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

by Beinhart, Larry

  “What I’m thinking,” I said, “is that you might think of the whole thing the other way ’round. As an opportunity.”

  “Like how?”

  “When it comes time to make the case, it would be best to have your people make it. Brooklyn D.A. investigates corrupt fire marshal, or even crooked cops, is a whole lot better than federal strike force brings indictments in Brooklyn, which is saying that the Feds gotta come in because the powers that be are letting things slide.

  “But even more important, you’re in control. If it’s your investigation, you can keep too many extraneous things from happening. I go to someone else with this, which I don’t want to do, they could make a circus. Subpoena everybody and his brother-in-law.”

  “It’s worth having some people discuss it,” he said. “You keep me current.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Gene got up. He held out his hand. “Always good to see ya, kid.” I took his hand and we shook. As I started to turn away, he said, “Hey, Tony.” I turned back. “Be careful with Silverman.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t know what you did with him, Snake Silverman. If anything. That’s your business, not my business. My business is to know that first he was gonna be indicted—by federal people—and now he’s not going to be indicted. You understand.”

  I understood.

  Ralph McGarrity, arson investigator, was retired. That meant he had a pension. Which meant an address to send his checks to. Owen Levy dug it out for me. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that it was a post office box. In Faith, North Carolina. I was going to have to go looking for him. Owen was apologetic. He said he would try to get more information, possibly even a real address, which would make it all so much easier. But certainly photos. If life were all business, I would have left for Faith as soon as he found the pictures. But even with my deadline on the case, I had another priority. I’d promised Wayne I would be there when he came back from camp. And I was going to be. Even if it was just so that I could explain in person why I was leaving.

  Thursday night I took five Levys—Owen and Elvira, Carl, Paul, and Sarah—and Marie-Laure out to dinner. We went to Jezebel’s, at Forty-fifth and Ninth. It looked like New Orleans on the inside. Tastes good too. The Levy family looked sharp. And respectable. Practically Cosbys.

  I could see Owen figuring what dinner for seven was going to cost.

  “That’s exactly why I picked the place,” I said, “and we’re not going down the street to Blimpie’s. I want to spend a little bit on you and your family.” I turned to his wife. “Mrs. Levy, would you be so kind as to order whatever it is your husband truly likes, because if you don’t he’ll try to figure out what’s cheapest on the menu. And don’t skip the appetizers. And don’t skip dessert. And tell me what kind of wine you’d like.”

  “Well, this is sort of soul food,” Owen said, “and the truth is I don’t think it’s going to beat Elvira’s cooking.”

  “Sure, Dad,” Sarah, the youngest, said.

  “Do you really live in Paris?” Elvira said to Marie-Laure.

  “Oh, yes,” Marie said. “Do you know it?”

  “Oh, no,” Elvira sighed, “but I’ve always dreamed of going to Paris.” Every woman does.

  “I want to go to Rio!” Carl said.

  “Right on, Rio!” Paul said. “Carnival!”

  “I like New York,” Marie said. “All the people, also from the TV, make me think New York is not friendly. But it is very friendly. More friendly than Paris.”

  “Would you mind telling me about Paris?” Elvira said.

  “Yes, please,” Sarah said.

  I watched Owen watching his family with pride. And joy. The kids knew that Dad’s eye was on them, and they didn’t seem to mind.

  And I wished it was me. That I had my own family. Or that I was solidly centered in myself so I could feel that way about my adopted family. Did I want a kid, several kids, of my own? I had an uncle ready to put up the money for it. Assuming that the offer hadn’t really run out in ninety days.

  After two tentative glasses of wine, Elvira was bold enough to ask Marie about her relationship with me. Her future with me.

