by Bob Mayer
“You ain’t gonna shoot me.” But Cibosky took two steps back.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” Kane recited, aiming the High Standard from one arm to the other.
Kane took one step forward and Cibosky reverse mirrored him.
“Catch a tiger by the toe.”
“Oh, come on, man!”
“If he hollers, let him go.” Kane slid onto the driver’s seat, resting the suppressor on top of the steering wheel, clear shot over the folded windshield. “What was the message?”
Cibosky frowned. “Huh?”
“You said Delgado was sending a message by having you beat up my Jeep. What was I supposed to make of that?”
“Stay the fuck away from him.”
Kane shook his head. “I thought we had an understanding this morning. This will be on him from here on out. Tell him that.”
A frown appeared on Cibosky’s face as he tried to understand.
“You going to holler?” Kane asked.
“Huh?”
Kane sighed. “’Never underestimate the power of human stupidity’.”
“Huh?”
Kane depressed the clutch, turned the switch and the Jeep’s engine belied the outer appearance, turning over with a throaty roar. The tall gearshift lever poking up from the floor was already in first. Kane kept the High Standard aimed at Cibosky as he released the clutch while using his right hand to twist the wheel hard left. He rolled past Cibosky, left hand aiming the gun across his body. Clear of the muscles saturated with steroids and stupidity, Kane tossed the gun on the passenger seat and leaned over, snatching the bat off the ground. He chucked it in the passenger seat well.
Exiting Trimble, he hooked left on Thomas to loop around the one-way street toward the entrance to the FDR Drive underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. On Barclay, short of the Drive, and across from City Hall, he pulled over to a pay phone, enraging cab and truck drivers who swerved around. He engaged the parking brake, left the engine running and slid the High Standard back in the map case. Looped the bag over his shoulder. He went to the phone, dropped a dime and dialed.
It was answered on the second ring. “Ms. Marcelle’s office.”
“Mrs. Ruiz, it’s Will Kane.” Disapproval crackled through the phone line. “I know she’s in a meeting but you have to give her a message. You ready?”
“I am always ready, Mister Kane. Proceed.”
“Right. Tell her she needs to check on our mutual client. That Delgado sent someone after me. That it isn’t sanctioned by Cappucci. Delgado is off the leash. She’ll understand.”
“I’m sure she will.”
“Thank you.” He waited a heartbeat. Then another. Just silence. “All right, then.” He hung up. Spent two more dimes, first calling his eldest uncle on his mother’s side, then the youngest, ignoring the horns blaring. He got back in the Jeep. Drove underneath the Brooklyn Bridge onto the FDR to travel north to the Bronx along the east side of Manhattan.
THE BRONX
Friday Afternoon, 8 July 1977
COUNTRY CLUB, THE BRONX
“Does anybody here own a yacht?” Kane asked.
“Does anybody in here look like they could own a yacht?” Conner Riley replied. “We’re drinking nickel draft, Will.”
“The place is called the Pelham Bay Yacht Club,” Kane pointed out.
They were seated at an old wooden bar, the surface scarred by generations of drinking. The view out the row of propped open windows was Long Island Sound between the Bronx and City Island. Sunlight danced on small waves. Directly across the water was Rodman’s Neck, where the NYPD ran a firing range. To the left, along this side, was Pelham Bay Park, and on the far end of that, next to Coop City, in an accurate barometer of the condition of the city, was a massive ten story high toxic dump that the Sanitation Department was adding to on a daily basis with an unending convoy of garbage trucks. At one time a previous mayor, Lindsay, had suggested it could be made into a ski slope after it was closed. There were many reasons he wasn’t mayor anymore and his presidential ambitions had sputtered to vapor, but that bright idea hadn’t helped.
“Every place gotta be called something,” Conner reasoned. “It’s on the water. It’s a club. Got to be a member.”
“Is that expensive?”
