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

by Beinhart, Larry

  Joey’s apartment was available.

  There I was. Happy to meet me. In an apartment that belonged to someone else. Alone but for someone else’s dog.

  Space. I just needed some space. That’s what I told her.

  In mid-July, Time said Geraldine Ferraro was “A Historic Choice.” The next week the Los Angeles Olympics was “America’s Moment.” We had a couple of small cases, matrimonials. I put the other guys on them. Joey called a few times. I missed him. But when he returned I would have to move back with Glenda. I did see her. We drove up to see Wayne on parents’ day. And pretended that nothing was wrong. I was good at it. I’d been doing it all along.

  It was also possible that someone was following me. I twice saw a salt and pepper team behind me in a government-issued sedan. And I spotted Fergie the FBI gorilla on the street outside the office. If they were watching, they were being disappointed. The big case was going nowhere. I was reduced to following up a letter to the editor in the New York Times as a lead.

  For Blacks: Friend or Fraud

  I read with dismay, and amazement, the once again uncontradicted claim that Randolph Gunderson was ever a friend to the black race. Or friend to minority persons of any type. I am personally familiar with the period, “the early days before the Civil Rights Movement had begun to move,” to which our Attorney General refers. I am personally familiar with his con-duct during that period.

  It was reprehensible. It was exploitive. It was consistent with his record today.

  The standards of objective journalism should be no excuse for lazy journalism. Where are people who check the facts? Are this man’s words to be accepted like biblical prophecy and not to be challenged? Or has your august journal, the newspaper of record, joined in the day’s inversion of rhetoric in which war is called a peace initiative and racism is called civil rights?

  Rev. C. D. Thompson, Sr.

  Charles Dickens Thompson was getting on. He walked with a cane. A stout and sturdy, polished piece of wood. But his teeth were his own. And his voice was strong. He lived on Edgecombe Avenue, in Harlem.

  It was a warm summer evening, the late light was gold. The brownstones on the block, which were built well, large and ornate, looked genteel and comforting. If the yuppie march north finally pushes white people over the invisible border, or money somehow comes into black hands, it will become prime real estate. I’d bet on the yuppies.

  I showed him my news credentials. It was all it took.

  “Umm-hmm. Oh, yes, I know Mr. Gunderson. Mr. Randolph Gunderson. Attorney at law. Attorney General of the United States.” The soul needs music, the tongue loves glory; the reverend was a Baptist. Words came like the Lord’s own flood. I didn’t hear the amens, but the amens were there, like a cadence in the air. “Oh, yes, indeed. I bought a home from Mr. Gunderson. I lost a home to Mr. Gunderson. And that home no longer stands. The land on which it was built barely stands. It is as a land sown with salt. A wealth and a richness made desert. Oh, yes, I do know Mr. Gunderson.

  “Those were the days when we walked with our heads bowed low. We had Robeson, we had Robinson, we had Louis, Joe Louis, in the ring. But it was ‘yassuh,’ ‘nosuh,’ and you had Jim Crow. There was Truman, who integrated the Army. Yes, sir—said a black man was fit to die with a gun in his hand in that Korean conflict, on an Asian land. Something that even Mister Roosevelt didn’t dare to do. Black was black, white was white.

  “Then there was Mister Earl Warren; you know they still, still curse his name. The white men who hate the black men. Because it was Mr. Warren who said ‘separate but equal is not equal.’ When a man sees the truth he is blessed. When he speaks the truth, he is a pariah. Mr. Earl Warren dared to say that a black child is a child just like a white child. That we must teach him. That we must allow him books. Teach him numbers. Mathematics. History. Even science. Imagine, a black child, beside a white child, delving in a text of physics. Quantum mechanics. Nuclear theory.

  “Dr. King dared to dream. We dared to dream. I dared to dream.

  “My dream was to lift my family out of poverty. Which I did. You see their pictures there, on the wall. Yes, see them there on the wall. My son Charles Dickens Thompson, Jr., lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. In uniform … ”

  I looked as he pointed. They were studio portraits. Posed. Paid for. Pridefully maintained.

