The guests, on cue, broke into light applause. Pat Cohan held up his hands, palms out, and the applause stopped. “I don’t want to belittle Stanley’s victory the other night, but …” He wrapped his arm around his daughter’s waist and pulled her close. “But long after Stanley Moodrow’s pugilistic skills have evaporated, long after his triumph is forgotten, he’ll still be savoring the fruits of his second victory which I announce here tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, my good friends, and, you, too, Salvatore.” He paused again, waiting for the laughter to fade. “As of this night, Detective Stanley Moodrow and my darlin’ Kathleen, my one true treasure, are engaged to be married. May their union be long and healthy. And may they not wait too long to give me a grandson.”
Pat Cohan raised his glass on high. Thirty other glasses rose to meet it. “Hurrah,” Pat shouted. “Hurrah,” they answered.
“ ‘Ah, my darlin’ Kathleen,’ ” Moodrow imitated. “ ‘My one true treasure.’ ”
“Stop it, Stanley.” Kathleen Cohan somehow managed to shake her head in disapproval and giggle at the same time. She loved her daddy with all her heart, but sometimes he was pompous. Kathleen was twenty-two years old, too old to be called ‘my darlin’ Kathleen,’ but Daddy was Daddy and no one told Pat Cohan what to call his own daughter.
They were standing in a small closed porch. The front door was open behind them and they could hear the buzz of conversation from inside the house.
“And why would ya be so hard on me, girlo, when I’m only after larnin’ the ways of the Department?”
“He doesn’t talk like that.” Now she was laughing out loud. “Stanley, you’re terrible.”
Kathleen Cohan, educated by the nuns and priests from kindergarten through college, had been a good girl all her life. Upon graduation from St. Mary’s College, she’d chosen to teach at Sacred Heart Grammar School when she could have gotten a lot more money teaching public school. But she didn’t want to get away from the faith any more than she wanted to get away from the father who needed her so much. Needed her because her mother had walked away from the family on the day the telegram had come, the one announcing the death of Rose Cohan’s only son. Her only son and, for all the affection she’d ever shown her daughter, her only child. She’d walked away from the family and buried herself in the broad bosom of her faith.
Kathleen Cohan never spent much time worrying about her mother. She was a practical woman and there was too much to be done at home. The house had to be cared for and even if she didn’t have to do it herself, she still had to supervise the colored girl who came in twice a week. And somebody had to balance Daddy’s checkbook and pay the mortgage and get the plumber when the pipes leaked.
“Stanley?” she whispered.
“No.”
“How do you know what I’m going to say?”
“I don’t want to live here. I don’t want to live with your father.” He would have given her his most determined look, the one with the narrowed eyes and the pinched lips, but his face hurt too much. He had to settle for saying ‘want to’ instead of ‘wanna.’
They’d been having the same argument for months, ever since her father made the offer. They’d probably be having it until the day he moved her into her own apartment. Not that he was complaining. What he liked best about Kathleen Cohan was her stubborn determination. Most of the time she dressed like a high-school girl. Right now, she was wearing a starched white blouse and a blue pleated skirt that covered her knees. Add that to the freckles and the long, honey-blonde hair and she seemed as insubstantial (and as sexy) as the fairy on a bottle of White Rock ginger ale. But underneath that schoolgirl uniform, she wasn’t insubstantial at all. She was heavy-boned and solid and believed in herself as much as she believed in her God. Or her father.
Ignoring the sharp twinge in his shoulder, Moodrow put his arms around Kathleen and pulled her in close. He kissed her on the lips and felt her mouth open beneath his. He wanted to slide his hand down over her buttocks, but the door was open and there was always a chance one of the assembled cops would look up from his drink at the wrong time. Besides, she was undoubtedly wearing a girdle-she almost always wore a girdle under her dresses and skirts because it gave her that “smooth line.” Girdles, in Moodrow’s estimation, were the modern equivalent of the medieval chastity belt. You couldn’t seduce a woman wearing a girdle. You couldn’t slide a girdle over a woman’s hips. It took so long to get it off, the act had to be deliberate, had to be premeditated. It couldn’t just happen.
