Piece of the Action (5 page)

Moodrow grabbed O’Grady behind the neck before he could escape and the fireman instinctively tried to pull away, lifting his body erect, opening his ribs to the right hand. The bell rang an instant before Moodrow could react to the opportunity, but that didn’t stop him. He drove his fist into O’Grady’s chest, then turned and walked back to his corner.

“You’re cut, Stanley,” Epstein said.

“Bad?” Moodrow suddenly became aware of the drops running along the outside of his right eye.

“Not yet.” Epstein took the edges of the cut between his fingers, squeezing them tightly together. He held the cut closed until the bleeding stopped, then filled the gash with a thick coagulant. “You could use a real cut man for this one. If he keeps tagging you with the jab, it’s gonna get messy.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sarge. They’re not gonna stop this one for blood.” He glanced across the ring, but O’Grady’s handlers had him surrounded.

“Look here, Stanley.” The referee’s face swam into view. “I want you to stop the bullshit. Right now. Stop grabbin’ him. Stop the elbows. I’ll disqualify you.”

“The crowd’ll love that,” Moodrow grunted. The truth was they’d probably tear Spinelli to pieces and Spinelli knew it. O’Grady was on his own.

The second round, in direct contrast to the first, was slow and dull. O’Grady got on his bicycle, staying far enough away from Moodrow to spin out before his back was against the ropes. The strategy was effective in that it prevented him from being trapped, but the distance was too great for any meaningful offense. O’Grady looked like a scared fighter and the few jabs he managed to land did nothing to change that impression. By the time the bell rang to end the round, the crowd, including a few of the firemen, was booing.

In the third round, O’Grady again reversed strategy, staying close to Moodrow, as he had in the first. Moodrow wasn’t surprised. Irish fighters were expected to be especially courageous. O’Grady would have to return to the firehouse as soon as his injuries, should he suffer injuries, healed up. He couldn’t very well go back to his buddies if he came out of this fight labeled a coward.

Moodrow led with a hard, straight right. It missed, but not by much. O’Grady didn’t bother to counter. He came inside and banged his forehead into Moodrow’s nose. Moodrow heard the cartilage in his nose snap, but he had no sense that it was his own flesh being torn. It was more like someone in another room had broken a pencil. O’Grady, aided by the referee, tried to pull back, but Moodrow held him long enough to put his glove on the fireman’s cheek and rub the laces across his face.

O’Grady managed to jerk away and the referee, incensed, stepped between the two fighters before Moodrow could take up the pursuit. “I’m takin’ a point,” he shouted. “Y’understand? I’m takin’ a point for that.”

Spinelli signalled his decision by turning to each of the three judges and raising his index finger. The cops in the audience sent up a howl. They’d been fairly quiet before, not sure how to react to Moodrow’s tactics. Now they were screaming for O’Grady’s (and Spinelli’s) blood.

The bell rang a few seconds later and this time O’Grady didn’t wait to be hit. He bounced away like a puppet on the end of a string. Moodrow, standing in the center of the ring, turned to the crowd, spread his arms in a gesture of wonder, then minced back to his corner. The cops roared with laughter.

“How’s the eye?”

“Forget the eye,” Epstein nearly shouted. He pressed a hot-water bottle filled with shaved ice against his fighter’s nose, trying to spread the swelling out over Moodrow’s face. “Your nose is broken. I think it might be split.”

“I know. I can taste the blood. It’s kind of salty. Maybe we oughta save it and pour it over a hard-boiled egg.”

“You’re a funny guy, Stanley. But this ain’t
The Milton Berle Show.
”

“The fight’s over, Sarge,” Moodrow replied calmly. “He’s mine.”

“This I already know.”

O’Grady began the fourth round with a five-punch combination that stopped Moodrow in his tracks. Instinctively, Moodrow grabbed O’Grady and pulled him close. Spinelli, still furious, yanked at Moodrow’s left arm, tugging it back far enough to allow O’Grady to drive his right fist into Moodrow’s ribs.

