Piece of the Action (49 page)

Jake grabbed a couple of towels off the rack and tossed them over his shoulder. Later on, if they fired tear gas into the bedrooms, he’d stuff the towels under the doors. On a whim, he wedged Aunt Golda’s spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and peered at his mustache in the mirror.

“Not bad,” he decided. “Not perfect, but not bad.”

He strolled into the bedroom and yanked his aunt’s box spring off its metal frame, revealing five wooden cross-slats. He grabbed two of them and headed back to the living room where he knelt and jammed them under the doorknob.

“Maybe they’ll blow out the lock,” he said, “and try to bust through the door. How many could I get before they figure it out? Two? Three?”

He aimed Little Richard at the door, imagining the cops’ fear, imagining his .45 blasting away. Imagining the screams.

There hadn’t been any screams when he’d done poor Abe Weinberg. When he’d done his fucking
buddy.
Maybe that’s was the
real
reason he hadn’t gone out to Los Angeles like Steppy told him. The wops had asked him to sacrifice Abe and he’d done it. It was like a promise they’d made to him, a promise they didn’t bother to keep.

“Joe Faci told me that Abe would be the end of it.”

They could’ve skipped town right after they’d done the spic. All of them—Jake, Izzy and Abe. But Joe Faci said, “Take care of Abe. He’s got a screw loose somewhere. Y’understand? Take care of Abe and we’ll take care of you.”

Jake walked across the living room and opened an end table drawer. He took out his second gun and slipped it beneath his belt. Six spare clips, all full, lay in plain view on a small pile of old magazines. Sighing, he scooped them up and slipped three into each pocket of his jacket. Despite the fact that he
knew
they’d make his pockets bulge. That he’d look like a Jew pedlar from the old days instead of a successful gangster.

“Whatta ya gonna do?” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Whatta ya gonna fuckin’ do?”

As he and Fred Stone climbed toward the sixth floor, Stanley Moodrow found himself looking for Jake Leibowitz at every turning of the stairs. He recalled his earliest fights and the way his heart had punched at his ribs as he waited for the opening bell. What had he been afraid of back then? A broken nose? A swollen lip? It seemed like a joke, now. A joke in comparison with facing a Colt .45. Talk about a punch in the ribs. A .45 would turn your ribs into dominoes.

Moodrow pulled his .38 and slid it into the pocket of his overcoat. His already thin mouth tightened into a bloodless white line. For a moment, as they approached the door to the sixth-floor corridor, Moodrow felt something near to panic. His legs seemed to belong to someone else. They barely lifted him from one step to the next.

“Hold it a second, Fred.” Moodrow became aware of his hoarse whisper only after he’d spoken. “What we’re gonna do is prop the door open so you can stay here and still cover the apartment. Now, look, there’s only one way out of there. If he decides to use it,
don’t
shoot me.”

“C’mon, Stanley,” Stone said, smiling his sunniest, little-brother smile. “It’s just a tip. Besides, he can’t shoot through the wall, can he?”.

“Not through these walls,” Moodrow admitted. The Vladeck Houses, completed in 1940, had one thing in common with the most modern skyscrapers. They had steel fire-shields in the walls between apartments and the walls running along the common corridor. There were no fire escapes on the outside of the buildings, because the whole idea was to seal yourself in your apartment in case of fire. Unless, of course, the fire was
in
your apartment. Then, you ran like hell.

The net effect was to turn every apartment into a little fortress. If Jake refused to surrender, there was no easy way to get to him. In the tenements, a few blows with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer would bust through any wall. Here, you’d need a welder’s torch.

“I think you oughta take this seriously,” Moodrow said, surprised to find his voice much stronger. The simple fact was that he only had a few minutes before Epstein showed up and became the ranking officer on the scene. The captain would follow Epstein, along with several lieutenants. If the siege took any kind of time, the inspectors and the deputy chiefs would arrive with the reporters. By then, Stanley Moodrow would be little more than an innocent bystander.

“I
am
taking it seriously,” Stone insisted. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.” He twirled his .38 on his index finger, still grinning madly.

Moodrow turned away in disgust. The trick, he knew, was to turn the fear into power, to aim the wasted energy at your opponent. He’d promised Greta that he’d try to talk Jake Leibowitz into surrendering. That didn’t mean he was obliged to go crashing through the door. It didn’t, as far as he was concerned, mean that he was obliged to take any risk at all. He was going to give Jake a chance at life, but if Jake refused, Mama Leibowitz would get her trip to the morgue after all.