But maybe that was all to the good. More than a few of Moodrow’s peers had gotten their girlfriends pregnant despite the conscientious use of Trojans. Almost all those peers had done the right thing, but he knew of one girl who’d gone uptown for an abortion and come back home on a slab. The suits had tracked down the doctor who’d implicated the boyfriend who was now doing eight to twelve in Sing-Sing. Moodrow, having listened carefully to Pat Cohan’s warnings, would rather do the time than confess that he’d gotten the Inspector’s daughter pregnant. Pat Cohan was president of the NYPD Holy Name Society. He was an officer in the Knights of Columbus and a patron of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He would neither be understanding nor forgiving.
Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t times when they’d worked up enough heat to scorch the plastic cover on Inspector Pat Cohan’s living-room couch. Times when darlin’ Kathleen had pressed Moodrow’s face into her breasts, not even bothering with the ritual “no,” not protesting even when his lips and tongue ran over the smooth skin of her belly. Times when she’d opened her legs to allow his fingers to work their way under her slacks, her white cotton underpants.
“Doesn’t this hurt?” Kathleen asked, pulling back.
Moodrow touched his fingers to his puffy lips. “It does, now that you mention it.”
She reached out and took his left hand, bringing it to her cheek. “I have to go back inside.”
“Why? Your father’s in his glory. He wouldn’t care if you stayed out here until tomorrow morning. He probably wouldn’t even notice.”
“Stanley, it’s freezing. I don’t have a coat on.” She took a step back, but continued to hold onto his hand. “I won’t see you for three days.”
“Unless you visit me.” Moodrow had three days’ vacation coming to him and he intended to pass them going from his bed to a hot bath to the kitchen table. He was scheduled to report to the lieutenant at the 7th on Tuesday morning and he didn’t want to walk into the squadroom a cripple.
“I can’t, Stanley.” She dropped his hand and looked down at her shoes. “Daddy …”
“I can understand ‘old-fashioned.’ Your father wants to protect you and I guess that’s all to the good. But you’re not sixteen years old. You’re a college graduate, a working woman. And we’re engaged, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain.”
Moodrow put his hands on Kathleen’s waist-he wanted to put them on her shoulders, but he couldn’t raise his hands that high-and looked directly into her eyes. “If you wanna wait until you’re married to become a woman, that’s okay with me. And I’m not talking about sex, either. But once the priest says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ you’ve gotta stop being ‘darlin’ Kathleen’ and start being Katie Moodrow. What scares me is that I don’t think you have any idea who Katie Moodrow is. I can see the woman in you, but you can’t. Or won’t.”
“You can be very hateful, Stanley.”
“I don’t wanna marry your daddy.”
“He needs me, too.”
“Katie, your mother spends half the day in church and the other half in her room with a rosary. It’s sad, but it’s not your fault. Just tell Pat that you’re coming to see me and let that be the end of it. You’re twenty-two years old and you’re engaged to be married. That entitles you to come to my apartment when I’m too sore to get up and come to you.”
She didn’t want him to leave like that. Didn’t want him to walk out carrying the same arg
ument they’d been having for months. This was 1958. He was right about that. She should be able to do as she pleased, guided by her own conscience and not her father’s.
“I’ll try,” she said. “I’m not promising, but I’ll try.”
“Good,” Moodrow grunted, “because as soon as I get you inside, I’m gonna lock the door, rip off your clothes and force you to do ten or fifteen obscene acts I learned from all the prostitutes I was forced to arrest in the course of doing my duty.”
“Stanley, you’re impossible.” She was grinning up at him, happy again. He had a way of making things better, of easing their arguments. As if he knew it would be all right, even if she didn’t.
“Not impossible, Katie. Just very, very unlikely.”
