You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The alleged organized crime member, as the television refers to it?”

  “Yes, Father,” Joey said, respectfully.

  “He’s a very bad man,” Guido said.

  “Yes, he is, Father,” Joey said.

  “So we hear, Guido,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s very true,” Guido said.

  “Thank you for that information,” I said. Joey gave me a look. For being disrespectful to the father.

  “I know that he is,” Guido said. “I was his family confessor. At Saint Anthony on Fordham Road. Many years ago. I might be able to help you reach him.”

  Then, the second day in a row, I had to go out to Brooklyn. Gene Petrucchio wanted to have a talk. Gene doesn’t like to talk on the phone. Except about the weather and the Brooklyn Dodgers. We met at Dom & Angie’s Luncheonette. I asked after his family.

  “Anita, she’s got a boyfriend. He’s a nice boy. An accountant. Me, I’m happy for her. The wife, she’s all upset. What if they wanna get married? They can’t get married in the Church. It’s all the same to me, long as they’re happy, but not to the wife. They’ll be living in sin, that’s what the Church says, so that’s what the wife says. If they have kids, the kids’ll be bastards. I tell the wife, what kinda bullshit is that? Of course I don’t say bullshit, but that’s what it is. So she’s in an uproar, and she wants Anita should go back to her husband. So Anita’s in an uproar. Otherwise, maybe I woulda had you over the house.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. “This is a nice luncheonette.”

  “Well, they make good coffee. Also they sweep the place every week. Check the phones, everything. For the convenience of the patrons. My nephew Eddie does it for them.”

  “What can I do for you, Gene?”

  “It’s what I can do for you,” he said. “You have a problem.”

  “I have a problem?”

  “I hear,” Gene said, “you get in trouble over women.”

  “Jesus, not anymore,” I said. “The truth is, I’m ashamed to admit, that I lead a very monogamous life. These days.”

  “Well, you did something to that broad, she hates your guts.”

  “Which broad?” I asked him.

  “The D.A. broad. Bronstein. I don’t know what you did to her, but she’s out to hang you. You’re lucky you still got some friends. Also that she doesn’t.”

  “Who’re my friends?” I asked him.

  “I am. When the broad went to Landsman—”

  “Bronstein went to Landsman?” I said in surprise. Landsman, the designated successor to the D.A.’s office, should have been the last person she would go to.

  “ … Landsman went to Alfonse, because Landsman doesn’t wipe his ass unless Alfonse says it’s OK to put it on paper. Alfonse called me.”

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is Bronstein going to Landsman. She hates him.”

  “If you can’t fuck your friends, you fuck your enemies,” Gene said. “Some people are like that. It looks like Bloom isn’t going run for D.A. So your friend decided to play ball. She’d have offered Landsman gratuitous sex, but Landsman can’t spell it. She had to bring in something. She gave Landsman you, so Landsman could give you to the Feds. There’s a lot of Feds in Brooklyn—grand juries, strike forces, special task forces. It could save somebody’s ass someday to have a line on who the Feds are investigating. She says there’s a lot of charges they could bring you up on. Suborning an officer of the court, violating the grand jury process, attempted bribery.

  “I want to protect you if I can, because you’re one of my people in this thing. So tell me what’s going on, and maybe I can fix things for you.”

  “What I was asking Bronstein for,” I said, “was the special prosecutor’s report that she worked on, on Randolph Gunderson. There’s some people that think that the special prosecutor didn’t do a real good job and that Gunderson could and should be indicted. In time for the next election.”

  “Is that it?” Gene asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “You offer her a bribe?”

  “I told her that I would get her favorable press. That I had a hook at WFUX. That if Bloom did run, I could get Des Kennel to make a big deal out of it. Which was bullshit. But there was no offer of money. I told her she should give me the report for the public good. Technically I could even say I was working for WFUX.”