He walked past the door to apartment 678 and stationed himself alongside it. Fred Stone, across the hall and twenty feet away, held his thumb up and winked.

“Go get him, Stanley. And don’t forget to jab.”

Moodrow shook his head. “After we take Mr. Leibowitz, I think I’m gonna celebrate by slapping your ass from here to Central Park.”

Moodrow pounded the door with the side of his fist, then quickly yanked his hand away. A second later, Jake Leibowitz emptied half a clip through the door. Moodrow watched five small mushrooms appear, one at a time, on the door’s steel sheath. He saw the mushrooms burst, saw tiny sharp points blossom on the ruptured metal, saw five clouds of plaster explode from the opposite wall.

He saw all of it before he heard the sound of the shots. Or rather, the sound of the
shot.
Because what he heard was a single sharp crack, like the sound of Mickey Mantle’s bat hitting a Don Newcombe fastball. The echo was surprisingly short, but the emptiness that followed seemed to last forever.

Moodrow looked over at Freddy Stone. The young cop wasn’t smiling anymore. His mouth was agape, his eyes so wide his lashes merged with his eyebrows. The sight was comical, but Moodrow didn’t bother to smile.

“Hey, Jake,” he shouted through the door. “Does this mean you’re not gonna surrender?”

“Why don’t ya come in and find out for yourself? I was just settin’ up for tea and crumpets.”

Moodrow reached out, carefully twisted the doorknob, then gave a gentle push. The door was locked.

“I can’t join you unless you open the door, Jake,” he said calmly. “Your mother was much more hospitable.”

“How’d ya talk her into rattin’ on me? She told me ya gave her the third degree.”

“You believe that?” Moodrow paused for a moment, then continued. “What I did was show her a picture of Luis Melenguez’s body. I told her that’s what you’re gonna look like if you don’t give yourself up.”

A second volley of shots roared through the door. Moodrow felt a sharp pain on the left side of his cheek. His first thought was that he’d somehow been shot, but that was clearly impossible. He looked at the pock-marked wall across the corridor as if it might hold the answer, then reached up and touched a thin steel splinter protruding from his face.

“Damn,” he whispered, pulling it out. Now that he knew it wasn’t serious, it hurt all the more.

“Stanley, you’re bleedin’.”

Moodrow looked over at Freddy Stone. “Keep your mind on business, Freddy.”

“You talkin’ to me?” Jake Leibowitz asked. “Cause I can’t hear ya.”

“Say, Jake,” Moodrow called. “Do you want me to go through the deal about how you’re surrounded? About how there’s a hundred cops out here? About how they’ve got submachine guns and shotguns and tear gas?”

“Don’t bother. I could’a run when my old lady called, but I didn’t. What I want is that you should try to take me. I don’t care how many cops ya got out there, ya could only come through that door one at a time. Ya listenin’, flatfoot? I don’t care if ya got a fuckin’ army out there. Ya gotta come through one at a time.”

Moodrow saw the door behind Freddy Stone open wide. A dozen uniformed cops poured through. Half of them took up stations near the stairs. The other half ran past him to the far end of the hall. Moodrow closed his eyes as they came abreast of Jake Leibowitz’s door.

“Stanley. Come over here.”

Moodrow looked up to find Allen Epstein beckoning to him. “Whatta ya want, Sarge?” He wasn’t about to cross that doorway.

“C’mere, for Christ’s sake.”

Jake Leibowitz chose that moment to send another volley through the door. Moodrow watched Epstein’s eyes squeeze shut. The uniforms in the hallway dropped to one knee and aimed their service revolvers in his direction. As if, in the absence of a preferred target, they’d decided to shoot
him.
It wasn’t until Captain McElroy appeared in the doorway that he was sure they wouldn’t open fire.

“Any bodies out there?” Jake called.

“Not yet,” Moodrow answered. “But I’m glad to see you’re interested.”

McElroy tiptoed up to the doorway. “Can you keep him talking?” he whispered. “Keep him distracted? We need about fifteen minutes to evacuate the floor and set up on the rooftops.”

“I’m not gonna stay here another fifteen
seconds
unless you get these assholes to point their weapons at the floor.”

McElroy looked down the hallway as if seeing it for the first time. “Whatta you plan to do,” he roared, “shoot
me
? Lower your weapons.”

