Piece of the Action (12 page)

Jake didn’t let himself become so lost in his plans for the future that he failed to keep an eye on the front door of the restaurant. He spotted the driver as soon as he stepped onto the asphalt. The man was tall, middle-aged and nearly bald.

Hatless despite the cold, he walked with his head down, flashing his shiny dome. He came directly to the truck, then hauled himself up and into the cab without looking at Jake.

“Ya know what this is all about, right?” Jake said.

“Yeah.”

“I want ya to make ya way over to Route Nine, then head up toward the city. Any problems?”

“Naw.” He pressed the starter button on the dash and the engine roared to life.

“What’s ya name?” Jake asked as the rig began to move.

“Dayton. Dayton McNeese.”

“You from down south, Dayton?”

“Mississippi.”

“I guess that explains it.”

“Explains it?”

“Explains why ya don’t like hats.”

Jake Leibowitz was so happy at the way things had turned out that he wasn’t even bothered by the fact that he couldn’t see the mustache he was attempting to trim.

“I’m movin’ on dowwwwwwn the road,” he sang in imitation of every colored inmate he’d run across in Leavenworth. “Movin’, movin’ movin on dowwwwwwn the road.”

But the truth, as he saw it, was that he was moving
up
the road. And it wasn’t a road, either, but a goddamned turnpike. They’d dropped off the SpeediFreight driver a mile from the Bayonne Bridge, then hotfooted it through Staten Island to a trucking warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons had been unloaded and counted. The count had come out exactly as advertised, fifteen thousand cartons straight from the R. J. Reynolds factory. The payoff had been a little tricky, because Jake had told Izzy and the wop he was only getting fifteen cents a carton when he was actually getting twenty. But Joe Faci had been smart enough to hand over the money in the privacy of his office.

“Three grand,” Joe Faci had said, “like I promised. And this here is the name and the phone number of the dispatcher at SpeediFreight who’s been working with us. Call him and arrange a face to face. You should be aware that he sometimes needs a little encouragement.”

Izzy’s cut had been 30% of twenty-two fifty. Silesi had settled for 20%. Which had left Jake with a very satisfying eighteen seventy-five.

“As in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five dollars and no fucking cents,” Jake said, straightening his tie.

The first thing Jake had done was stop off in Mrs. Pearlstein’s Ladies’ Garments on Norfolk Street and pick up the largest rabbits’ fur coat on the rack. Not that he was stupid enough to actually tell his mother it was rabbits’ fur when he handed it over.

“It’s raccoon, mama,” he’d said. Then he’d broken into a sweat when she tried it on. If the goddamned thing hadn’t buttoned over her fat gut, if she’d had to have her
raccoon
coat altered, if the equally fat woman who ran Mrs. Pearlstein’s had laughed in Mama’s face … But it hadn’t happened. The coat had fit loosely enough and neither his mama nor her old-country girlfriends could tell the difference between mink and cat.

Jake hadn’t forgotten about his
own
reward, either. He’d gone uptown, to Leighton’s on Broadway, and bought himself a pearl-gray, double-breasted overcoat and a matching homburg. The homburg, with its softly rolled brim, made him look older, more mature. It made him look
established.
Which was the whole point, really.

“Ya beggin’ days’re over, Jakie-boy,” he said as he dressed. “Time ta show the world where ya comin’ from.”

Fifteen minutes later, he was down on Pitt Street, stepping out of the Packard and walking up to a familiar door. He knocked softly and waited until it opened, until he was face to face with Al O’Neill.

“What could I do for ya, mister?” O’Neill asked.

“Ya don’t remember me?” Jake took off his hat and leaned forward. “I’m insulted.”

“Hey, mister, I see a lotta guys …” Then it hit him and he staggered back. “We’re payin’,” he said. “We’re payin’
everything.
We’re payin’ on time.”

“Relax, Al, I ain’t here on business. I’m here on pleasure.”

“Yeah?” O’Neill took another step back, then his face brightened. “Yeah?”

“Everybody gotta get laid, right? If it wasn’t fa that, where would
you
be?”

O’Neill managed a laugh. “Can’t argue about that one. Now, whatta ya intrested in? Ya got anything special in mind?”

“Young and willin’, Al. That’s all that matters.”