Stunned at the turn of events, Spinelli let Moodrow’s arm go and started to say something to O’Grady. He wasn’t fast enough to get his message across. Moodrow grabbed O’Grady’s face with his left hand and stuck the thumb of his glove into O’Grady’s eye. Once again, O’Grady tried to pull away, but this time Moodrow’s follow-up right caught the top of the fireman’s head.

O’Grady responded by coming directly at Moodrow for the first time. And Moodrow, for the first time, began to give ground. He took a step backward, then another, then another, then set himself and put every ounce of his 247 pounds into a short left hook. O’Grady ran directly into the punch. It stopped him in his tracks, paralyzed him just long enough for the following right hand to catch him flush on the jaw. He trembled for a moment, like a sapling hit with a sledgehammer, then his body went limp and he dropped to the canvas. Moodrow, looking for any sign of consciousness, knew the fight was over when he distinctly heard the crunch of his opponent’s skull smashing into the floor of the ring.

“Jesus, Stanley. Jesus Christ.” Epstein ran to the center of the ring and tried to remove his fighter’s mouthpiece.

Moodrow, his arms raised in triumph, ignored his trainer. He walked over to the ropes and saluted the assembled brass. The cheering continued for several minutes, then finally died away. Moodrow dropped his arms, weary for the first time. The pain was coming. He could feel it in his nose and ribs, only a dull ache now, but soon it would overwhelm him. Still, he wanted to drag it out as long as possible, to imprint his victory in the minds of every cop in the crowd.

“Go shake your opponent’s hand, Stanley.”

“What?” Moodrow looked down at his trainer as if surprised to find him there.

“Go shake his fucking hand. Tell him it was a great fight. Tell him anything, but don’t leave him sitting there.”

“You’re right,” Moodrow admitted. “I forgot.”

O’Grady’s handlers had him up and sitting on his stool when Moodrow approached. The fireman stared at the bloody apparition kneeling in front of him for a moment, then nodded his head. “You fought hard, Stanley,” he said. “You deserve it. But I want a rematch. One more fight to settle the issue.”

“Sorry, pal,” Moodrow replied evenly, “but you’re gonna have to learn to live with this one. I’m retired.”

P
ATRICK FRANCIS MATTHEW COHAN
lingered in the bedroom of his ten-room Bayside home, despite the fact that most of his guests had already arrived. He knew his guests were out there, having met each of them at the door. He also knew about the gusty winds blowing through the borough of Queens. Those winds had greeted him each time he opened the door and now he was thoroughly absorbed in the task of patting rebellious strands of feathery white hair back into place.

Pat Cohan was always careful with his hair because he wore it long, despite the current fashion. There was no rebellion involved in the style he preferred. (Patrick Cohan was, after all, a full inspector in the NYPD, not some Greenwich Village beatnik.) It was just that a tall, broadly built, fifty-nine-year-old Irishman with a thick head of silvery hair couldn’t, on pain of being declared a Protestant, wear that hair in a two-inch brush cut.

Pat Cohan thought of his hair as “the mane,” called it that as he worked each strand into place. “Guess it’s time to tame the mane.” His daughter, Kathleen, liked to tease him about the amount of time he spent in front of the mirror. Pat didn’t particularly like to be teased—he
only
took it from “my darlin’ Kathleen”—but he also knew it was important that his hair always be neatly combed. Short hair, in 1958, was a badge of patriotism, the physical equivalent of a loyalty oath.

Satisfied that every hair was firmly in place, Pat Cohan drew himself up to his full height and measured the result of his efforts. His “mane” floated above a large skull, just as it was supposed to. It framed his broad brow, strong assertive jaw and blue, blue eyes. He liked to describe those eyes (to himself, at least) as the color of an Irish lake under a cloudless sky.

Of course, there were the negatives. (There were
bound
to be negatives when you were on the wrong side of fifty and tied to a desk.) His once-flat belly had gone the way of his colleagues’ hair. And Pat Cohan had jowls, too, and the florid complexion and small broken veins of the habitual drinker. Not that he was a drunk, by any means. Alcohol was the curse of the Irish and every Irishman knew it. But the functions he was expected to attend as an NYPD inspector often required him to stand in a little circle of politicians with a drink in his hand. There were only forty-two inspectors in the 24,000-man NYPD and they spent as much time on the politics of the job as they did on policing the City of New York.