  “Joshua Paul Thompson, in uniform, first lieutenant, United States Marines, died in action in Vietnam. My daughter, Mary, who teaches high school in San Francisco, California. Her husband is a college professor at the University of California.

  “My dream was to take my children out of the ghetto. Away from the evils of the streets. Into a clean place, a clean and well-kept place, high in aspirations. Not rich in material things, but wealthy with dreams, with the coin of ambition.

  “That’s how I met Mister Gunderson. Randolph Gunderson, Attorney at law. And through the blindness of my desire, through the desperation of my hopes, through the greatness of my need to do right by my issue, I became a pawn for his evil.

  “Evil. I do call it evil. A harsh word. A strong word. But a biblical word and the right word. Randolph Gunderson is a man of evil.

  “I tried to buy a home in a good neighborhood. When I came to look, they jeered at me. They threw stones and bottles at me. They scandalized me. And they would not sell to me, for no matter how green my dollar was, my skin was blacker.

  “Then Mr. Gunderson came to me. How he found my name, how he knew my aspirations, I do not know. But he came to me. He made me an offer. He would buy a house for me. Of course, I could not see it, except perhaps to drive by, but he would buy a house for me. With his white face. And my green money.

  “Of course he made a profit. I expected him to make a profit: ten percent, fifteen percent. I don’t know how much profit he made, but I know that it was more than twenty-five. I know that it was more than thirty. It may have been fifty. Fifty percent profit. On a transaction for which he risked not a nickel.”

  It was more than Thompson could afford. Gunderson helped arrange financing. At a point or two over the market. Thompson went for it.

  And Mr. Thompson was not the only black family that Gunderson assisted. He liked to bring in two per block. They called it block busting. It was in the interest of the real estate dealers to fan the flames of fear. Get the residents to panic and sell at panic prices. The middlemen made out very well.

  But the prices were high enough that a lot of the purchasers were certain to default. Then the brokers, or the lawyers, or the banks, would repossess and resell. Very quickly, the buyers, in order to make the mortgages, broke up one-family homes into two or three apartments. Or rooming houses. The prophecy that blacks would bring down property values was self-fulfilling. Half of the Bronx, hunks of Queens, huge chunks of Brooklyn, went down the tubes.

  “He was there when we bought, he was there when we sold, and in the end, when there was nothing else left to take, when the udder had been milked dry, when the land had been overplanted, he burned it down for the insurance.

  “He burned so many down.”

  “Mr. Thompson,” I asked, “can you prove that?” Because if he could, we had Gunderson.

  “If I had proof, oh, if the good Lord had placed proof in my two hands, legal proof, evidence of the sort that brings weight in the courts of law, then Mr. Gunderson would long ago have gone to a better place for such as he.”

  “It’s a serious charge,” I said.

  “We in the black community, we are not surprised by it. Oh, no. It’s part of the language. Up here, out there on the streets, they call it ‘Jew lightning.’ You ask what happened, when the family is standing naked on the streets, their pitiful collection of material goods char and ashes, smoke and ruin, before their eyes. They say, ‘Hymie the landlord was smokin’ his cigar.’ But that’s a form of racism too. Gunderson was not a Jew.

  “Randolph Gunderson. Let him be as full of fear, as full of despair, as full of c
are, as I was when the bank came and foreclosed on my hard-won home, when the bank came and confiscated all my worldly goods, when his bank came and made me bankrupt, with three babes in my wife’s arms, Lord rest her weary soul.

  “I have something greater than proof. I have the truth.”

  I didn’t tell him the truth was nothing. He already knew that.

  Or that racism is not a lawbook crime. That exploitation is not a crime. Buying low and selling high is a virtue. Real estate speculation is the national sport. George Washington preferred it to fox hunting.

  I needed an indictable offense.

  Which arson is. It is also one of the most difficult crimes to prove. It was worse when it happened twenty years ago.