  “Qué será, será. I like Tony. But I live in Paris, he lives here.” She shrugged. So Gallic. Her eyes, as always, told stories, asked questions, and knew the answers. I thought I could talk her into staying. For a while. If I wanted to.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said to me. “I still can’t find a street address for McGarrity. I got pictures. From the retirement ceremony. So they’re only a couple of years old. I wished I could do more. Arsonists. That’s personal. They’re trying to kill me. They don’t know that it’s me. Well, you … you understand that. You and that dog of yours.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about the address. I’ll find him.”

  After dessert, coffee, brandy for the adults, and one sweet liqueur for each child, I didn’t let Owen even peek at the bill.

  It was one of the loveliest evenings I’ve ever spent.

  On the way upstairs, I picked up Joey’s mail. We were alone when we entered the apartment. Not even Mario was there. He was on duty at the office.

  I was feeling round and full. I took off my shoes. Marie turned on the TV. I checked the mail to see if there were any bills that I had to take care of for my eternally on vacation and out of touch partner.

  There was a fat envelope addressed to me, c/o Joseph P. D’Angelo.

  Tony,

  They have a typewriter here. One of these modern IBMs with the correcting ribbon. I would have killed for one when I was on the force. I learned on the old manuals. Where you had to slug the keys. That was the old Department. Where you could slug the suspects too.

  I guess they still do. But back then you didn’t expect a perp to actually complain about it. And if they did, you didn’t expect anybody to care.

  I was ambitious. That’s one reason I learned to type. A very valuable skill for a cop, typing. And spelling. You look at the old reports, you see everything crossed out, typed over, misspelled. Of course, in those days, they weren’t so meticulous, and they didn’t throw things out of court for a typo.

  There are so many things I have to tell you. About me. About your father. I guess I’ll do the hardest thing first.

  In the early days I was not a clean cop.

  There, that’s out. Now that it is said I will defend myself. Briefly. The lines are drawn now. Once they were just understood. “Honest graft”—we had honest graft. A store owner wants you to keep an eye on his store, which you would do anyway, which is your job to do anyway, and he wants to slip you a fin—once upon a time five dollars was money, that’s how long ago we are talking about—anyone in his reasonable mind will take it. Nobody figured out that like smoking that Mary Jane, it would lead to hard drugs. Which of course it did. Not with me. With the force.

  I can’t say to you, you don’t know how it is, out there alone in the scumbag section of life with the only people who is on your side doing exactly what you shouldn’t be doing, and not trusting you if you don’t do it. I can’t say that to you, because you were there. In scum city. And you didn’t fold. You didn’t go along to get along. So you know how it is.

  That was the hard part. The rest is easy.

  I wanted to make detective. Because I was ambitious. And I was a rising star.

  It was hard in them days. The Department belonged to the micks. Still does, if you read the names of the upper ranks. They still got The Department. I was a guinea, greaseball, eyetie, black hand. Us, the Hebes too, was like blacks is today. See, I know you always looked at me funny when I said nigger this, coon that. I can relate what we say about them to what they said about us. But the other part of me really believes they is different. How come they haven’t come up? How come? With all the helping hands, government programs—which we did not have. Nobody in America lives like they do, they got more junkies, drunks, homos, whores, and no familie
s.

  Like I said, that’s how the micks thought about us. And they did not want no goddamn guinea moving up in the ranks. They had—have—the Emerald Society, we had the Columbian Society.

  A few of us sort of got picked to get the guinea push up the greasy pole. I was one of them. Partly because I was smart. I had a good record, fifth in my class at the academy, some good arrests, a couple of citations for bravery, all that good stuff. Plus I could type and spell. It’s amazing how many cops spend so long at making reports and never realize that making reports is a big part of the job. Plus it is the part your superiors get to see. That’s what they know you by. Once you know that—which is an obvious thing—it clearly pays to set aside some time to not only get good at it but make it easy on yourself. Like learning how to shine your uniform shoes. (That’s not so important these days, but in those days we were much more paramilitary. Shined shoes, clean uniform, polished buttons, standing up straight at inspection, all counted for a whole lot.) That’s why I took a typing course.

