The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “Look, kid,” Cohen said. “When my partner comes back it could get a little nasty. He had a UF-28 good to go and now because of you and that Shoeshine guy it’s cancelled.” He saw the look on my face. “UF-28. Day off. How is it you don’t know that?”

  “How is it I should?”

  “Because your old man.”

  “Because my old man what?” I said. The bastards had done their homework. “He never brought it home. Do you?”

  “I try not to,” Cohen said. “It’s hard enough being a Jew in the NYPD without bringing the NYPD into the Jews. Some is excusable. But mainly I keep it separate. If I can. A guy like Dougie, Detective Kennedy, he’s third generation blue. Me, it’s just a job. I’m the only one in my entire family, actually. The only one of anyone I grew up with. Mostly doctors, accountants, business.” He smiled. “Me and your old man, good cops but abnormal hebes.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Heard of. We were both in the Shomrim. That’s the Jewish cops’ organi—”

  “I know what the Shomrim is.”

  “So how come you didn’t follow in your father’s footsteps?”

  “My father’s footsteps were confined to Downtown Brooklyn,” I said. “I wanted something more than seeing Joralemon Street all day every day.”

  “A kid like you, they’d make you a dick right away.”

  “No offense, but a kid like me wants to do stuff my father never did.”

  “Like?”

  “Travel, get into trouble, get out of it. Read books, maybe even write some. Some people are just not born to be cops.”

  “Still, your old man had a good name in the department. Until he—you know.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, ignoring the addendum. “He worked hard all his life.”

  “I heard your mom died.”

  Shit, I thought. “Yeah. I was little. I know her from pictures. My dad raised me.”

  “So you know the drill.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “It’s not me wants to know and it’s not Dougie. It’s the Manhattan DA. They’re looking for your friend.”

  “An acquaintance. We’re members of the same organization.”

  Cohen came alert. “What organization?”

  “The Mafia,” I said. “Sometimes called The Family. Sometimes the Cosa Nostra. You heard of it?”

  Cohen was just not very bright. But he tried to be helpful. “You know what you’re saying, kid? Because you might want to think about it.”

  “The Bhotke Young Men’s Society,” I said. “That’s the organization, detective. Not the Mafia. It’s a club for old geezers who came to this country from a place in Poland—“

  “My old man’s from Poland.”

  “Everybody’s is,” I said. “In Brooklyn. It’s just a stupid club for guys who like to talk about the old country before Hitler destroyed it. And there’s burial plots in Beth David.”

  “The Shomrim’s plots are in Beth David.”

  “Detective Cohen—”

  “Stan.”

  “Stan, the only connection Mr. Shushan Cats and I have is through the Bhotke Young Men’s. I helped with the funeral, the mourning period.”

  “You can say shiva, kid. I’m no goy.”

  “Who’s no goy?” Kennedy said, walking in. He was a Kennedy in name only. Where everything about our president was elegant, understated, well-tailored, this Kennedy was so lace-curtain no amount of money would make him anything but sloppy, overblown and incredibly badly dressed, even for a cop. His rayon tie looked like it had been fished out of the East River, and his suit like what had fished it out. His shoes were unshined, but his nose made up for it. And, this close, he had had a drink, maybe in the past minutes.

  As my father would have said, a disgrace to the force, but more or less standard issue. “I was just telling Stan—”

  “Stan?”

  “Detective Cohen here that my only relationship with Shushan Cats is we belong to the same Jewish organization. We buried his mother.”

  Kennedy crossed himself silently. “Well, kid, if we don’t find this guy you have no relationship with you’re going to have another tombstone to put up.” He considered. “Jews put up stones?”

  Stan and I looked at each other.

  “Yeah, we do,” he said. “Sometimes we do that when we’re not kidnapping Christian children to put their blood in matza. You know what, Doug? We been together six years day in day out, and that’s what you think of Jews, that we don’t properly bury our dead?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Kennedy said. “It just never came up what Hebrews do.”

  “You and I been to a Jewish graveyard.”

  “When?”

  “Moscowitz,” Cohen said. “When that spick shot him in fifty-nine.” He turned to me. “Big funeral. You wouldn’t believe how big.”

  “Huge,” Kennedy said. “That’s the kind of funeral I don’t want.” He turned to me. “That’s the funeral you get when you take a bullet. Me, I plan to die on the beach in Florida on full pension.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said. “I really don’t know where even to look for Shushan Cats. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to look for him. I’m a college student. My interests are women, literature and getting high, not always in that order. This whole thing with Shushan, it’s an anomaly.”

  “It’s a what?” Kennedy asked.

  “Not usual, not normal. Completely out of what anybody would expect. Like running into a street-corner Santa on Easter Sunday, or snow in July. Theoretically this kind of thing can happen, but it’s unlikely. Anomalous.”

  Cohen stepped in to help out. “Like when you get a letter but it’s not signed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly. Now can I please go home?”

  Kennedy smiled. Under the fluorescent bulbs that lined the ceiling like railroad tracks for aliens his teeth glowed a bright chartreuse. The veins in his nose seemed to be a roadmap of a very busy city. “Kid, we got to hold you.”