Four
January 4
Jake Leibowitz was sitting at the far end of his mother’s kitchen table, the end closest to the living room. He had two reasons for doing this. First, it was as far as he could get from his mother, Sarah, who was cooking breakfast, and, second, he could see the open closet by the door leading out of the apartment. The closet held his “reward for a job well done.” Jake always treated himself to a reward when a job came off successfully.
Of course, there were some people, like his mother, who thought it was stupid to spend two hundred on a reward when you only took in three hundred, but Jake had to disagree. He wasn’t throwing his money away. Nor was he trying to play the big shot in front of his associates. He was conditioning himself for success.
Jake, as far as he could remember, had never liked to read. He tended to see letters upside down and words in reverse order. Not that he couldn’t read. It was just that extracting the information locked up in those letters was closer to an all-out siege than a leisurely pastime. Still, there were lots of empty hours in prison, hours when time seemed to reach out to the edge of a very flat earth. Jake, like the majority of his prison peers, spent most of those hours lost in common, if complex, sexual daydreams. But he couldn’t spend all the hours dreaming-there were just too many-so, somewhere in his fifth year of incarceration, he began to read Life magazine. He chose Life for two reasons. First, because it was on the warden’s list of approved periodicals and, second, because it only came once a week. Jake needed a week to get through an issue. A week was an absolute necessity when you had to work on the words a letter at a time.
Jake was in his ninth year at Leavenworth when he came on the article in Life that changed his life. It was the missing link in Jake Leibowitz’s formula for success. The article was on a Soviet psychology experiment which was called “conditioning.” It was mostly about a man named Pavlov who did an experiment with his dog. He rang a bell each time he fed his dog and after a while the dog started drooling every time he heard a bell, even if there wasn’t any food. At first, Jake thought this was pretty funny. He imagined Pavlov walking his dog down the street. Whenever the dog hears a fire bell or a church bell, it starts dribbling away. Like on some old broad’s hightop shoes.
But the article stuck to Jake, despite its clownish aspects. The way he understood it, the commies were saying that you could make something happen by getting someone to expect it to happen. Maybe that was why he kept screwing up in life. He was always kicking himself when he made a bad move, always putting himself down. What he should be doing, he figured, is rewarding himself when he did something right. That way he’d get used to being successful. He’d get conditioned.
“Eat your eggs.” Sarah Leibowitz banged the plate down so hard, the salami omelet bounced several inches into the air, then settled back on the plate with an audible plop.
“You still pissed off, ma?” Jake knew the answer to the question. He was sorry he’d asked it before the words were out of his mouth.
“He asks am I angry?” Sarah hugged her enormous belly with both arms and rocked from side to side.
“Don’t do a speech, ma,” Jake begged. “For cryin’ out loud. Give it a rest.”
“He asks am I angry,” she repeated, ignoring him altogether. “Here is a boy goes out and buys himself a two-hundred-dollar overcoat when his mother is wearing a rag. A rag, mind you, that’s not even wool. It’s a cotton rag without a lining. Here is a boy who puts lambswool on his back …”
“Cashmere, ma. It’s called cashmere.”
“Lambswool on his back when his own mother is wearing a twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents winter coat she got off the sales rack at Klein’s. So why should I be angry that my son thinks he’s gotta be Prince Jake, but it’s okay his mother should freeze her tuchis off whenever she steps out of the house to go shopping for his dinner? Why, I’m asking?”
Jake wolfed the eggs down as fast as he could. He had work to do and he didn’t want to distract himself by fighting with his mother. She never lost a fight, anyway, because she mostly ignored whatever he said.
“You’re going where today?” Ma Leibowitz asked.
“Mamaleh, mamaleh.” Jake gave his mother a hug. She accepted his arms, but he knew what was coming next, so what he did was take three quick steps back after letting go. Ma Leibowitz’s right hand just missed his face.
“Hugs are for cheapskates,” she shouted. “Fur coats are for mamalehs.”