“Not if you’re a cop.” Conner drained the mug and leaned over the bar, filling it from the unmanned tap. He was a blocky man, once strong, now booze flabby. His face was red and mapped with broken blood vessels that pointed to a bad ending. Thinning brown hair kept baldness at bay for the time being. He wore a cheap suit, the tie pulled loose and the top shirt button open. The possibility of it ever being closed was remote, perhaps impossible. A snub-nose .38 was on his belt, right front, a silver badge on the left front, indicating plainclothes, not the gold of detective, but the step up from wearing the blue uniform of patrol.
“You pay as you go or you have a tab?” Kane asked, his own already empty.
“I’m keeping count.” Conner gave Kane a questioning look but grabbed his glass and topped it off.
“Right,” Kane said.
A couple of tables were occupied by folks like Conner; fat, older white guys who were either retired or marking time to retire, who served themselves as needed, all doing the tap. The well drinks were for later. The building was two stories, faded white, on the eastern edge of the Bronx. There was a yardarm in front from which the club’s flag hung, occasionally energized by a breeze; a white ship’s wheel with spokes against a blue background and the white letters PBYC, not exactly on a level with a Union Jack pennant or Stars and Bars.
“What’s so important you call me off the job?” Conner asked. “You seen your mom lately?”
“Nice try, Uncle Conner. Did someone call you this morning asking about me?”
Conner looked out the old, open windows at the water. “I think in the old days there might have been yachts. Big boats at least. Used to tie up to the dock before it fell apart. Fancy people with money. Back when the north Bronx still had some farms. I remember when your folks moved up to their place from the apartment on 148th Street. Guy dressed in white delivered milk door to door in a box out front of each house from a local dairy, fresh that morning.”
“Yeah, the good old days,” Kane said. He had faint, black and white memories of that. And of an old man walking next to a mule pulling a wagon rattling along on the cobblestone street, calling out in a strong foreign accent for housewives to bring their knives and scissors out to be sharpened.
His tone got his uncle’s attention.
“Someone called me,” Conner admitted. “Had my home phone number which ain’t listed. Woke me up, which is never good. Woke the lil’ missus up which is worse.”
Conner’s wife, Aileen, was indeed little, barely over five feet, and scrawny, but she ruled him with a sharp tongue and hair-trigger Irish temper. He counteracted that with copious amounts of alcohol, which pissed her off even more and they made a fine Irish cyclone together.
Conner continued. “Said they had a friend outside my house. I went to the window and there was someone sitting in a Caddy, just down the street, engine running. One of those nice guinea caddies, not a nigga pimp-mobile. Ugly white guy staring ugly at the house. I took them serious. All they wanted to know was where they could find you. I didn’t give ‘em your apartment.”
“You told them I stop at Vic’s every morning.”
“I had to give them something. They had someone sitting outside the house.”
“You’re a cop.”
“I got kids in the house,” Conner snapped. “Got to protect my kids.” It was out before he could grab it. “Sorry, Will.”
Kane waved that off.
Conner pressed his case. “Did you get hurt? You look okay. The guy said they just wanted to talk to you about something you was up to with that lawyer you work with.”
“You’re a cop,” Kane repeated, more for himself.
“Yeah? And?”
“Do you kno
w who you gave me up to?”
“Oh, come on.” Conner mustered some fake outrage. “It’s not a state secret where you eat breakfast. It’s a public place.”
“You dropped a dime on me.”
“They called me. I’d never drop a dime on family.”
Kane spoke slowly, enunciating every word distinctly. “Do. You. Know. Who. Called?”
Conner pretended to be interested in the seagulls once more. “No.”
“Bullshit.” Kane drained the glass of beer. Leaned over and drew himself another. “That’s on your tab. A fucking nickel.”
“What’s wrong?” Conner said, frowning at the refill. “Why you so upset and drinking? You look okay.”
“I got threatened,” Kane said. “Twice. Once indirectly, then directly. Busted up my Jeep.”
“That old clunker, why—“
“No, Uncle Conner. Don’t do that. I had to pull my gun.”
That fixed Conner’s attention. “Did you shoot?”