  “It’s understood that I look out for my people,” Gene said. “So what I’m gonna do is have Landsman told that there’s nothing to this and I think we can keep it under control. But you better figure she still might go to the Feds.”

  I had been wrong. Very wrong. Alicia Bronstein had not sent me the report. She’d sent me the FBI. It was that coincidence that had them following me when I went to the offices of Finkelstein-Magliocci and why they had picked me up on the way out.

  “This thing you’re working on … if it any way affects my people, it’s got anything to do with Brooklyn,” Gene said, “I figure I’ll be the first to know.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Has it got to do with Brooklyn? With Alioto?”

  “As far as I know,” Gene said, “it doesn’t. But that’s not the point, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  “My nephew Eddie Alfoumado—the Alfoumados, that’s my wife’s family—he learned all this countersurveillance in the Signal Corps.” Gene gave me his nephew’s card. “He’s real good. You ever use that kind of thing, you might call him.”

  22.

  The Badlands

  IT HAD TO BE Sydney Coberland.

  When I called his office, they informed me that he was no longer with the firm. I asked if they knew where I could reach him. They said they didn’t.

  I staked out his house. He came out at 8 A.M. He wore a tweed jacket, pink shirt, blue tie, denim pants, and a funny little helmet on his head. He mounted his bicycle, in a precise and neat way, and pedaled off against traffic. When he got to the end of the block he turned left and disappeared.

  I stood there. I had never tried to follow someone on a bicycle before. But it was obvious that it couldn’t be done on foot or with a car.

  Of course, I, too, know how to ride a bicycle. I rented one and was ready the very next morning. It had ten speeds, those handlebars that curve down, two wheels, and everything. Even a lock and chain. I was fully liable if the bike was stolen. When Sydney mounted up the following day, I was ready. I followed him the wrong way up the block and turned left on Lex. He cut sideways through the traffic to the right-hand side of the street, then a right, then a left to go south on Park Avenue.

  On Park Avenue I got doored. Doored is what happens when you’re riding as fast as you can and someone opens a car door immediately in front of you. The front wheel hits the door. The bicycle stops. The person continues.

  My head went over the car-door window. My shoulder hit the window, which broke. I continued, airborne. Somehow I tucked my head and hit Park Avenue with my hands and then my shoulder.

  I heard the screech of brakes. Someone was being polite enough to stop rather than run me over.

  I looked up. It was a taxi. The driver stuck his head out the window.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said, feeling for broken things.

  “Then will you get outa the road,” he yelled.

  My injuries did not require medical attention. But the bike shop held me liable for the wheel. Clearly, this job, so simple at first appearance, required special expertise. I hired Speedo.

  Speedo trailed Syd to the Gay Alliance Health Crises Center on Christopher Street. He called me. When I got down there, Syd was still inside. I paid Speedo and went in.

  Oversize posters recommended safe sex. Cartoon drawings were graphically explicit about what was safe and what was not. A slender young receptionist with a blond Frito Bandito mustache sat at the front desk. The sign above his head said: “It’s time to learn about
living with death.”

  “Hey, guy,” I said, “is Syd around?”

  “Do you have an appointment?” he asked me. Like a receptionist anywhere else.

  “It’s personal,” I said, a little shyly, “and I’d like to surprise him.” I smiled my nicest smile. A nice surprise.

  He smiled back, displaying Hollywood caps and flirtatious hazel eyes. “I guess it’s all right,” he said. “Over there.”

  There was a new sign on the office door, which said: “Legal Services.” Syd didn’t look up when I entered. But he did when I said, “Hello.” He didn’t appear pleased to see me.

  “It’s about the special prosecutor’s report,” I said, seating myself in the client’s chair beside the desk.

  “It would be better for both of us if you leave now,” he said. He even stopped looking at me and continued making notes on his legal pad.

  “It took me a long time to figure it out,” I said. “It never occurred to me that it was you. But now I know it was.”