  It was dark when I finally left. And warmer rather than cooler. The breeze was dead. The air sat. There were a bunch of kids on one stoop, laughing and sassing. Across from them, two men drank from a wine bottle, while a momma fed the infant on her lap with a bottle. A large, shirtless teenager danced with a fifteen-pound tape deck on his shoulder. He shone with sweat, and rap screamed down the block. I saw the tight blue pattern of flame from a butane torch reflected in an automobile window. Someone was squatting between the cars, sucking up a crack pipe. There was a silver Mercedes with smoked windows down where I had parked. Four or five brothers were hanging around the driver’s side, looking for action.

  I walked up the block.

  The minute they turned toward me, I knew. It was in their walk, in their eyes. Dark, shiny eyes that thought four on one was fun. They were gonna get some manhood by cutting pieces out of mine.

  They spread, two to cut me off, two to get around behind me. The headlamps on the Mercedes flicked on. An invisible man behind the smoked-glass windows put it in gear and it purred slowly down the street, leaving me to his friends.

  SCENARIO #1

  Q: So four guys walked across the street, more or less in your direction?

  A: Correct.

  Q: Then you pulled a gun?

  A: Correct.

  Q: I see. Did they have weapons? I mean, visible to you?

  A: One had a baseball bat.

  Q: He was also in a sweatshirt. With a team name on it. So he might have been hanging out after a game in the park?

  A: I didn’t think so.

  Q: Now, did any of these four hit you?

  A: No.

  Q: Throw something?

  A: No.

  Q: Utter threats?

  A: No.

  Q: Did you know any of these people previously?

  A: No.

  Q: Four guys, actually two groups of two, cross the street, at a walk, carrying no weapons, except possibly a baseball bat, which might well have been used for playing baseball. They do not commit battery, assault, or even say anything to you. Then you draw a .38 caliber revolver and begin firing. You kill one and injure two.

  A: Wait a minute. You don’t understand. I knew by the look in their eyes.

  Q: Tell me, Mr. Cassella, are you in the habit of committing murder because people walk across the street? Did you think that that side of the street was yours?

  A: I mean, what it is, if I waited for them to get close enough to assault me, four to one, it would have been all over, the other way. I was the intended victim.

  Q: Or is it because they were black and you have some paranoid racist fantasy that all black people are criminal assailants? This is not South Africa. This is not Nazi Germany. We don’t permit that, Mr. Cassella. Which is why you’re under indictment for murder.

  SCENARIO #2

  Witness: Well, Officer, dey was dis whiteman, don’ know what all he’s doin’ here. He jus’ bobbing along, you know. They they’s these brothers, you know, they’s on the other side of the avenue. Up and a sudden the whiteman, he starts flyin’. He’s screamin’, “Feets, don’t fail me now,” or some such. I don’ unnerstan’, you dig. Then they’s these other dudes, brothers, you dig, you hear me, man, they start goin’ after the whiteman. Don’ ast me whys, I don’ know whys, alls I knows is they’s flyin’ behind. Until they catch him, ’cause you know no whiteman go’n beat four brothers in no foot race. Get one of them Ferrari cars maybe outruns the brothers. Anyways, then he was dead meat. Right there. Dead meat. I sees it. … Who they was? I don’ know nobody. Not me, Officer, I don’ know none those people. Prob’bly from Jersey, Georgia, someplace like that, you dig.

  SCENARIO #3

  With one hand I drew my gun, flicked the safety off, and pulled the hammer back. With the other, I pulled out my wallet. I flopped it open like I was showing my shield. Little bits of paper fell out. Receipts. I didn’t bend down to collect them.

  “Don’t even fucking think about it,” I said.

  They stopped. All four of them. Their eyes locked on me. The way a Doberman stares when his master says, “Watch him!” I put my wallet back but kept my piece out. “You two,” I said to the brothers on my left, “beat it. You,” I said to the ones on my right, the ones between me and my vehicle, “up against the car. Assume the fuckin’ position. You know the fuckin’ position. You been there.”

  They had. They knew. They did.