“No. But I really hate doing that because it escalates a situation into possibilities I don’t like.”
“But no shooting. Okay. No harm then. Right?”
Kane closed his eyes, taking some deep breaths.
Conner spoke into the silence as he stared out at the Sound. “When we was growing up on 148th, my father, you don’t remember him well do you, he used to take Nathan up here. Across the way, over there to Rodman’s. They’d take the Six to the end of the line and walk through the park and over the Hutch bridge to the range. To shoot. And I used to get so jealous. The old man never took me. It pissed me off.”
The breeze shifted and the stink from the landfill wafted this way, sliding in the open windows that had been trying to catch some cool off the water. There were muttered curses from a few of the club members.
“What are you trying to say?” Kane asked. “That’s the reason Nathan turned out to be the cop he is and you’re you?”
“Hey, I’m a good cop! I’m a collar man.”
“What does that mean?” Kane asked.
“It means I lock guys up.” Conner’s face was redder. “Guys who rob, rape, hurt people. Nathan thinks he can make the world a better place. Take down the big shots. The crooks who steal millions, but with a smile and a suit and a handshake behind closed doors. You can’t stop those people. They own Nathan even though he doesn’t know it. They own me. They own you. They own the world. What the fuck you think Vietnam was? What was that all about? You think those gooks were gonna come over the ocean and invade us?” He gestured at the scar mostly hidden under Kane’s hair. “Why’d you get wounded twice and then go back again and get totally screwed over? You were a good soldier, wasn’t you?”
Kane stared at his uncle. “I admired both of you. I remember you in your new uniform coming to the house with Uncle Nathan, also in his blues. And Liam in his FDNY dress uniform. Nathan was bursting with pride that his youngest brother was on the job with him. That was the party my mom hosted after you graduated the Academy and got your badge. She was so proud of you. I was just a kid.”
“Hey, fuck you.” Conner’s face flushed, the interstate of veins scarlet. He poked Kane in the chest. “This is your problem that got dumped on me. Not mine on you. I don’t know what you’re doing with that dyke guinea lawyer. Probably something shady, so don’t come crying to me when your shit blows over me. You’re the one who should be apologizing for getting me involved.”
Conner tried to do another poke to make the last point, but Kane reflexively grabbed the hand, twisted it, causing Conner to stagger off the bar stool and go to his knees. Standing over his uncle, Kane muscle-memory flowed the move, bending the hand back at the wrist and Conner cursed in pain. Kane’s other hand was drawn back, open-palmed, angled to slam the nose upward, into the brain.
Kane immediately let go. “I’m sorry, Uncle Conner.”
Seven semi-mid-day-drunks were staring at them. Then they went back to their primary concern.
Kane reached out to help Conner, but he slapped the hand aside. He got to his feet, grunting in pain and embarrassment.
“It was someone from Cappucci’s crew that called you,” Kane said.
Conner sat down, drank half his glass. He was staring straight ahead.
Kane pushed. “You heard of a guy named Quinn?”
“Nah.” Now Conner had found something interesting in the bottom of his glass. “Nathan knows all those mobbed up guys from his time on the Organized Crime Task Force. Ask him. We don’t get many of those mafia mobsters in the Bronx. We got the bullshit spic and nigga and guinea street gangs that wear colors and fight over corners and drugs.”
“Did you tell whoever called about my past? The Army?”
“I just told them you were in the diner every morning. That’s all that was asked.” Conner decided to drown whatever had held his attention in the bottom of the glass by filling it from the tap. He sat on the stool and faced Kane. “Yeah, I knew it was someone mobbed up. That was clear from the caddy outside and the way the guy talked. But I don’t know what you’re into, Will. It could have been about your business, some contact you wanted to make. How the fuck am I supposed to know? Nobody in the family really knows what you do. Not your mother or father. You sure don’t fill anyone in on nothing. That’s the Kane family thing. Don’t say shit to nobody is your father’s fucking way. Like just breathing is a secret in that fucking house you grew up in. The last time you were in ‘Nam we all had to learn about what happened to you on the news. We still don’t know where you were the years after the, well, you know.” Conner stumbled to a halt.
