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

by Beinhart, Larry

  Meantime, I’m in a fight with the families. They want to bury the dead. Naturally. They even sent a priest to see me. But I got a use for them. I want them in the morgue.

  I get one of the inspectors down to the morgue, telling him it’s about something else entirely, and I show him the body, the one we broke to take out of the water. Naturally he had to barf. I follow him into the John and start berating him. I am all over him. He’s on his knees, there’s vomit all over the toilet seat and he’s got it on his tie and I’m screaming at him that the body in there, that’s his responsibility, his fault. He breaks down and he tells me who paid him how much.

  Thing is, he tells me more than I’m expecting to hear. More than I want to hear, about how he passes on a cut to the guy who is over him, who has to pass a cut on to the water commissioner.

  That, right there, was the time for me to stop. I knew that.

  What they told me, my lieutenant, then the captain, also my district leader and several other people, was that if I persisted would ruin my career, and I wouldn’t make my case anyway. My wife told me that also.

  There was four kids dead.

  There was only one person who saw it my way. That was Michael Cassella. I told him about it, while it was happening. He agreed with me, and more, that it was murder. He was the only one who told me to go and do what had to be done.

  Even after I knew, for certain, and he knew, for certain, that what I was doing was professional suicide.

  Which it was. They creamed me. I lost my shield. I got foot patrol. For seven years I had foot patrol. Rockaway in the winter, to freeze with that wind coming off the Atlantic, the Bronx in the summer so I could sweat a little. I wasn’t happy about it. I admit that I did some drinking and was tough to live with. But that wasn’t why she left me and took the kids, who I never did really get to know again, ever. She left me because she was not going to have the Lieutenant moving up to Captain moving up to Chief that she was promised. She left me because I wouldn’t take no more fivers from shopkeepers, or fix parking tickets, or any of the low-end pickings that are there for foot patrol. So we were stuck living in Hell’s Kitchen in this cheap apartment which is now an incredible steal.

  She left. Found a car dealer in Florida. She was a looker and knew how to turn a man around.

  She took the kids with her. My son looks like he’s doing real well. The stupid son of a bitch, and that is the best use of the expression I have ever had the opportunity to use, is messed up with Arizona wise guys. Either he thought I was blind or he’s a slob. I saw the subpoena on his desk calling him before the federal strike force. My daughter, who made the good marriage and has become a Valium junkie, is more to be pitied than scorned.

  I can’t scorn the junkies anymore. Not when I’m one. Percodan before I went on my vacation. I’ve moved up to morphine since.

  I’ll try some smack when I’ve finished this letter. Am I telling you too much? Let me go back, because I’m skipping ahead and getting confused myself.

  It took me seven years, by then she was gone three, to get the shield back. I never made any more rank than that. Never made the climb up the greasy pole even though I was one of the chosen few picked to do it.

  Your father was one of the few who stood by me. The truth is, for a long time I hated him. But then I came to understand that he fought his own battles the same way he wanted me to fight mine. Usually it’s the guys who sit home in the trenches that scream the loudest.

  Like the President. There you and I mostly disagree. I think Reagan is what this country needs to hold its head up again. But I got to admit he talks about war like a guy who has only been to a war in the movies. Not like a guy who has been to a real one. I think about that sometimes. You don’t like him because he’s a phony. But did you ever think that these are phony times and what the world needs is a phony?

  I’ve done what I could for you. This Gunderson thing. I’m hoping that when the crunch comes you do the right thing. From the day it came in the door, I saw that it’s trouble. Only thing is, I don’t know what the right thing is. You done the right thing once. It broke you. Nearly. Now you’re on your feet. I done the right thing. Once. These people, these kind of people, they can smother you. Take it all away. So I want to say don’t do what I did. Don’t stand up to what can’t be stood up to and have the next ten years of your life, or whatever, go down the tubes and end up a nothing old man like me.

  I tried to stop you. I couldn’t. Because you’re ambitious. Which is good. You can climb. You can be someone. With the money and all the good things. Remember that.

  If you go looking in the dog food—remember how I told you to only give Mario the Alpo—you’ll find some cans of Kal Kan there. I got them from the head shop down the corner. You give them a twist, the top comes off. They’re stashes.

  It’s the cash money, a lot from Silverman, that I’ve been siphoning off. Some, just money I didn’t spend. Silverman’s not going to open his books to nobody. So it’s good clean unreported cash. It’s for you. Fixit money. Getaway money. Whatever you need. Because if you go with this Gunderson thing, you’re going to need something.

  I don’t know if I want to be honest about this. But there is something about what I did that still feels good. No matter what it cost. Your father would probably feel the same way. If he was alive. Though who we’re looking up in the sky to for approval or whatever that made us do it, I don’t understand.

  See, in the end, your father’s fight, my fight, all it did was bring hurt to ourselves and our families. That’s the bottom line.

  Now, I’ve done something else. You will see the enclosed papers. Adoption papers. I have adopted you. I don’t know if that is legal or not. You are not an orphan and so forth and so on. But that apartment of mine, like I said, is a gold mine, now that Hell’s Kitchen is getting to be Clinton and it’s one of the last rent-controlled apartments in the world. Which you can take only if you are a member of my immediate family. There are two sets. One current and semi-legal, maybe. The other backdated to the year your father died. Use whichever is going to work better.