  “It’s not personal,” Cohen said.

  “Not at all,” Kennedy said. “Your old man and all.”

  “You have to hold me. Why?”

  “Because the Manhattan DA wants to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “About Shoeshine.”

  “Shushan,” I said.

  “You know who I mean,” Kennedy said. “He’s a popular guy right at the moment.”

  I couldn’t make it out. “You know about the FBI?”

  “Oh yeah,” Kennedy said.

  “They try to step in,” Cohen said. “In cases like this.”

  “In cases like what?”

  “We got to hold you for when Frank Hogan’s office wants to see you.”

  “He’s the Manhattan DA.”

  “I know who he is,” I said. “I read the papers.”

  The two dicks looked at each other. It was hard to believe too lumps like this had made detective. I had always thought my father’s gold badge signified membership in a very exclusive club.

  “We really got to hold you,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry. It could be for a half-hour. It could be a couple of hours.”

  To be precise, it was nine hours twenty-two minutes in which I sat in a five-foot square cage made of steel meshwork, and in which everything had something missing: one crippled bentwood chair minus a leg, one cement slab on which to semi-recline—it too was short by a foot—and a pile of Playboy magazines with the centerfolds torn out and most of the nude photos as well. I may have been one of the few college students in America who could legitimately claim to have read Playboy for the articles. My cage was at one end of the detective bureau, a procession of battered metal desks whose green linoleum tops were so scarred by cigarette burns there was something about them of art: Jackson Pollack might have created them on a really bad morning after.

  The dicks were good to me, up to a point—outside of trips to the toilet they kept me locked up—and bought me a couple of packs
of Luckies when twice mine ran out, to say nothing of meals, which they were under no obligation to provide. Lunch was all right: pizza. But dinner was spectacular: pizza with meatballs. I could hardly complain. Though they were theoretically free to come and go, neither Kennedy nor Cohen had much more freedom, in essence, than I. Whatever happened to me in the next hours and days, I did not have to return daily to this roach-infested station house in a bad neighborhood—“One point seven miles of insanity,” in Cohen’s words—where carrying a gun was as much a necessity for the citizenry as it was for the cops.

  At nine-fifteen, Kennedy unlocked the cage. “I didn’t think it would take this long, but Hogan’s office, they don’t give a shit.”

  “You on hours?” I asked, the cop’s son coming out in me: overtime.

  “Better believe it,” he said.

  Cohen came up carrying a rolled up newspaper under his arm. “The drill is this. We’re gonna put you in the back of the car. No cuffs. When we get to within a couple blocks of the DA we’re gonna put the cuffs on. This whole thing to my mind sucks. We figured an hour or two. But they been dealing with the press, the investigation, interviewing suspects. So Dougie and me we want to make sure you know we didn’t mean to treat you like shit. It’s just the system. So you walk out with us now, and later we’ll put on the cuffs.”

  “Policy,” Kennedy said. “NYPD fucking policy. You don’t need to be cuffed.”

  “What press?” I asked.

  The two detectives looked at each other in the dimly-lit hall.

  “What investigation?” I asked. “What suspects?”

  Kennedy nodded to Cohen, who handed me the paper. It was the bulldog edition of the Daily Mirror, the first of several editions that would be pumped out through the night until the final edition at five AM. There on the front page was a photo from the funeral of Shushan’s mother, a grainy blow-up but clear enough. It was a picture of Shushan in close conversation with a young associate—Shushan was actually clutching his arm. The associate’s head was crudely circled in red, as if with a crayon. The headlines told me all I needed to know of what was.

  SHOESHINE

  POLISHED OFF?

  CRIME BOSS VANISHES

  AFTER MAFIA CONFAB

  BOY-GENIUS SUCCESSOR

  HELD BY COPS

  But little of what would be.

  15.

  The assistant district attorney to whom I was delivered at the Manhattan DA’s Office was a middle-aged woman with gray hair, gray eyes, a gray suit buttoned to the neck and sensible shoes, also gray. Even her name suggested the color—it was Grady. Her nails were bitten and her stubby fingers stained with tobacco the color of her dark gold wedding ring. Other than tiny single-pearl earrings she wore no jewelry. “Please take a seat, Mr. Newhouse.” I sat heavily on the black Naugahyde sofa at the far end of the long room from her desk. The two cops took a position by the door, as if to make sure I would not attempt an escape. They had already made a nice show of uncuffing me. Grady sat in the armchair opposite me, a yellow legal pad in her lap. If a voice could be described as gray, hers was gray. Also flat, vaguely metallic, and matter-of-fact, the voice of a teacher who had long before become disenchanted with third grade. “You are Russell Newhouse?”

  “People keep asking me that.”

  Grady was uncharmed. “Of 556 Eastern Parkway?”

  “Yep.”

  “Social?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your Social Security number?”

  I told her.

  “Married, single, divorced?”

  “Still single,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I’ll ask the questions, Mr. Newhouse.”

