole, so he doesn’t want to do hard time. Then you turn them. Then you turn the next person up the line,” she said. “But you can’t just call in everybody who volunteers, listen to them ramble, and then check your Crim Law 101, federal statutes, to see if something will fall out of the sky. You have to work at it.”
“Was that all it was?” I asked. “He didn’t work at it?”
“He didn’t know how,” Alicia said. “And when I told him, told him how, he got just as insulted as any other male chauvinist pig does when you tell them anything more complicated than ‘you’re so big, you’re so big.’ ”
I walked her home. The branches of Brooklyn trees threw lacy shadows on deeper shadows. Windows were traced with frost. Streetlamps had a hazy glow and yellow warmth. Well-kept brownstones and a kind of quiet felt like the preserve of either an earlier time, a good old day, or a future time, when we’ll all be gentrified out of our minds, kept clean and sweet by the landmarks commission.
She took my arm. Her hip bumped my thigh. “Come on in,” she said. “One for the road.”
Up the steps to the first-floor apartment. High windows, high ceilings in the front room. High windows, high ceilings, and a big, big bed in the back. It was warm inside. I opened my jacket, she stripped out of hers. She brought me a bottle of beer from the kitchen. Déjà vu. Sydney, read my lips. We sat on the edge of the bed. In the light o
f the day she might have been barely the safe side of ugly. What matter? What matters is the moment.
“What do you want from me?” she said.
“What do you think I want?” I said coyly. There’s something about fucking that’s something like love, which is something like trust and sharing. And I wanted her trust and sharing. Maybe I was wanting Alicia. Just because she was female. A different female, and there’d been a long stretch of fidelity. I understood that cheating could get complicated, very complicated.
“I don’t know, but you won’t get it from fucking me,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“One thing about being a lady lawyer, it’s easy to get laid. The guys in the office, they wanna fuck me because I’m there. The cops, they wanna fuck me ’cause they’re the horniest sonofabitches in creation and they wanna brag about something. The defense attorneys wanna fuck me because I’m the only woman around. The perps think if they could only fuck the D.A., she would be so overwhelmed she would cut them loose. Join them in a life of crime. Men,” she announced, “are so impressed by their cocks.”
“And you’re not?” I said.
“Now you figure I’m a dyke, right?”
No. That’s not what I figured. I figured it was the defense of a woman who knows that men only leave with her at closing time.
“Uh huh. You’re a good-looking guy. You wanna do it, I could do it with you. But I warn you right now,” she said, “I don’t fuck around with fucking around. You do me, you wear a rubber.”
“Oh,” I said. She made it so unromantic.
“So what do you want? Come on, Tony, I know when someone wants something. Just ’cause I’m ugly doesn’t mean I’m dumb.”
“You’re not ugly,” I said with male-o-mat sincerity.
“It’s something to do with Gunderson, maybe,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah. Since you ask. I would not mind at all getting hold of the special prosecutor’s report. Without deletions.”
“Why? Who for?” Her face changed, and it was more than a switch from boozy to business. I was going to have to ease her back to that good-time mood by tantalizing her with a different kind of yearning.
“WFUX. ‘The Hot One,’ ” I said, since truth sometimes works. “They want to know. Inquiring minds want to know. But the thing is, then I’m in a position to do you a lot of favors. See, I don’t know what you plan to do about Landsman, or what anyone plans to do about Landsman, but right now he’s got a lock. The party regulars they get line A in the primaries, and unless people got a real good reason out here in Brooklyn, when they walk into the booth they pull the lever on line A, just like they’ve been doing all their lives, all their parents’ lives.
“I don’t know if anyone is gonna make a run at Brooklyn D.A., like Fernando is making a run at the City Council, but unless they get lots of noise, nobody is even gonna pay attention.”
“If—if—someone is making a run,” she said, wanting it but afraid of it, “and they’re better, really better, than Landsman, better for Brooklyn, and better for me, then you might have a deal. I’ll give it some thought.”
“Don’t wait too long. Do it while what you got is still worth something,” I said.
“I will definitely consider it,” she said, sounding so close to yes.
“See, it costs you nothing. And gets you a lot.”
“I want to sleep on it,” she said.
“OK,” I said as we moved to the door, just praying she would slip off the hook. “Let me know tomorrow.”
“A good, hard sleep,” she said. “I’ll let you know end of the week, beginning of next week.”
“It’s not like you’re doing something wrong. You’re doing something right,” I told her.
“I had you figured,” she said, holding the door open for me, “for the kind of guy who wouldn’t wanna do it with a rubber.”
8.
Scrupulous
IT HAS BEEN COMMON practice that a person arrested for a crime has to post a bond or await trial in jail. That makes the bail bondsman a significant feature of the criminal justice system. The bondsman has very peculiar and unique powers. If people for whom the bondsman has posted bond fail to appear, the bondsman or his designee can go after them, exactly as if he had police powers. Chasing bail skips has been, traditionally, a lucrative source of income for private investigators. Some bondsmen pay a percentage of the bond recovered when the skip is returned to the court’s jurisdiction; others pay a fee. It’s a lot like bounty hunting.