Jake paused at the apartment door long enough to throw his new black overcoat a wistful glance, then took his navy peacoat off the hook and put it on. The peacoat was the cheapest coat in his closet, but it was warm and completely inconspicuous. There were thousands of them walking around the streets of New York. All on the backs of ordinary workingmen. Jake had nothing but contempt for wage slaves, but when he pulled the black watchcap down over his head and checked himself out in the mirror, he had to admit his mug would look perfectly normal behind the wheel of a truck.
The effect was exactly what he was looking for and he remembered to reward himself before he walked out the door. “You done all right, kid,” he said, nodding the way his father would’ve nodded. If he’d had a father.
Jake felt good enough to take the four flights two stairs at a time, but when he opened the outer lobby door, the cold hit him like a hammer. It was twenty-four degrees in New York and the wind was blowing out of the northwest at twenty miles an hour.
“Damn!” Jake’s eyes began to tear before the door closed behind him. He blinked rapidly for a moment, then opened them to find Abe Weinberg lounging against the side of the Packard as if he was basking in the July sun. Abe was wearing his favorite black leather jacket which he hadn’t even bothered to zip up, because he wanted everyone to see the white T-shirt he was wearing underneath it. Abe, or so he’d told Jake, had seen The Wild Ones eighteen times.
“Whatta you, a fuckin’ snowman?” Jake asked.
“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of my new girlfriend,” Abe said defensively. “It ain’t right.”
“Your new what?” Jake noticed the girl for the first time. She was also wearing a black leather jacket and black motorcycle boots. And she couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.
“This is Maria Roccantelli. She lives on MacDougal Street.”
“Pleased to meetch’ya,” Maria said, extending her hand.
“Likewise.” Jake allowed his fingertips just to graze hers. He was familiar with the term jailbait and he was pretty sure it didn’t apply to touching alone, but he wasn’t taking any chances. “Don’t you gotta be in school or something?”
Maria giggled. “I just come by ’cause Abe said I should meet ya.”
Jake looked at Abe, who was leaning against the car again. “Wake up, Abe. It ain’t Rock-Around-the-Clock time. Say goodbye to ya girlfriend and let’s get outta here.”
“See ya later, alligator,” Maria said jauntily.
“Take off,” Abe hissed out of the side of his mouth.
The reason Jake held it in as long as he did-five endless minutes-was that it didn’t matter much anyway. Maybe it made things harder, but it wasn’t going to change the spots. He told himself that what’s done is done, but wh
at he said was, “How can you be so stupid as to bring your girlfriend along when we’re goin’ out on business?”
Abe, who was working on his pompadour with a long black comb, looked over in surprise. “We’re only goin’ out to check locations, right? It’s not like we was doin’ somethin’ wrong.”
“I don’t give a shit. There’s times when you’re workin’ and there’s time when you’re social. I been tryin’ ta tell you that for the last six months. What I don’t understand is how a guy who’s been in the joint could be so goddamned casual. And that broad ain’t even a broad. That broad is a kid. She can’t be no more than sixteen and she looks like twelve. Here we are killin’ ourselves to get in with the wops and you wanna pump some guinea’s sixteen-year-old daughter. You gotta be stupid and I don’t need stupid.”
Abe Weinberg slouched down in the seat and drew his lips up into a sulky pout. It was the same pout Elvis had used in Jailhouse Rock, but it had no apparent effect on Jake Leibowitz.
“C’mon, Jake, smile. Ya gotta smile.” Abe torched a Lucky Strike and blew a thin stream of smoke at the windshield. “Maria’s seventeen, Jake. She graduates in June. Her parents like me.”
“Do they know you’re thirty years old? Do they know you’re a gangster?”
Abe didn’t answer and Jake didn’t bother to pursue it, because it didn’t matter anyway. Abe Weinberg was the kind of problem that could give Jake and all his efforts a bad name. It wasn’t about putting on a show. It was about low profile. It was about doing what you had to do without the whole city knowing your business. Guys who got too much attention-who got their names and faces in the goddamned newspapers-ended up in a Jersey swamp. Which was exactly where they were going.
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