  There was enough Italian votes and enough Italian politicians—mayors like La Guardia and Impelliteri, plus councilmen, district leaders, boro presidents, all of that—that the Irish had to give us some slots.

  I got my gold shield.

  I can not tell you how proud I was. I understood all the politics involved, all the bullshit. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter now. I got the shield with me. The original one. Polished. It glows when you polish it good. All the years of polishing have dulled the detailing a little, which gives it a hazy look, like looking at a streetlamp on a night with fog. It glows. Bury me with the sucker.

  That was in the days when I got real close with Michael, your old man. He was, as they say, a breath of fresh air, and an unusual man. No bullshit. Even his bullshit was no bullshit.

  Also, at the same time, I got away from the honest graft, which as we now know, as I knew then, was not so honest. That made me feel good. Clean and good. That is a very impressive feeling. You feel proud as a prelate.

  The thing that was so interesting about your old man was that he had broken with the old ways. Most of us Italians—and I should really say Sicilians, because we are not Italians except to America—most of us took the old ways to the new place and blended the two. To Michael, the old ways were crap. Omertà, crap. La Cosa Nostra, crap. The Church, crap. Keeping women barefoot and pregnant, crap. I always wished I had a relationship—what a word—like Michael and Anna. I like your mother. I should have stayed in touch with her. I never did. I lost touch with a lot of things after it all came down.

  My relationship—there’s that stupid modern word again—with my wife was different. It was traditional. I was the husband, breadwinner, king of the house. I won’t say what she was, good or bad, no need to slander others, but you will see for yourself what she was.

  Michael had a fresh vision. It was niave. (Here I am bragging about my spelling and that is one word that I can’t get right, but it’s the right one.) He did not seem to understand the venality of man. He thought doing right would somehow produce a whole race of people doing right. A very American way to think. He was born in the old world but made for the new one. In Sicily they would have stoned him to death, laughing all the way, hysterical, for such foolish thoughts. A world of honest cops, honest politicians, honest and powerful unions which would stand up for workingmen and let them earn a decent and honorable living. A fantasy world full of the dreams of men like Tom Paine, Voltaire, Garibaldi. Something would come up and Michael would say, “What would Garibaldi have done?” “What would Tom Paine have said?” “What would Thomas Jefferson have said?” He also read and talked about Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen. Books you had to hide under your bed, like something from 42nd Street with anal sex and dogs. Whatever happens, don’t let Mario fall so low as to do it for pictures. He should only be with his own kind, and no pictures. That was a joke. Nothing is funny anymore.

  Gravesend. I better tell you about Gravesend. Out in Brooklyn.

  We got a couple of floaters. I don’t know if you know about floaters, ever seen them, for real. The body is a sack. After death a lot of gases begin to form. They swell the body, like a balloon. If it’s in the water it creates buoyancy. This buoyancy lifts the body to the surface. That’s a floater. In warm water it takes five to ten days, in cold water it could be two, three weeks. Before they come up. Identification is difficult. The swelling, which I mentioned, also causes the outer layer of skin to split and peel from the body, plus the effects of water, and whatever else has happened to the corpse during the submerged period, buffeting, feeding upon the body by various forms of aquatic life.

  Finally we do identify one of them. It takes about a week. What identifies him is that one leg was shorter than the other, and his clothes, which matches with a missing persons we got of four kids from Red Hook. All about 14, 15.

  So what the hell is a Red Hook kid doing as a Gravesend corpse? I ask around and I find out that it is very possible that the place in which they come up could be almost entirely unrelated to the place they went down. Particularly in a harbor with two rivers, and more if you count the small ones out of Jersey, and ocean tides. A floater that started out in Poughkeepsie could come up the same place as one that started dead in Coney Island.

  Turns out, also, that I know one of the families, slightly, they being from Red Hook like me.