  Two years ago, when I went in for my operation, I found out I had cancer. They got some of it. A year later it was back. It’s everywhere, Tony, everywhere. Lymph glands, lungs, liver, stomach. It even got me by the balls. I knew that. The vacation, that was for an operation. They took one look and closed me up. Doctor practically barfed in me. I tease him about it now.

  My balls hurt. They want to take them off. So my three weeks or three months or whatever will be less painful. I want to go out with them still hanging, even if oversized, slightly misshapen, and killing me. Irony there. We always thought you were the one whose own balls would kill him.

  Almost forgot. About anything I might have forgot to tell you, look in my notebooks. I was always a good detective, because I could type and took good notes. Meticulous, thorough notes. In boxes in the bedroom closet of the bedroom I don’t use, marked Salvation Army.

  The doc is an OK guy. I asked him what if I died in my sleep, would there be an autopsy. He said there wouldn’t. I’m a long way from what the fathers and the nuns taught me. A long way. Heroin is easy to get up on the block there, where the apartment is. I’ve stockpiled. And brought it with me. This way the doc won’t be embarrassed by stuff missing from the supply closet. Not that I haven’t figured out how to do that. I have.

  What little life I got left—I got nothing left—is ugly. I’ll pass on it. So when I finish this, I’ll slip the needle in a spot where there’s already tracks.

  I don’t have to tell you that you are the son that I wanted my son to be. Take good care of the dog.

  Joseph P. D’Angelo

  35.

  A Tacit Bargain

  I CALLED GLENDA IN the morning. While Marie was in the shower.

  I didn’t tell her about Joey. I just said that I would be home that night. For good.

  “You have a lot of ’urt,” Marie said. Her lips looked so full and he
r eyes so knowing. I brushed the hair from her forehead.

  “You want to go get some breakfast with me, at the Greek joint?”

  “I will make coffee. Ow would you like, au lait or noir?”

  “Au lait,” I said.

  “Do you want to say anything to me? There is a lot on the inside.”

  “Introspection is a disease,” I said. “Or a drug. I dabbled in it once. In college. A lot of college girls were into introspection as foreplay.” All of which was too fast and too colloquial for Marie. I knew that. But the drivel just kept gushing out of my mouth. Like a comedian in front of an audience that doesn’t laugh. “Later on it got easier. In the seventies all you needed to get laid was cocaine. But when you do introspection, you don’t do anything else. You enter the cosmic swamp. Meaning becomes obsessively elusive. Naturally, my grades slipped. My father, who used to do things like call my professors to find out how I was doing, found out how I was doing.”

  She poured the coffee into the hot milk. Standing in the kitchen naked. The sun coming in through the narrow window. All curves, lit and shadowed. I took the cup she offered me. I’d told her about Glenda. And Wayne. “Are you going back to ’er?” she asked.

  “My father thought it was serious,” I said, “and he whipped my ass back into shape. ‘There’s a real world out there. With things that need doing. You’re a man. You got to be a man. Or you’re no son of mine.’ That’s not what he said. That’s an exaggeration. But it’s what he meant. He died while I was in law school. He had a stroke. He lay there in a coma. First you hope. When someone has a stroke. Then you begin to worry. The longer they’re out, the less there is when they come back. So you think, this is day three, he’ll have a little trouble forming words, maybe a hitch in his walk, but with therapy … Then week two. You got to figure paralysis down one side or the other. Braces, cane, walker.

  “And don’t forget the mind. Less and less of it is going to come back. The will. It affects the will. ‘It’s like practicing veterinary medicine,’ the doctor said, ‘when the patient can’t speak to you to say where it hurts.’ Then it was two weeks. Maybe it got to three. When you know that if something wakes up, it’s going to be half vegetable. I don’t know. Then he died.

  “This is good,” I said, about the coffee. She looked so sad. Like I should’ve looked. I put the cup down and put my hands on her hips and drew her body close.

  “I don’t think she is right for you,” Marie said.

  “I vote with my feet,” I said. “I was out of law school and into the Correction Department before I realized that it was a decision. Too much introspection and you turn into a vegetable. I vote with my feet.”

  Marie brushed her fingers through my hair. “It is the hour that I ’ave to go to the plane,” Marie said.

  “You have to go back to Paris.”

  “Ah, yes, I ’ave to.”

  “We are out of time,” I said.

  “We ’ave a little time,” she said.

  A little time. We made love face to face, kissing. Then I turned her on her side, with me above her, so I could touch the round weight of her breasts and her buttocks. The womanness of her.

  She didn’t shower again afterward. I walked her downstairs, carrying her bags. She had our sweat on her body, and my semen still inside her. I hailed a taxi.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “A taxi to the airport is too much money. I will take the train to the plane.”

  I reached in my pocket and pulled out some bills. About fifty dollars. I pushed it into her hand.

  “No. I cannot take it.”