“Like the Riley’s are a font of information?” Kane countered. “How’s Liam doing? Still cut off for marrying a Puerto Rican and then getting divorced? Double damned? How’s his kid? Dave, right? How is he? Seventeen now?”
“Shit, Liam hardly gets to see the kid,” Conner said. “Fucking spic bitch.”
“My dad is over there where that smell is coming from,” Kane said, indicating the north with his glass. “Doing his job. At least he knows his garbage. When he was a sandman on the trucks, the house always smelled of it. No matter how many times Mom washed his uniform. Hung it out there on the clothesline. I think it permeated him and the house.” The glass was empty so he refilled. “He doesn’t care what I’m doing. Once I was out of the Army, especially the way it happened, I was dead to him.”
“That ain’t true,” Conner protested. “He was so proud of you at the Point and then in the Army. It hurt him when you left the military. He had visions of you as a general. He was always boasting about you.”
“It hurt him? I didn’t leave, Conner. They got rid of me. And I never heard any boasts.”
Conner squirmed on the stool. “Well, I don’t know much about all that.”
“You know enough about me to send a mob nutjob to my breakfast this morning.”
Conner faced him. “I’m sorry. Okay? And they didn’t know where you lived, but they sure as hell knew where I did!”
Kane subsided. “Yeah, all right. You got a point. They would have shown up at the diner sooner or later anyway.”
“And don’t knock your dad’s job,” Conner said. “Sanitation Department goes on strike; the city notices right away. Takes longer when the cops go off the job.”
“Yeah, he’s the garbage master.”
“He’s a fucking superintendent now,” Conner said. “Been a long time since he’s had to toss a can. He runs a lot of guys and trucks. He’s got good years in. He took care of my sister and you kids. Put all of you through Catholic school and that ain’t cheap, especially when he was on the ass end of the truck. He was always doing overtime to pay the bills. He did for your mother even though he never converted like the priest wanted.”
“Lucky us,” Kane muttered. “The nuns were a blast.”
“Let me tell you something,” Conner said. “A couple years ago, when you was off wherever you was off to, we were all shitting we’d lost everything. Sanitation,
police, fire. Banks wouldn’t cash city checks and then the checks were delayed. We thought all those years of work was out the window. Our fucking retirement gone. Fucking Abe Beame and his heeb shysters nearly had the city bankrupt.”
Kane walked around the bar and refilled both their glasses, tired of discussing his father or the state of city civil servants. At the end of the bar was a large jar with For The Widows And Orphans written in bold letters on cardboard taped to the front. It had several bills stuffed in it. “What’s that?”
Conner was also glad to change the subject. “What it says. Money for the ones in the Old Country.”
“What ones?”
“The families of those the Brits kill or throw in jail on trumped up charges.” Conner’s eyes shifted past Kane to the front door. “Fuck. You called him too?”
Kane turned. Nathan was six years older than Conner’s forty-seven, but looked ten years healthier. Fit, slender and wearing an off the rack, buy-two-get-three, suit from the loud mouth guy who advertised on TV all the time, with the cuffs a fraction too long. He sported a head full of thick, silver hair. Nathan walked across the room to the bar with the confidence Conner had never tasted. A gold badge glittered on his belt. His gun was out of sight.
Nathan extended his hand. “William. Good to see you.”
“Uncle Nathan.”
Conner took a step away. “I’m still on the clock at the precinct.”
“Hold on, Conner,” Nathan said to his youngest brother. “They’re adding people, a lot of people, to the Omega Task Force. You want, I can put a word in with the Inspector.”
Conner snorted. “No, thanks. I just wanna do my thirty.”
“Could mean a gold badge,” Nathan dangled.
Conner shook his head. “I don’t want a gold badge. I’m too old and too tired. Plus, only if they catch that Son of Sam bastard. He keeps killing, heads are going to roll from that Task Force.” Conner downed the rest of the glass.
