A Piece of the Action

by Stephen Solomita

  “Look what ya did,” Mitkowski said calmly. “Ya moved ya noggin and the phone book fell on the floor.” He picked it up, then grabbed Zayas’s face and lifted his head. “Now what I’m gonna do is put this phone book on ya head again. I know ya first instinct is gonna be to shake it off. Hey, it’s only natural. But ya should think about this. If there ain’t no phone book up there, then there ain’t nothin’ between ya faggoty skull and Pete’s nightstick. See what I mean?”

  Mitkowski didn’t wait for an answer. He balanced the phone book on top of Zayas’s trembling head, then stepped back and nodded to O’Brien who once again brought the club through its arc. This time Zayas didn’t scream. He slumped forward, his eyes fluttering, nearly unconscious.

  Zayas would have remained that way for a long time, preferring the blank dizziness to the reality awaiting him, but the sight of Stanley Moodrow crashing through the door overrode any common sense he might have had.

  “What the fuck is goin’ on here?” Moodrow demanded.

  “Jeez.” Even Mitkowski, who’d been expecting Moodrow’s entrance, was impressed. Like most of the cops in the 7th Precinct, he’d witnessed the Liam O’Grady fight.

  “I asked you a question,” Moodrow repeated.

  “Drop dead, Stanley,” O’Brien said. “We’re just doin’ our jobs.”

  Moodrow strode across the floor and grabbed O’Brien’s lapel, yanking him in close. “What you are is a fucking animal, Pete. And what I am is an animal trainer. I want you out of here. You and that asshole dwarf you call a partner.”

  “Take it easy. Take it easy.” O’Brien instinctively pushed back Moodrow’s chest. It was like pushing against a concrete pillar. “Jeez,” he said, echoing his partner’s sentiments.

  “Look here, Stanley,” Mitkowski muttered, “this asshole belongs to us. You try to play the big hero, we’re gonna go to the lieutenant.”

  Moodrow released O’Brien and turned to Mitkowski. “Go anywhere you want, Mack. As long as it’s out of here. And give me a key for those cuffs. Whatta ya think ya got here, public enemy number one?”

  Mitkowski fished a key out of his pocket and threw it at Moodrow. “We’ll be back,” he announced.

  “Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

  Of course, they did slam the door. O’Brien slammed it as hard as he could and Moodrow had to wait for the crash to die down. When it was quiet in the room, he knelt beside Zayas and removed the handcuffs on the little man’s wrists and ankles.

  “That feel better, Victor?” Moodrow asked.

  Zayas nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “What they did was wrong.” Moodrow went back into the anteroom and picked up a small table and a chair. He carried them back into the interrogation room and set them in front of Zayas. “How do you take your coffee, Victor? Milk and sugar? Light and sweet?”

  Zayas stared at Moodrow, uncomprehending.

  “Your coffee, Victor. How do you like it?”

  “Black.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Moodrow reappeared a minute later with a steaming mug in his hands. He placed it in front of Zayas before sitting down. Carefully, almost reluctantly, he took out his ballpoint and his notebook. “You smoke, Victor?” he asked.

  Stanley Moodrow sat at his kitchen table, an untouched bowl of Hormel chili (customized with strips of Kraft’s Sliced American) in front of him. He was trying to read the Daily News, the same edition he’d been reading before Kathleen’s call, but the stories seemed trivial, absurd. Albert Anastasia, the ultimate high-profile gangster, was in the headlines again. The reputed head of Murder, Inc., Anastasia had been gunned down in a barber’s chair the previous October. Ever since, publicity-seeking DAs and congressional committees had been dragging in one mobster after another for what they called ‘questioning.’ Now it was Meyer Lansky’s turn, Lansky and Sam Trafficante who were, according to the story, in Havana trying to buy the country of Cuba from its dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

  Despite his best efforts, Moodrow kept asking himself the same question: what did Albert Anastasia and Meyer Lansky and the DA, Frank Hogan, have to do with what had happened in the Canary Cage? As Patero had predicted, the reporters had come to photograph Moodrow leading a handcuffed Playtex Burglar out of the 7th Precinct and into a waiting van. Would the story they printed have anything to do with what had gone on in that basement room? Would they, for instance, reflect Patero’s anger? Because he, Moodrow, had never taken Patero’s list out of his pocket. He’d simply written down whatever Zayas had said and had the kid sign on the bottom line.