S
TANLEY MOODROW, SITTING AT
his kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and the
Daily News
in the other, was more than annoyed. It wasn’t the events of the last few days that had him going. He’d become reconciled to making the rounds with Salvatore Patero. Not that he actually
approved
(or even that he was committed to the money), but there was nothing he could do about it. Not in the short term, at least. The cards had been dealt and now he had to play them. It was like the sky falling on Chicken Little. The smart thing was examine the pieces, then do what you had to do.

He’d learned
that
lesson the hard way. He’d been fifteen when his father died quickly, twenty-three when his mother died slowly. Whatever he’d meant to say to his father or been afraid to say to his mother was going to go forever unsaid. For a few minutes, at his mother’s wake, he’d thought he might die himself. Just stop where he was.

“If you can get through this, you can get through anything.” That’s what he told himself. And the truth was that compared to sitting on that folding chair by the coffin while friends and relatives murmured their condolences, his problems with Sal Patero and Pat Cohan were less than two piles of dogshit on the sidewalk. No, what bothered Stanley Moodrow as he dawdled over his breakfast was the weather.

It was cold and windy. Again. Looking out of his bedroom window as he’d dressed, Moodrow had followed the hunched backs of workingmen as they made their way to buses and subways. Checking the weather was a habit he’d picked up as a patrolman. It was funny, in a way. The newspapers wrote about cops all the time. Likewise the novelists. And while the reporters were mostly critical and the novelists full of bull, neither of them seemed to understand the physical aspects of the job.

On cold days, if you managed to keep moving, you’d stay warm from your neck to your ankles. Above and below, you froze no matter what you did. Your ears and feet would hurt for the first hour, then go numb and stay that way until you finished your tour. Which wasn’t so bad until you came back to the station house and thawed out. On really cold days, the pins and needles would have more than one cop dancing in front of his locker.

The summer wasn’t much better—you sweated all day and tended your rashes at night. By the time the dog days hit, your feet and armpits were permanently inflamed, the powder you put on in the morning was white greasy mud by noon, your balls were floating in a lake of sweat by ten o’clock. What got you through the discomfort was nothing more than dogged persistence. You learned to accept the discomfort like an ox accepting the yoke.

The telephone interrupted Moodrow’s daydreams and he left the kitchen to pick it up. He was expecting to hear Sal Patero’s voice, but found his fiancée on the line instead.

“Stanley,” she said, almost whispering, “I only have a minute, but I have to talk to you.”

“Are you at home?”

“No, I’m at Sacred Heart. I just went to confession.”

“And?” The next part wasn’t going to be any better than the weather and Moodrow knew it.

“What we did the other day, Stanley? It was beautiful, even if it was technically a sin.”

“Did you tell that to Father Grogan?”

“It was Father Ryan. And no, I didn’t. I told him that I knew I’d hurt Jesus and I was sorry for that. Which I am, Stanley. But the important thing is I had to promise not to do it again. You know that I
had
to.”

Moodrow did know it. In order to make a true confession, in order to receive forgiveness, you had to do two things. You had to be truly repentant and you had to believe that you wouldn’t go out and sin again. Moodrow had been all of fourteen when he’d realized that he
was
going to do certain things over and over again. No matter how many oaths he took in the confessional. He’d handled this insight by avoiding confession. Compounding the felony was what the lawyers called it.

“All right,” he muttered. “I admit it. But you’re also expected to avoid ‘the near occasions of sin.’ Does that mean we can’t see each other until the wedding?”

“You don’t have to be cruel, Stanley. You’re a Catholic, too.”

“I’m a
phony
Catholic, like ninety-nine percent of all the Catholics in the world.” He hesitated a moment. “Look, I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t want to attack your faith. The other day … well, if I gotta wait another six months, I’ll wait. That’s all there is to it.”

“Actually, there’s something else, Stanley. I probably shouldn’t have gone to Father Ryan. I should have gone to Father Grogan, because he’s a lot easier. Maybe I felt guilty. I don’t know, but it’s done now. Father Ryan wants me to tell my father. As part of the penance.”

“
Jesus Christ.
”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name, Stanley.”

As he made his way to the 7th Precinct, Moodrow was hoping against hope. He knew he was dealing with a fifty-fifty proposition at best. Maybe Kathleen wasn’t a religious fanatic, but she did believe in sin and the ritual of forgiveness. Which always included a penance. Most penances consisted of saying a rosary or lighting a candle, but apparently Father Ryan had considered Kate’s sin to be especially evil.