The bail bond business is not what it once was.
Because the prisons are overcrowded with people awaiting trial, because it is a fact that those who await their trial in jail are almost always convicted, while those who await trial in freedom frequently get off, and because bail has a very limited effect on whether the accused turns up for trial, bail is no longer standard procedure in New York.
Only three bondsmen are left in Manhattan. In Brooklyn there were five, including Alan Bazzini. Now there’s four.
My partner announced that Bazzini was definitely retiring. He had found a buyer for his business. One of his competitors, Bernard “Snake” Silverman.
I’m in a business that helps people. Should a person languish in incarceration vile merely because he does not have the means? No. That is not right and that is why I am here. Always thank God for the Magner Carter, which has put such persons as myself here. Yet here is a person who has abused my trust. What am I to do? What am I to do? . . . Bring me his head. Dead or alive.
BERNARD “SNAKE” SILVERMAN,
Brooklyn bail bondsman
“I went over and spoke to Snake,” Joey D’ said, “and Bazzini, he called him for us. We’re going to get a piece of his business.”
“Do we want it?” I said. “Is that the kind of business we need or want? Where you don’t know if you’re gonna get paid, though you do know that if you don’t get the guy you won’t get paid.”
“How much we out,” Joey D’ said, “on your bet with Des Kennel?”
“There’s a difference,” I said, “between one isolated stupidity and making a policy of it.”
“Hunting bail skips is not like going to the track,” my partner said. “It’s good business. So you miss a few; the ones you score, they more than make up for it.”
“Yeah, right, like roulette,” I said. “The city, if it didn’t pay cops unless they got the perps, you know how much the city would save. The cops are too smart to let the city do that. Now what are you going to say, that we are dumber than cops? What we have to do is get to be more like a business. This is supposed to be a business, but it’s two guys, renting out their bodies.”
“We’re doing OK,” Joey said. “Making more than we were a couple years ago. And,” he added “you are doing a whole lot better than you were a couple years ago,” which was a personal remark.
“Fuck you. My progress as a human being is not the point. Things … cost of things is going up faster than our income. Case in point.” I held up the letter from the health insurance company. “Premiums up twenty-eight percent over last year. And the deductibles have doubled. We’re not going up no twenty-eight percent a year. What the hell are we gonna do when the lease comes up?”
The phone rang. “Have you found my Bergmans yet?” Jerry Wirtman said.
“You know, for what should be a real simple job,” I said, “Bergman is remarkably elusive.”
“So how much is this costing?”
“He isn’t in the metropolitan area. That I’ve established. His bank account is a blind. Those checks, with his name on it, that’s an account that’s owned by a law firm. His ex-partner’s widow hasn’t heard from him in fifteen years or something like that. The ILGWU, they don’t know where he is, but they’re looking for him too. For me. Which means for you. It’s not like nothing’s happening.”
“So how much is this costing?”
“I’d have to sit down and add that up. I don’t have a
figure off the top of my head.”
“Is that a stupid question for me to ask? Is it rude? Am I being pushy? I have something being done. I would like to know: How much is this costing?”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. I covered the phone. I took a deep breath. I’d put in maybe three days, with at least one more to go. Expenses, seven hundred, maybe. “It’s around two. So far.”
“Around two? Around two what? Two hundred? Two thousand? Two dollars?”
“Around two thousand dollars,” I said.
“How much around?”
“Without pulling the paperwork, which I can do if you wanna give me a couple of minutes, I’d say around twenty-one, twenty-two.”
“And for this I have what?”
“Nothing yet. Which I’m sure you understand. With a job like this, you have pretty much all or nothing.”
“So. So. How much longer? How much more money?”
“Mr. Wirtman, I have no way of knowing. I doubt it will be much more.”
“I am not happy.”
“That’s understandable—”
“You’re right, it’s understandable.”
“Look, Mr. Wirtman,” I said, getting irritated. “You own a car?”
“Yes. I own a car. An Oldsmobile.”
“Fine. Well, sometimes you take it in to get repaired and you figure it’s something simple. A tune-up, new spark plugs. But then it turns out you need gaskets, and when they take it apart to put the gaskets in, they discover you need your heads reground. So you get pissed at the mechanic. Fine. So do I. So you go somewhere else. You still have to get gaskets and the heads reground. And it costs about a hundred times more than you were expecting when you drove in. But that’s what’s wrong, and that’s what it costs to fix. You can pay it, or you can junk an eighteen-thousand-dollar car. That’s the situation. You got a problem. I tried to fix it quick and simple first. It doesn’t happen to be a quick and simple.”
“Well done,” Joey mouthed, nodding approval and miming applause. I bowed to him.
“You understand what I’m saying, Mr. Wirtman,” I said into the phone.
You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 8