  “Why am I not surprised, Mrs. Grady?” In 1963 women were still addressed as Miss or Mrs. Ms had not been so much as conceived, much less born.

  “Call me Dolores.”

  “Dolores.”

  “Russell, do you know why you’re here?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Dolores, it is so.”

  “Then I’ll tell you,” she said. “Do you mind if I make a record of this conversation?” She pointed down to her legal pad.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Cohen make tiny circular motions with the index fingers of both hands. If this was good-cop, bad-cop, Cohen was up to his ears in good. For whatever reason, he was telling me what Dolores Grady was not: A hidden tape-recorder would have me on record agreeing to “a record of this conversation.” The tape would not show Grady pointing to her legal pad. There was little I could do. Either I would not agree to the taping and set up an adversarial relationship from the get-go, or agree and know that whatever I said could become evidence in a court of law. Better to conceal what I knew. “Sure,” I said. “I have nothing to hide.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Grady said. “You do know why you’re here, don’t you?”

  “The papers have it wrong,” I said. “I’m nobody’s protégé.”

  “We have Mr. Shushan Cats on record as having introduced you in many venues precisely as such. Are you aware of that?”

  “Dolores, do I look like anybody’s idea of a gangster to you? I’m twenty years old. I’m a senior in the honors program at Brooklyn College. My biggest scrape with the law is some unpaid parking tickets which, by the way, I fully intend to pay. I don’t own a gun and in the unlikely event I found one in my hand I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s not that I believe the pen is mightier than the .45 automatic, but the pen is what I’m interested in. I’m a reader, not a racketeer. If things go as planned I’ll end up a college professor, or maybe a writer, or both. Okay, you could say teaching and writing are rackets, but they’re legal.” I pointed to the yellow pad Grady was barely making notes on. “Maybe one day this interview is going to end up in a book. Don’t worry. I’ll play it for laughs. This is a comedy of errors, Dolores. The only thing I know about criminality is that Shushan Cats is supposed to be a hood. But all I personally know about him is that as secretary of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society I helped him arrange a funeral for his mother and then at his request helped him out during the shiva, the week of—”

  “I know what it is, Russ. I was a Greenberg before I became a Grady.”

  Did she mean she had de-Judaized her name, or that she had married out? I didn’t bother to ask. “When the mourning week was over I parted company from Mr. Cats.”

  “What’s the Bhotke group?”

  “A criminal enterprise in which old guys from the old country talk about how when they were young in Poland they rode horses and milked cows. It’s a fraternal organization. There are hundreds like it. Now that the old country has been erased these organizations have become important to their members, because that’s all that’s left. They’re not only legal but they’re exceedingly boring, at least to me.”

  “So why are you a member?”

  “My late father was one, and I got drafted because they needed young blood. And very few of them write English that’s grammatical. It’s a job, twice a month. A volunteer job, but they throw me a couple of bucks. Anyway, considering the trouble it’s caused, I may volunteer myself out of it. Dolores, if you’re looking for Shushan Cats, I’m the wrong address.”

  For answer she rose and came back with a thick folder from her desk.

  “Is it or is it not true that your late father, Meyer B. Newhouse, was a New York City police officer?”

  “Very true.”

  “And that he was relieved of his badge for conduct detrimental to the NYPD?”

  “He never did anything but blow the whistle on crooked cops.”

  “And that a hearing was held in which he was removed from the force?”

  “By the same cops he blew the whistle on.”

  “And that he lost his pension along with his badge?”

  “With three years to go. He had seventeen in, and they took that away. That’s right.”

  “And that bec
ause of this he harbored a grudge against the NYPD and against law enforcement in general?”

  “What does my dead father have to do with this, Dolores?”

  She looked up from her notes to peer at me over her glasses. “Are you aware that after he was thrown off the force your father is known to have consorted with criminals?”

  Oh, that. “Dolores, my father did security for anyone who paid him. No pension, remember? He had a kid to support, and himself, and security was all he knew. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

  “Did your father tell you about his criminal involvement, Russell?”

  “Come on, Dolores.”

  “Did your father ever tell you about his life after he left the force?”

  “He didn’t leave the force. It left him. My father barely talked to me. He was a bitter, silent man.”

  “He was bitter about his treatment at the hands of the NYPD, wasn’t he?”

  “My father was bitter because his wife died on him. He loved her. And he was bitter that he had to raise me alone. And that every time he looked at me he saw my mom. Believe me, the NYPD was nothing compared to that.”

  “Did your father carry a gun?”

  “As a cop. Then when he was doing security.”

  “So when you told me you are not familiar with firearms that was not exactly true, was it?”

  “I know how to clean a revolver,” I said. “I’d do that for him sometimes. And there were a number of occasions when he took me to a firing range. Maybe you’d want to know it was regularly, sometimes every week. So I know how to shoot at targets. But not necessarily to hit them. Or people. And I never said I was not familiar with firearms. I said that in the unlikely event I found one in my hand I wouldn’t know what to do with it, not how to. There, full disclosure.”

  “So can we stick to the same full disclosure the first time around, Russell?”