Manhattan Mayhem (30 page)

Because Sam’s mother had gone to Florida for a wedding of a childhood friend, he was able to bring Sally over to his apartment that night. They lay in his bed while she talked and cried, and then they got up and he fixed her something to eat, and they talked, and they lay back down and talked some more. Next to Sam’s bed was a pull-down shade with a chomp at the side. He didn’t remember how it got there. The moon filled it, and the gray shadows of its face seemed to be laughing at him. They slept. He woke with Sally kissing him. It didn’t take long before he entered her, and afterward he was saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and
she was whispering, “No baby, I wanted you to, I wanted you to.”

She got up to go to the bathroom. Back in bed, she said she was bleeding. Again he said he was sorry. She said nothing this time.

Despite himself, he fell back to sleep. As dawn was glowing through the hole of the shade, he felt Sally’s warm breath and then her lips on his and heard her say, “Hold me again, Sammy; you have to hold me, or I can’t live.”

Pain from feeling helpless can be worse than from a thing over and done with, like watching a sick person die versus the death itself. Every day that passed without an answer to who killed Izzy and the mother slapped Sam in the face. He had his own precinct’s assignments, and Sally required much of his off-hours time, so he pestered the detectives in Precinct Seven every other day, until he suspected they conveniently weren’t there to answer. He’d seen Mike Kelley at the services and tried to talk with him, but all Mike did was walk around inside and outside like an ice pop with the color drained out.

A month to the day after the murders, two men in a basement game room on East Thirteenth were rubbed out. One was a gopher for the owner, the other a regular player. The owner lost only a finger from a pistol shot. He said he knew from the get-go it was mobsters imitating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The dogs, he called them, wore fake cop uniforms, pretending to bust his joint. “I saw dirty shoes coming down the steps. Then this one mope had a button off. Our cops don’t dress like that.” Proud of NYPD cops even while he broke the law. He ordered them out with an unloaded shotgun from a shelf, and that he shouldn’t have done.

Detective Samuel Rabinowitz and a probie wrote it up, the probie drawing the scene with templates that had cutouts for arrows and rooms and bodies. Sam asked the owner if he could remember anything else. “Yeah, there was this one, hung back by the stairs. He had a crew cut and red hair. Very pale, like an albino. He was screaming while
the shooter grabbed my money and Jimmy was moaning on the floor. I loved that Jimmy, like a son he was. I’m gonna make pig-slop out of them that did it, soon as I can.”

Was Mike Kelley the only redhead with a crew cut in the borough of Manhattan? Of course not. But Sam’s impulse was to go with what you know.

He took a jog off his assigned route after looking up the fur store Mike’s uncle on his father’s side owned. Mr. Kelley had to buzz him in—so many walk-away thefts going on, he explained. Mike was in the back; he’d get him.

Mike and Sam stood squeezed between two racks of furs. Sam’s nose itched. He barely even had to open his mouth when Mike, after being sure his uncle was out of earshot, said, “Not here, Sammy.” He told Sam to meet him in Tompkins Square Park. “That giant elm in the center? The one, you know, half of it’s dead from beetles? Nine o’clock. It’s dark by then.”

Under a light pole, the light further helped by a full moon, Sam eyed Mike’s boots as the men sat down on the bench. “Fancy wear there, partner.”

“Pampa boot. Cost a few pennies, yeah.”

He was going to comment on Mike’s shirt, too, but Mike beat him to it to criticize his own. “Hawaiian now? Stylish. Police work must be good to you.”

They nodded affirmative to each other and looked across the pathway at the silhouettes of a girl and guy making out on the grass. “You need to go break that up?” Mike asked. “Oh, you don’t have your badge on.”

“Mike. What you got to tell me?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“You wasn’t where?”

“That game room that got shot up. Somebody told me someone saw a redhead. It wasn’t me. I heard.”

“You seen Tino Caruso lately?”

Mike got up and went to the edge of the walkway. All of a sudden he started doing jumping jacks. He said for Sam to come join him and laughed stupidly.

Sam went over and grabbed him by the back of the collar and shoved him back onto the bench. “Izzy. What happened with Izzy? You know. I know you know.”

Mike’s face shone from a burst of July sweat. His eyelashes were pale smiles from the side. But Mike wasn’t smiling, and in a swift motion he lowered his head, and put his hands to his face, and silently sobbed.

Sam got it out from him. Tino Caruso had had Izzy wiped. The mother wasn’t supposed to be part of it. When Mike heard Mrs. Jacobs had been violated besides having taken a pistol shot to the back of the head, he disappeared for two days, later making an excuse that he tripped on a curb and knocked himself out, and spent those days in a hospital unidentified. That explained the bruises from banging his head against an alley wall, the reason his eyes were ringed in green and black. “He’ll bump me off too, he knows I talked to you.”