  Moodrow was honest enough to admit that he’d known about the game all along. His uncle had enlightened him before he’d entered the Academy. It was simple enough, really. The courts (the lower courts, at least) would admit any confession, no matter how it was obtained. The higher courts, assuming the convict had the money for an appeal, were as likely to reverse these convictions as not, but this meant less than nothing to the NYPD. As far as the cops were concerned, cases were cleared the minute a conviction was obtained, no matter what happened two years down the line. Of course, clearing cases wasn’t the only way up for an ambitious precinct commander, but failing to clear as many cases as your competitors was a sure way down.

  Maybe, Moodrow thought, it was like your first murder scene. You never forgot the first one—it dug under your skin like the teeth of a bloodsucking tick—but, after a while, you simply got used to the violence. After a while, you could stand there, inhaling the coppery stink of drying blood, and chomp on your doughnut like a real veteran.

  The doorbell rang before Moodrow could drag himself back to the Daily News. He got up, hoping against hope that it was Kathleen come to tell him that Father Ryan could go to hell. But it wasn’t Kathleen. It was his neighbor, Greta Bloom.

  “Good evening, Stanley,” she announced, marching past him into the apartment.

  “Why don’t you come in, Greta?”

  “I’m already in, thank you.” She turned back to the door. “Rosaura, please. Don’t stay in the hallway. You’ll get a draft.”

  The middle-aged woman who stepped into the apartment was so large that Moodrow couldn’t believe that he hadn’t noticed her in the hallway, had nearly shut the door in her face.

  “Stanley,” Greta said, “this is your neighbor, Rosaura Pastoral. Rosaura, this is our policeman, Stanley Moodrow.”

  Our policeman? Moodrow managed a nod despite his annoyance. He reminded himself that Greta had been his mother’s best friend, had nursed her through her illness. If it wasn’t for Greta Bloom, his mother would have spent the last six months of her life in a hospital.

  “What could I do for you, Greta? Somebody lose a cat?”

  “What you could do is ask us to sit down. And don’t be a wiseguy, Stanley. I told you a million times about that.”

  “Greta, Mrs. Pastoral, please sit down.”

  Then he remembered. A homicide on Pitt Street. A stiff named … Melenguez, that was it. Luis Melenguez. He was supposed to ask around, find out what happened.

  Greta perched herself on the edge of the couch. “Nu, you shouldn’t bother with coffee and a nosh. It’s late and we won’t be staying long.”

  “Gee, Greta, I was just about to create my world-famous onion dip.”

  “Please, Stanley. This is serious business.”

  Moodrow sat down and looked the two women over. Rosaura Pastoral looked to be about five foot eight. She weighed maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. Greta Bloom, tiny, nervous, fluttering like a parakeet, had never weighed more than a hundred pounds in her life.

  “What it is,” Moodrow said, trying for a smile, “is I forgot all about it. I mean what you asked me the other day. Things got a little crazy in the precinct and I forgot to ask around.”

  “He forgets a murder? How is this possible?”

  How could he explain it? All the times he’d responded to a crime scene to find a DOA lying in a pool of blood. It was
always gruesome, no doubt about that, but it had long ago ceased to be exotic.

  “What could I say? I’m sorry.” What he wanted to do was get rid of them without listening to the harangue already showing in the expression on Greta’s face. “I’ll tell you what, Greta. As long as you brought Mrs. Pastoral with you, why don’t you let her tell me why she feels something’s wrong here. That way I’ll know what to ask when I go into the precinct tomorrow.”

  Greta Bloom sniffed once. “That’s smart, Stanley. But I’d be happy you shouldn’t embarrass me again. If you’re not interested in doing a favor, you should come right out and say so.”