  “Frankly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The Gunderson report,” I said, in a manner that I thought conveyed conviction and relentless determination.

  “Whatever your name is,” he said, “I think you should know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is interested in any attempt at obstruction of justice in the federal judicial system. I am about to call them. I suggest you depart before I finish dialing.” He lifted up the phone with one hand. He tore a page from his notepad with the other.

  The page, which he held up for me to read, said: “Tonight. 8. Christopher & West St.”

  The corner of Christopher and the West Side Highway used to be tucked in damp darkness, heavy-leather bars on the east side, piers of desperate assignation on the west. Then the highway fell down. The city removed it from Forty-second Street to the Battery, rediscovering a fine wide street, with sun and the river breeze. The derelict warehouses have been torn down and the piers paved over, creating a nonchalant park with a river view.

  That side of the street is for light cruising.

  The howling wolf—banner of The Badlands—hangs over the northeast corner. The heavy-cruising corner. Everybody’s in a costume from a butch Baptist’s nightmare: leathers, macho mustaches, hot hankies, chains, and lace—an explicit code declaiming categories of lusts.

  Vanity Fair

  THE LURID LOOK

  Fashion goes downtown again.

  Nothing beats the gay underground for sheer macho depravity. Three hot young designers are turning to the leather and stud set that can be seen lounging around the alleys of the West Village to bring a new look uptown.

  “The straight world has abdicated masculine image making. I will bring it back!” is Hugo Von Diedle’s bold claim. “Even men who like women will dare to look like men again.”

  Esther della Vacheria says, “It is inspiration. All inspiration. My inspiration is the real men who once populated the cinema. What woman doesn’t want a John Wayne, swaggering in his costumes militaire. Or the silent cowboy strut of Randolph Scott. Every woman laments, Where are such men today? Should only men have them?”

  Lancelot Westbrook III is even franker.

  “Let’s talk hot. Brando in leather was hot. Hoffman in drag is not. In the last ten years, the only men who dared to look hot were in the Mineshaft or at the Saint. Come on, you straight guys. Come out of the closet. Add a little explicit hot to your haberdashery.”

  … What we ask is: can that heat be translated with the new cross-back fashions? And do we want it to be?

  Ayn Atlass

  An outsider like me assumes that the code has a refreshing clarity, a certain unabashed honesty. But maybe not. Maybe presentation diverges from performance, style is a promise that no one means to keep, and man-man routines are as full of lies as man-woman games.

  I looked for Syd. They looked at me. X-ray visions imagining my body. I felt their fantasies creeping between my legs and across my chest. Dorian Gray’s portrait came down from the attic, with its pale, ravaged face, dyed hair, eye with a tic, and put a hand on my arm.

  “Come on inside,” he said.

  Anything could be going on inside—pulling a train on a virgin from Waycross to the fist-fuckers’ regional playoffs. “Do I have to?” I asked, terrified as a Baptist coming face-to-face with a vagina.

  He gave me a big broad wink. It was not reassuring. “You’re looking for someone, aren’t you?”

  “If you mean that in the specific sense, yeah. If you mean am I looking for someone, no!”

  “Your specific someone is waiting for you,” he said.

  I followed him, keeping my mind closed. It was dingy inside. Syd was leaning against the wall in back, with a bottle of beer in his hand. He still wore his tweed jacket and tie. He looked distinctly understyled, given the surroundings. To the left of him, two guys dry-humped and French-kissed passionately. Another guy sucked frantically on his own mustache while receiving a hand job under one of the small tables. It was like the good old days. In prison.

  Syd’s friend, who had never relinquished his hold on my arm, guided me through.

  “Here’s your hunk, sweetie,” he said to Syd, both of them relishing my discomfort.

  “Thanks, Fred,” Syd said. “Tony and I want some privacy, you understand.”

  “Sure, Syd. I was just hoping I could watch,” Fred said, and gave us a wink as he backed away.

  “Jesus,” I said, “did we have to meet here?”