“Doesn’t he live around here? Why’d we come here, then?”

“Uptown, near Stuyvesant. He’s loaded now, from rip-offs. He works for a big guy named Harry Gross. Some he does on his own, on the side.”

“Why in hell did you get involved, Mike?”

“The take-down on Thirteenth, he made me come along. I swear I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“And why’d he do Izzy? Why carve up his face like that?”

“Tino didn’t do it himself.”

“I don’t care about that. I want the guy who did it. His name?”

“He goes by Hambone. Izzy flapped his yap about Tino’s new career. Somebody talked to somebody. That somebody was a cockroach. He told Tino. I’m scared like I never been, Sammy. What’ll I do?”

“You have to go down, Mike, you know that.”

“Pop me now, Sammy. They send me upriver, I’m meat for the taking.”
Then he sank to his knees and cried so hard, no sound came out. Sam pulled him sideways and squeezed, telling him it would be all right, although of course it wouldn’t be. Again, nothing was the same. Nothing ever would be.

Sam walked Mike to the street, where they were going to go their separate ways. Then Mike said he was sure he saw Hambone’s car drive slowly by. Hambone, the muscle for Tino. The one who cut up Izzy and maybe got nasty with Mrs. Jacobs. A groan came out of Mike, right before he turned and puked in the grass.

Sam had his handkerchief out for him when he rose back up. “You’re coming with me.”

When he got Mike to the station, Detective Hirsch convinced the captain to put him in a safe house in Queens until he could be used in a courtroom for state’s evidence.

When he lifted his cigarette from the ashtray, Hirsch’s fingers made the cig look like a toothpick. Sam wished he had those damn fine weapons. He told Hirsch that Mike Kelley said that Tino meant the game room disaster to be strategic, to send a message to all his suckers.

“Tino’s IQ can’t lift a fly off a feather. I can locate him before anyone else can. The piece of dirt acting as his muscle is Fishel Gross, a nephew of mobster Harry. He goes by Hambone. Let me put the word out that I maybe want in on Tino’s action. We set it up, we take him down.”

Detective Hirsch raised his voice to tell Sam to stay out of it until he could put a team together. “For now, you’re under orders to cool it.” Sam left the meeting with an ache in his gut. He liked Hirsch. He liked the job, his brothers, his badge.
Don’t do this,
he kept telling himself.

He’d already found out from Mike that Tino’s routine on Thursdays after eating out was to go home, call up a girl, do their business, and have her gone by midnight so he could fall asleep reading Captain America comics with his Magnavox radio set to WMCA. Clockwork.
Sam recalled that was the one thing Tino was good at.

The night air was stifling, windows open everywhere. Sam studied the building to locate where Tino’s window would be. He took the fire escape on the north side. Some people kept wooden sticks in the window so it would open only so far. Not Tino. He must feel invincible, Sam thought. He stepped through, not even a curtain or drape to push aside, right into his bedroom.

Tino’s weapon lay on the side table where anyone could lift it. Sam tucked the gun in his waistband and then leaned down to clamp a hand over Tino’s mouth. He almost drew back. The man slept with his nose on—Groucho glasses hooked to a nose, without the furry eyebrows. Did he wear those with his lady visitors? Maybe they thought it was cute.

He covered Tino’s mouth to wake him up, then made him sit in a chair. Tino, naked except for shorts, kept wrapping his torso with his arms as if he’d never been in a military shower. Sam told him he could put his clothes on in a minute. Sam sat on the edge of the bed with his gun on his leg and decided he wasn’t going to lay it all on Tino right there, right then, but he did say, “It wasn’t your nose you lost, Tino. It was your heart.”

Tino’s face was scarred beyond what the rifle bullet had done. He must have had some failed surgeries that affected his cheeks; hence, the casual comment about it looking waxy.

“You don’t know,” Tino said.

“I know plenty.” Sam stood and walked a few steps, faced him, and asked, “Were you always a creep, Tino? If not for the war, would you have ever killed a friend and molested an old lady?”

“I didn’t do any of that!” Tino’s eyes shifted just a fraction of a second.

That’s when Sam felt a shadow-pull, a flutter-fall of instinct, the way the mystery alert in the Belgian woods had given him the awareness to cancel the intent of a sniper.

Just so, here in Tino’s bedroom, from nowhere came the warning. Sam moved his back to the wall.

When Fishel “Hambone” Gross, in socks and shorts, took two
steps in with a pistol out chest-high, Sam grabbed his forearm and, with the butt of his service revolver, chopped Hambone’s weapon out of his hand. Then he twisted the big man’s left arm back to force him down, kicking the firearm into the wedge of the door. But Hambone’s nickname held for a reason. He was big and stubborn.