  Moodrow turned to Rosaura Pastoral without answering. Now that she was sitting in front of him, he did recognize her. Maybe he’d seen her by the mailboxes or carrying a bag of groceries up the stairs. He couldn’t really remember and that was too bad, because there was a time when he could name every family in the building.

  “Maybe you better tell me about it,” he said.

  “Señor Moodrow,” Rosaura Pastoral spoke for the first time. Her voice was deep and slightly hoarse. “This thing happens the day after Christmas. My boarder, Luis Melenguez, goes out for the evening and he don’ come back. For five days I don’ hear nothing. Then someone tell me he is killed in a house on Peet Street.”

  “Peet Street?”

  “She means, Pitt Street,” Greta interpreted.

  “I’m sorry for my English is no too good. I try to learn, but it comes very slow.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Moodrow said. “Just tell your story.”

  “When I’m hearing this about Luis, I go to the police station and talk to the officer at the desk. He is sending me to a man in a suit, Detective Maguire. Detective Maguire is telling me the investigation is … progressing. Tha’ is the word he use. Progressing. Then I ask him why nobody come to see me. I am Luis’s landlady. He live in my home. Why nobody come to as’ me who is his friends? Who is his enemies? Ayyy, Dios mio, Detective Maguire get so angry. He say I don’ know nothin’ about it, so why don’ I go home and mind my own business. I do like he say, but no is right thing. I don’ think so.”

  Moodrow took a minute before he responded. He’d been in the final stages of training for his bout with Liam O’Grady on December 26 and knew less than nothing about the murder. But the fact that more than two weeks had gone by without an arrest meant that, statistically, at least, the murder was unlikely to be cleared.

  “You say that nobody came to interview you. Nobody?”

  “No, Señor. I never hear from nobody abou’ this thing. Luis Melenguez is only in this country six months. He leaves his wife and his children in Puerto Rico to come here. Luis never hurt nobody in his life. In his country, he is a … I don’ know the word for this.”

  “A peasant, Stanley,” Greta said. “And believe me, from peasants I have experience.”

  The Department, Moodrow knew, cleared a high percentage of homicides, usually within the first forty-eight hours. And the way they cleared them was by investigating the people closest to the victim. Of course, there might be any number of reasons why Maguire hadn’t followed standard operating procedure, not the least of which was the distinct possibility that Rosaura Pastoral was lying through her teeth. But even if Rosaura was telling the truth, even if Maguire had no good reason for sitting on his hands, there remained the question of what he, Stanley Moodrow, could do about it.

  “You should understand something here,” he said, more to Greta Bloom than Rosaura Pastoral. “I’m not the commissioner. There’s not much I can do.”

  “Stanley, please, no one expects you should go out and make miracles. But also you should remember that Rosaura is your neighbor. She comes to you for help, because there’s no other place for her to go. The machers at the police station don’t have no use for a pisher like Rosaura Pastoral. Let me tell you a story so you should understand what I’m trying to say.”

  “Please,” Moodrow groaned. Greta’s stories had a way of extending themselves through several generations.

  “Stanley, make me a promise you’ll listen close and I swear I won’t be too long.”

  “Keep it short and I’ll repeat it word for word.”

  “Huh,” she snorted, “always with the smart mouth. One day you’ll get in trouble with a mouth like that.”

  “One day?”

  “When I came to this country,” she said, ignoring his response, “I was already thirty years old, a married woman with two children. This was in 1920. All my life before that I lived in a shtetl in Poland. A shtetl is a small village. For me, a goy was one of two things. A goy was a peasant with a club or a Cossack with a sword. Believe me, Stanley, I’m not exaggerating even a little bit. I saw plenty growing up—Jews beaten, robbed, killed. It was an expected thing. So, when I found out that my husband, who came here before me, was living in an apartment with a goy next door, I was so crazy I couldn’t talk.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “Little by little, I learned there were goyim in the world who didn’t hurt Jews just because they were Jews. There were goyim who were neighbors, who helped you out when you were in trouble. This maybe sounds to you like nothing, but, for me, it was a revelation like even the prophets didn’t know. It changed my life and all my thinking. Rosaura is like me when I first came to America. She don’t know a soul. She don’t know how things work. But she’s my neighbor and she’s your neighbor, too. Just like her boarder, Luis Melenguez. From my thinking, when a neighbor asks for a favor, you do what you can. That’s how we survived in 1920 and that’s how we survive today.”