  “Take it. Take the cab,” I said, opening the door. “I’ll feel better. I don’t know. I’d put you in a limo if I’d thought of it. It’s OK to spend a little money.” I put her suitcase inside. Then I took her in my arms and kissed her lightly. “A good vacation, yes?”

  “Yes. A very good vacation.” She lived in Paris. I lived in New York. And all the rest that we didn’t say and kept not saying and were certain didn’t exist anyway.

  “You have a good flight. And don’t be sad or anything.”

  “No. I won’t be sad. And you, you will be OK?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I will be OK. That’s what I tried to explain. I don’t think about things too much. I just try to keep on doing.”

  “Yes,” she said. You boy, her eyes said, you are such a boy. Why don’t you ask me to stay? Why don’t you cry? You are not really OK. You are such a boy.

  I let her go. She got in the cab. I told the driver to take her through the Midtown Tunnel to the LIE to the Van Wyck. No foreigner rip-offs. I didn’t watch the cab drive off. I turned and went upstairs. She was a woman. I didn’t love her. It was just that she reminded me that I loved women. Which I had forgotten.

  Then I went back upstairs to Joey’s apartment. His things still filled it, like he was coming back. Marie hadn’t understood a word I said. There wasn’t much future in it. A great interlude. A fantasy come true. I felt so damn lonely. So damn lonely. I wanted to cry for Joey like I hadn’t cried for my father. I wanted to cry because Marie was gone.

  Instead I went to the office to take Mario for a walk.

  Naomi was there. There had been only one call. It was from Sam Bleer, my accountant. I called him back, but he had already taken off for the holiday weekend. His secretary said he would get back to me on Tuesday. I thought about telling Naomi to get the sign on the door changed from “D’Angelo Cassella” to just “Cassella.” And ordering new stationery too. But there didn’t seem to be any reason to do that. It was just an additional expense. I told her to close up and take the rest of the day off. That’s all I told her.

  Then I called the hospital to arrange my partner’s funeral. I was a day late. In accordance with his own instructions the body of Joseph D’Angelo had already been shipped out and buried in a veterans’ cemetery.

  Glenda’s office closed early too. I met her at three. I had Mario with me, and we went down to Riverside Park. To see the river or something. I told her about Joey. I told her I was home for good. “You keep a lot inside,” she said.

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m glad that you’re willing to have me back.”

  “Sometimes we all need space,” she said. “I understand that.”

  “I’m glad that I got this sorted out before Wayne got home.”

  “When, when you were alone. This last month. Were there other women?”

  “Are we going to go back to that crap immediately? The first fucking day?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “No … Do you love me?” I took her face in my hands and kissed her lightly on the lips. She burrowed her head in my shoulder and clung tightly to me. “You never said it very much,” she said, “but I always knew you loved me.”

  If one settles … for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans’ extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan’s version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute.

  GARRY WILLS, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home

  Part Three:

  AUTUMN 1984

  “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” I always thought Alan Ladd said that, in Shane. But it was on WFUX the other night, and he never says it. I wonder who did.

  Anthony Cassella

  And Samson slew the Philippines …

  Ronald Reagan

  36.

  Faith

  “PURPLE MOUNTAIN MAJESTIES,” REVEREND Billy Purvis Parker shouted. The white-robed chorus echoed the line. Their voices soared. “Above the fruited plain,” he declared. They echoed.

  “America, America,” he cried fervently, fervently.

  Then there was silence. One beat. Two beats. Three beats. Four.

  “God shed his grace on the
e!” A shout. A plea.

  “Please, Lord, shed your grace on thee. Show us the way to be worthy. Have we lost our way, Lord?” Billy asked. He looked up. No one else answered, so he did. “God put a special grace on this land. America is a Christian country. America is the Lord’s last, best hope for the salvation of the world!”

  I looked around, as best I could, through the sea of pale, fervent, white faces, searching for the face that matched my photo of Ralph McGarrity, P.O. Box 733, Faith, North Carolina. Not listed in the phone book or with the Board of Elections.

  Faith was a recent real estate event centered on Reverend Billy Purvis Parker’s Cathedral of Love’s Grace. In the constellation of big-time evangelicals, Parker was rated more fundamentalist than Falwell, though not quite as friendly as Jim and Tammy Bakker or as hard-rocking as Jimmy Swaggert. His finances were a closed book, but he was said to be richer than Pat Robertson.

  There were two places to stay in Faith. Both on Heaven’s Way, the commercial strip. The Promised Land Motel and Motor Court had facilities for recreational vehicles. So I chose the other one, the Land of Milk and Honey Motel.

  My room had two single beds and two Bibles, a Gideon and the Reverend Billy edition.

  Among the amenities was a map of Faith. The cathedral was at the center, meeting rooms and Bible study centers in satellites around it. Thousands came by bus, just like they do to Atlantic City. Bus parking was strategically placed so the thousands would have to walk through the commercial strip on the way to and from the cathedral. To the east and west there were tracts for Bless Our Home Houses. The business cards of two recommended realtors were enclosed. Also a schedule of Christian events and two form letters you could send to your congressman. One requesting his vote for the school prayer amendment, the other demanding a balanced budget amendment. I faithfully filled out both and sent them off to John Straightman.