The cops complied instantly, their fear of authority considerably greater than their fear of Jake Leibowitz. Jake, on the other hand, responded by firing several shots through the door. McElroy didn’t even blink. He’d come up in the days when social workers and bleeding-heart liberals had about as much influence in city politics as the toilet bowls in Tammany Hall. When Hell’s Kitchen was still called the Tenth Ward and breaking heads was the answer to every problem.

“Fifteen minutes,” McElroy repeated. “I’m not gonna let this drag out. I want Leibowitz before the reporters show up.”

“Look, captain, I think if we let him sit for a while, he’ll come out of there. I guarantee he can cover the roofs from inside. If you put an army of cops up there …”

“Shut up, Moodrow.” McElroy jammed his fists into his hips. “I’ve had enough of your bullshit to last a lifetime. I’m ordering you to submit. Do you understand what I’m saying? You are
not
the fucking commissioner. You do
not
set policy in my precinct. You’re a piece-of-crap detective, third grade. A monkey in a suit. When I play my accordion, the monkey always dances.
Always.
”

“I understand.” There wasn’t anything else Moodrow could say. Jake Leibowitz had fifteen minutes and that was that. “Do you bring any tools with you?”

“What?” McElroy’s posture hadn’t changed. He was still livid.

“I could use a four-pound hammer. To hold his attention while you get ready to kill him.”

Jake Leibowitz, peering through his bathroom window, couldn’t help but smile. The six-story buildings making up the Vladeck Houses were joined to each other in rows. Only, instead of laying the buildings end-to-end, the architect had connected the buildings at forty-five degree angles, giving the project a weird, saw-toothed appearance. It was stupid, really, because the arrangement left half the windows in permanent shadow. Maybe the builder was trying to save money. Just the way he’d saved money by letting one stairwell serve an entire line of roofs.

Whatever the reason, that last part was good for Jake Leibowitz and he knew it. The small brick tower that housed the stairwell would have provided excellent cover if it hadn’t been more than eighty feet away from the roof that overlooked his apartment. Not that it would actually be
impossible
to shoot from behind the stairwell, but the angle was wrong. Even a sharpshooter with a telescopic sight wouldn’t be able to cover more than a tiny part of Jake’s window.

“They gotta come to me,” Jake laughed. “They
gotta.
”

And they did. Picking their way along the tar-covered roofs as if they were tiptoeing over hot coals. God, but it was stupid. Big, blue-uniformed men carrying Thompsons and shotguns and rifles. Dancing like ballerinas. Wishing they were
anywhere
but where they were.

Jake raised Little Richard and aimed carefully. The army-issue Colt .45 was a notoriously inaccurate weapon, especially when fired rapidly. It weighed a ton and kicked like a mule. What he was going to get, he knew, was one decent shot. The rest of the clip, which he fully intended to empty, was more likely to kill pigeons than cops.

Boom! Boom!

It took Jake a moment to realize that something was wrong. That there’d been
two
reports when he’d only pressed the trigger once. He looked at the gun, then out across the roofs. Thinking maybe one of the cops was shooting back. What he saw drove that second explosion right out of his mind. Two uniformed cops were dragging the limp body of a third cop. They were heading for the stairwell as fast as they could go, which is not to say they were moving as fast as their unburdened buddies. The rest of the cops were
running.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

“What the fuck is goin’ on here?”

Then
he knew what it was. They were coming through the front door.

Jake flew out of the bathroom. He began firing through the door as soon as he could see it and continued firing until the clip was empty. Then he leaped behind his makeshift barricade, expecting some kind of volley in return. But there was nothing. Just the echo of dying gunfire and the calm voice of the cop in the hallway.

“You back, Jake? I was gettin’ lonely out here with no one to talk to. That’s why I decided to knock on the door. You know, to get your attention.”

Jake peered over the back of the couch. The door was still in one piece. The lock had broken out—that’s most likely where the cops had aimed—but the bolt a foot above the knob was still intact and the bed slats hadn’t budged an inch.

“Jesus, that was close,” Jake muttered.

He replaced the empty clip, then walked over to the window and pushed one of the mattresses a few inches to the side. The roof directly across from the window was empty. A few cops were crouched behind the stairwell tower eighty feet away. He punched out the glass and aimed Little Richard in their general direction. They weren’t giving him much target, but if he waited long enough …