  “What’s the favor, Greta? What exactly does she want me to do?”

  “Stanley, don’t be a schmuck. First you should find out what’s going on. Then you’ll think of something.”

  Nine

  January 12

  PAT COHAN WAS NEAR TO tearing his mane right off the top of his head. He just couldn’t get it right. Just couldn’t. Whenever he patted the last feathery wisp into place, whenever he was about to turn away from the mirror and face the plague that’d fallen on him over the last few days, another white knot popped out and fell over his eyes like the fine lace veil his wife put on every time she left the house.

  What it made him feel was incompetent, disheveled, out of control. Which, in his mind, was the same as old. Which was the same as retired. Which was the same as dead. Which …

  The point was that he could remember a time when he took problems in stride, when he actually looked forward to problems. Because if there was anything the Department appreciated, it was a cop who could make problems disappear. Especially the kind of problems that embarrassed the NYPD.

  He looked at himself in the mirror, fingers automatically fluttering over his mane. His face was bright red, which meant his pressure was up again.

  “Ya look like a boozer, Pat,” he muttered to his reflection. “Ya look like a damned Irish drunk.”

  What he felt like doing was covering his head with vaseline like some punk rock-and-roll singer. Or just shaving the whole mess off. Wear it military-style and to hell with his image. But what he did, finally, was fish a can of Clairol hairspray out of a bureau drawer and coat his mane until it was stiff as a board. Which he didn’t mind all that much. No, what really bothered him was the sweet perfumy smell. It would cling to him for the next hour, no matter what he did.

  Sighing, he turned out the lights and headed downstairs to the den. Once there, once the door was closed and he felt safe, he intended to light the biggest cigar he could find and fill the small room with smoke. Unfortunately, in order to get to the den, he had to pass through the living room.

  “What’s that smell?”

  Pat Cohan turned to confront his daughter. She was sitting in a leather wing chair. His favorite chair. And she was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

  “Isn’t there something you should be doing, Kathleen? Maybe your mother needs help.” Ordinarily, he enjoyed her t
easing, actually encouraged it.

  “Mother can pray the rosary without me, Daddy. But if you’d like to go up and ask her if she wants assistance …”

  That was just what he needed. A visit to his wife’s private hell, to windows and doors draped in black velvet, to an agonized, bloody Jesus hanging on the cross. The endless drone of his wife’s prayers sounded more like the hum of a mindless insect than human speech. The dead mourning the dead.

  “When Stanley shows up, I want to see him.”

  “Okay, Daddy. Sal’s here, by the way.”

  “Patero?”

  “Who else? I didn’t want to disturb you, so I put him in the den.”

  Pat Cohan felt his face begin to redden. His fingers automatically drifted up to his hair, then dropped back to his side. He left his daughter and crossed the living room.

  What he wanted to do was get it over with. He wanted to handle this problem the way he’d handled every other problem that stood between himself and the top of the heap. But this problem happened to be dope, and dope simply refused to be handled. It wasn’t clean, like gambling or prostitution. Dope was an open sewer pouring disease onto the city streets. It infected everyone around it, the innocent as well as the guilty, with a mechanical indifference that was near to maniacal.

  The only way to handle dope, he’d decided long ago, was to stay as far away from it as possible, to retire before he had to deal with it. That strategy had failed. It’d failed because the same people who controlled the gambling and the whores were moving into heroin. They had no choice in the matter. The potential profits were enormous. To surrender those profits to another gang would be the economic equivalent of cutting your own throat.

  He opened the door to his den and stepped through it to find Sal Patero sitting behind his desk. His handcarved, mahogany desk with the eagle’s claw feet.

  “Get the fuck out of my chair.”

  “Good evening to you, too, Pat.” Patero got up and moved around the desk. “Am I allowed to sit at all?”

  “Cut the bull, Sal. I’m not in the mood for it.”