  So here I am, the young lion, proud as one of them lions outside the 42nd St. Library, with my almost brand-new shield, and I am going to be a hero and find out what happened. Though mostly what happened, from forensics, is that they drowned. No wounds, strangulation, nothing. I’m not thinking major crime, just to find out what happened.

  I do the usual. When and where last seen. Turns out they were playing hooky, as kids will do, and they were playing down by the Gowanus Canal. Which is a place kids would play because it’s dirty and interesting. Somebody seen them there. I don’t remember who. This is a long time ago.

  The other thing I find is that there was a water main break, a big one, right about the time they disappeared. Same day anyway. I don’t know what made me connect the two, but I did. That’s something you are good at. Taking two things that just are and seeing the invisible rope that ties them. You are at your best when such connections truly exist. You miss things when things just are as they are and there is no connection. Your father’s mind worked that way also.

  You understand that a water main is not just a pipe. It’s more like a whole tunnel. One of them breaks, it’s like a flash flood. Even when I found the place, which was three weeks later, you could see where the water had rushed to the canal.

  It was muddy, it was dirty. What it was, was sewage. I go stepping through it. Wearing galoshes. Because in those days good shoes cost ten bucks, and five bucks was actual money. I found a shoe. I found a lot of things. But among the things was this shoe which was identified by the family as belonging to one of the missing boys. Not one of the two we found. Another one who went missing at the same time.

  So what I can see, clear as day, is that here are the four kids, playing in the sludge or whatever, the water main breaks, there’s a flash flood, the water carries them out into the canal. You’ve seen the Gowanus. It is not exactly your babbling brook. The water just sits there, mostly. But the force of the flood must’ve carried our floaters out into the bay proper, where the tides pushed them along the bottom, then they got snagged or stuck in the mud near Gravesend, where they waited until they were gaseous enough to rise.

  It was not a major crisis, as I said. Not a crime at all. Nobody cared except the families. Now we got one family with two brothers missing, two other families with one kid each missing. One of the brothers is one of the floaters. So we have two families with children that they don’t know is dead or alive. Of course we’re sure they are dead. But you know what mothers are. Fathers too.

  So I push and I prod and push. Finally we got teams out there. Dredging with hooks and such. We found a
third boy. His body was wedged into some pilings. Wedged real good. It took two days to get the body out. First we punctured it, in several places, to deflate it. The parents, they wanted the satisfaction, such as it is, of burying the kid and having the priest say a few words and saying how they was all going to meet again in heaven, where there aren’t no Gowanus Canals. That used to seem real important. Maybe it still does.

  What they had to do was break the body to get it out. Tore off an arm and half a leg. What the hell, it was only a corpse.

  We never found the fourth kid.

  I did find something else. I was looking at this water main. Just hanging around, watching them dredge. It was a new one, or a new replacement. The thing was, it was a piece of shit. Concrete that crumbled in your hand. What you would call substandard, materials and workmanship both.

  I don’t know, if I hadn’t known one of the families, maybe it would have been different. To this day, I don’t know if I would have said it was an accident. Kids playing where they aren’t supposed to be, and they know it, and something happens and that’s all of it.

  But I’m standing there, my shoes all covered with shit and mud, looking at this piece of crap that the city paid for, and this piece of crap, it killed four kids. For a few bucks.

  Also, I understand that some inspectors were paid off. Has to be. It’s murder. Or, technically speaking, at least negligent homicide.

  I am part of the system, the one on paper and the real one, both. So I know what’s what. Against my own better advice, I start building a case. I tell myself that I am doing it as an exercise. Because it is a technical thing. But really, it is not that hard. I got the bodies, including the third one, that had come to rest in a direct line where the flood would take it, I got the shoe, and I got a picture of the pattern the water laid down over the mud. I get samples of the materials and get them analyzed. I get an engineer—one who does not in any way work for the city. Here’s the negligence. There’s the corpses. I go to the records, there’s the names of the inspectors, also of course the names of the contractors, and I am able to track down the guys who did the actual labor.