What Moodrow had managed to do, after much persuasion, was to make Kathleen agree to go back to Father Ryan and beg for mercy. At least that postponed the confrontation. Maybe, if he had a few days to think about it, he’d come up with a better plan. One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to take a lot of shit from Pat Cohan. A rabbi was one thing—every up-and-comer in the Department had a rabbi—but Moodrow didn’t figure he needed a master. He had no intention of playing the monster to Pat Cohan’s Doctor Frankenstein.

He nodded to several uniformed cops inside the 7th Precinct’s lobby, then quickly made his way to the detectives’ squad room. Once again, the detectives working at their desks ignored him altogether. Moodrow had already stopped hoping that the cold shoulder was some kind of ritual. The truth was they resented the hell out of him.

Patero’s door was open when Moodrow approached. There were two detectives sitting next to the Lieutenant’s desk. Moodrow stopped for a moment, not quite knowing his place.

“Stanley, come in.”

Patero was smiling, so, whatever was going on, it couldn’t be all bad. Moodrow walked through the door and nodded to the suits. “Morning,” he said.

“Stanley, this is Pete O’Brien.” Patero jerked his chin at a tall, beefy cop. “And this here is Mack Mitkowski.”

Mitkowski was small and wiry. His face was all flat planes except for a nose that seemed to jump out of his skull. He stared at Moodrow through dark blank eyes. “Whatta ya say, Stanley? How’s it hangin’?”

Patero interrupted before Moodrow could reply. “We’re gonna take a piece of slime off the streets today, Stanley. Ya know the guy they call the Playtex Burglar?”

“I know what he’s done, but we’ve never actually been introduced.”

The Playtex Burglar had been breaking into one or another of the small clothing stores clustered near Orchard and Delancey for the past six months. As far as Moodrow was concerned, he was strictly small-time, even if he was miraculously successful. What made him interesting to the cops (as well as a minor sensation in the newspapers) was the fact that in addition to a few decent suits and coats, he always grabbed several pieces of intimate lady’s apparel. Lace bras, silk panties, a black shortie nightgown, a full-length slip. At first, the detectives who’d picked up the beef had assumed he was taking them home to his wife or his girlfriend. But as they’d gotten deeper into his m.o., they’d realized that he usually left a small pile of rejects in front of a full-length mirror.

“Well,” Patero continued, “we got the little prick. Tell him, Mack.”

“Piece of cake,” Mack Mitkowski said. “He must’ve lost his regular fence, because last night he approached someone else for the first time. A new fence. This someone else (who I ain’t gonna name) looks just like a rat, but he sings like a canary. He bought the whole load, then called me to come down and take a look at it. It matches with what went outta Kaufman’s loft two days ago. The scum’s name is Victor Zayas, a Puerto Rican. He lives on Avenue D, across from the projects. Works two blocks from here in the kitchen at Ratner’s.”

Patero shook his head. “Imagine. A spic who wears lace panties. Whatta ya think’s gonna happen to him when he goes upstate? Think he’ll be the belle of the ball?”

Moodrow started to laugh, then noticed that Mitkowski and his partner had maintained their neutral expressions.

“Mack and Pete are gonna toss the spic’s apartment,” Patero continued.

“We’re gonna go over to Ratner’s and bring him into the house. See if we can persuade him to own up to his foul deeds.”

Questions began to form in Moodrow’s mind, questions he was smart enough not to ask. First, he wanted to know if they had a warrant to search the apartment. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to use what they found in court. And they probably
didn’t
have a warrant, because if they did, they’d wait to see what they came up with before approaching Zayas. What Mitkowski was doing was protecting his informant. Or maybe the informant would never agree to testify in an open courtroom.

It amounted to the same thing. All they had was a name. That wasn’t the same as proof or evidence or anything else that would stand up in court, even if they were
sure
Zayas was guilty. Of course, they could put Zayas under surveillance for the next month. They could try to catch him in the act. But it would take six experienced cops to maintain round-the-clock observation. Six cops times thirty days equals a hundred and eighty payroll days which equals eight or nine thousand dollars. Maybe the captain of the 111th out in Bayside would approve the expense. Bayside was a nice, safe, low-crime neighborhood. But the 7th saw crimes involving knives and guns every day, not to mention a flourishing heroin trade. Captain McElroy wasn’t likely to invest that kind of money in the Playtex Burglar. The whole game hinged on getting Zayas to confess.