  I edged around them, keeping my eye on the other two, who strutted extra slow, just to show they weren’t intimidated. Fine. When the strutters were far enough away that they couldn’t cause me trouble, I moved in on the two leaning against the car. I kicked their legs wider apart and made sure they were too off balance to move. Then I started patting down the first of the two. I tossed his wallet on the ground. There was a big hunk of metal in his front pocket. A Saturday Night Special. I relieved him of it. As I moved to the next one, someone yelled, “White motherfucker,” and something hit me hard as hell in the lower back. I stumbled into the second guy. His hands slipped off the car roof and he started crashing down. His legs tangled in mine, and I went down on one knee.

  Half a brick sailed over my head and through the car window. I got my gun around and just about fired at two kids. They were no older than Wayne. “Motherfucking whitey,” they yelled, running away.

  I didn’t have time to sigh with relief for what I hadn’t done, when the first guy hit me in the head. Which was really stupid. He broke his hand. Which is what usually happens if you hit someone’s skull hard enough.

  It knocked me to the side. That was good too. Because the guy below me was waving a blade. Whatever part of me he was aiming at, he missed. His forearm and fist hit my shoulder. I saw the blade. It made me really angry. I shoved backward hard, using the full power of my legs and all my weight. He slammed into the car with a grunt, a thud, and a moan. I turned my gun on the other one, who was moaning over his busted knuckles. His eyes went wide and his mouth went slack.

  God, I wanted to shoot him. He saw it and started to scramble backward, waving his good hand in front of him, like it would ward off a bullet. The son of a bitch beneath me was still trying to stab me. I stumbled around out of his range, then kicked his arm. He dropped the knife.

  My arm was wet. I realized he had cut me. With my mind screaming “Nigger”—yes, the garbage of the world catches up with me—I stomped his hand. Stomped it hard. To hurt the bastard. Then I shoved the gun in his face.

  “Oh, man, oh, you motherfucker—I wanna make you eat this. I wanna make you swallow a fucking bullet and fucking die! You hear me? Now tell me who the fuck told you to come at me.”

  “Don’ know.”

  I tapped his head with the gun. Just like a real cop would. Seething, boiling, sick with rage. He moaned and put his good hand to his skull. I hit him across the knuckles. That hurt even more.

  “Don’ know the man. White man.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “Said to hurt you, hurt you bad.”

  “Pay you?”

  “Yo, he pay. He pay.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  He tried to pull out less than what he had. I snatched at his pocket and came up with two hundred-dollar bills. I kept them. Two hundred each, eig
ht hundred total. The man in the Mercedes had wanted me more than hurt. “You were supposed to off me,” I said.

  “Hurts bad’s what he say. Hurts bad.”

  Somebody had been following me. And wanted to stop me. Why now? Because of Reverend Thompson? The attack gave his information a whole lot of weight. A whole lot. “Stupid motherfucker,” I said about the Mercedes white man. “He paid retail.”

  There were sirens. Someone had maybe called the police. So I left the guy who’d cut me there and walked away. Though the sirens could have been going somewhere else entirely.

  Some guys like to kill. Some like to hurt. A lot of people take comfort in despising other people for the where or way they’re born. My daddy raised me different. I thought. So where did the garbage that had filled me come from? It was a white man set them on me. Why was I seeing niggers? Why do we do that?

  The adrenaline goes sour afterward. It turns into adrenochrome. That makes you feel sick. Nauseous. I swallowed it down, but I tasted myself. Tasted my garbage.

  I stopped in front of a deli as soon as I got far enough south for the streets to be white. I took a look at my arm before I went in. It was all right, but a mess. I went in and bought a roll of antacids and some aspirin. The guy behind the counter kept looking at my arm and wondering about its connection to antacids. I was close to home. My real home. The one with Glenda.

  Then I decided to go to my other home. The one with the dog.

  30.

  Je Ne Regrette Rien

  “ ’ELLO,” SHE SAID, DROPPING the h that doesn’t exist in French. “Do you remember me?” Which I absolutely did. “I am in New York now. I have just made the arrival.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At an ’otel, with my friend.”

  “Oh, which friend?” I asked. Not because I knew Marie’s friends, but to find out if it was Jean-Paul, Jean-Luc, Jean-Claude, or one of the other hyphenated Jeans.