  “Why not? I’m out of the closet now. Are you ready to come out?”

  “Fuck you, Syd. You know what I want to talk to you about. You sent me the special prosecutor’s report—”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Not think; know. I showed your picture down at City-Speed. Someone ID’d you.”

  “You’re lying,” he said coolly.

  I was. Nobody at City-Speed had been able to tell me, or the FBI, who had brought them the mystery package. But I didn’t feel like he was challenging me. More like he was telling me that lying was a mistake. That he might deal with me if I was up front. I admitted that I was figuring by process of elimination.

  “Why do you think I did it? If I did it?”

  I thought he did it out of fear. But I didn’t say that. I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Fear,” he said. “But not of what you think. Not of your cheap blackmail. You know, you’re a sonofabitch pig; you’re slime for what you did to me.”

  “I did what I had to do. I hit on some other people some other ways. You do what you have to do.”

  “But one thing I’ll admit: You used it straight. You did what needed doing with it, which is bring it out. The report was a bad piece of work. I know that now. I could have done a better job. Or quit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want a beer?” he asked, a mockery of flirtation in his voice, from our first go-around.

  “You did send it?”

  “I got so upset, so enraged, and so humiliated after you took the gun from me—not that I can believe I was that crazy that I pulled it out to begin with—I got sick. I have a history of asthma. I got what seemed to be bronchitis. Or maybe pneumonia. Look around.” He gestured at the room. “Every one of us has fucked someone infected with death. Then look around at your own life. Maybe you have too. Assuming you haven’t slept with men, and I figure you haven’t—God, you suckered me—think of your women. Any of them ever shoot up? Or get a blood transfusion? Or sleep with someone three years ago who shot up two years before that?

  “Think about it. Makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? Your stomach knot. Are you going through the list? Did you perhaps have a sore or a cut on your cock or your finger where her juices could slip into your blood?”

  There was a harsh moaning breath to my right. I looked. One of the dry-humpers was coming in his pants, his hands digging into his partner’s leather
vest and neck, his body rigid except for its moving center.

  “I thought about it,” Syd said. “Thought about it and thought about it. With every breath that I had trouble breathing, I thought terror.

  “Finally, I got hold of myself. More or less. And I decided I had to face things. Truth and consequences. Look it in the eye. I had a blood test.”

  The Village Voice

  Dear Problem Lady,

  I always had a terrible problem when I asked a simple question like “How are your parents?” or “your spouse,” or whatever, and then discovered the person I was asking about had—how shall I put it?—passed on.

  Frankly, Problem Lady, I never knew what to say. “I’m so sorry” is très stupide.

  Gradually, I stopped asking after anyone that I had not heard from within the previous month. Still those embarrassing moments would crop up! I simply ceased asking about anyone at all, unless they were standing in front of me, as large as life and actually exhibiting speech or motion.

  In recent months I have become afraid to ask even “How are you?” So many people reply, “Terminal.” “I’m so sorry” seems even stupider when you are talking to the soon-to-be-dead than about the absent dead.

  Since almost every conversation seems to require a “How are you?” I don’t speak to anyone anymore. This has had a noticeable effect on my social life. Which, no matter what anyone says, used to be excellent.

  What should I do? Should I move to a foreign country where I don’t understand the language? Or is there a secret, special response superior to “I’m so sorry.”

  (signed) Desperate & Silent in Manhattan

  “I tested positive,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s a curious thing,” he said, “being sentenced to death. Particularly as a result of your own sins. I blamed myself, of course. For my unnatural acts. Do you want me to be more explicit about which ones they were?”

  “No. That’s OK,” I said.

  He smiled. “I come from good old-fashioned New England Methodists. I bought into everything I was raised to be. Protestant, Republican, and better than them. All of them. Specifically these”—he gestured at the room—“them. It’s not a particularly unique reaction,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the RPQs? Or the Thirteen Club?”