But not tonight. Tonight was special. This was a ‘friends only’ occasion and Pat Cohan’s definition of the word ‘friend’ excluded all politicians. As far as Pat Cohan was concerned, politicians, with their addiction to public opinion, were only one step above the journalists who created that opinion.

“Not bad, Pat,” he said to himself, pulling his vest down over his belly. He was wearing a black three-piece suit cut from the finest Irish broadcloth and tailored by a Lithuanian from the Yorkville section of Manhattan. The black suit was his trademark and, offset by a starched white shirt and a blue tie that matched his eyes, it made him instantly recognizable, even from a distance, whenever he was out of uniform.

Pat Cohan was just about to return to his guests when someone knocked softly on the closed bedroom door. The door opened before he had a chance to offer an invitation and Detective Lieutenant Salvatore Patero entered. Patero, Cohan noted, was wearing his customary white, two-button cardigan, a duplicate of the cardigans Bing Crosby wore on the golf course. Pat Cohan, who’d seen many similar sweaters on Salvatore Patero’s back, felt that putting a guinea into the Crooner’s cardigan was like putting the vestments of a Cardinal on a gibbering ape.

“Salvatore, my boy,” Pat Cohan said quietly, “it’s not polite to barge into another man’s bedroom.”

Patero’s thick, dark eyebrows shot up in wonder. The gesture was habitual and every bit as conscious as Pat Cohan’s hearty Irish handshake. “I knocked, didn’t I? I mean, your wife’s in the other room, Pat.”

Cohan sighed and let the matter drop. The guineas were coming into the Department in larger and larger numbers. You had to make a place for them, but that didn’t mean they were civilized. Civility would take another generation to master. At least.

“Let’s hear the news, boyo. And would you try to make it
good
news. We’re celebratin’ my daughter’s engagement tonight.”

Everything about Salvatore Patero was sharp, from his chin to his chiseled Roman nose to his wiry hair. Even his slim, muscular body was all knees and elbows. Patero didn’t particularly like cops. He didn’t like
being
a cop, but “like” just wasn’t part of the deal for kids from large families. Not when it came to choosing a profession. Patero had first gone out to work when he was eleven years old, carrying milk, eggs and butter from a horse-drawn cart to the doorsteps of Brooklyn housewives. He certainly liked being a cop better than
that.

“I spoke to Accacio. I told him exactly what you said.”

“Which was what, Sal?”

Patero held his temper. Maybe, one glorious day in the future, the pompous Irish assholes who ruled the Department would be driven out, but he’d be long retired before it happened. “I told him how unhappy the Department was about what happened at the whorehouse. I told him I didn’t know if we
should
protect a guy who can’t take care of his own business, who hires amateurs instead of professionals. I told him it’s not nineteen twenty-five anymore. Civilians ain’t supposed to get hurt, much less dead. You got a problem, put it in a Jersey swamp where it belongs.”

“I’ll bet he loved hearing
that.
”

“He didn’t react much. I mean he didn’t seem frightened or anything. He told me the thing at the O’Neills’ was an accident. He said if there was any heat coming down, he’d cut off the links between his people and the event.”

“The lad is takin’ steps to protect himself,” Cohan interrupted. “How nice. Does he think we’re worried about
him
?”

Patero threw his palms up in the air and shrugged his shoulders. “What could I say, Pat? It’s the practical thing to do. I mean, I know you can handle your end, but there’s pressure comin’ down from the precinct.”

“From exactly
who
in the precinct? I’ve already spoken to the captain and he assured me …”

“We’re talkin’ about a homicide, Pat, not about gambling and whores. It’s not a thing a detective can ignore.”

“Be serious, boyo. Dead Puerto Ricans are as expendable as you guineas were forty years ago. Tell our friend Accacio that he needn’t fear the Seventh Precinct. He should be afraid of
me.
”

“That’s what I told him.” Patero absorbed the remark about “you guineas.” It was the price he had to pay and he knew it. “Look, Pat, I just wanna go on the record about this. We’re not doing the right thing, here. I’m not saying we should go out and bust Steppy Accacio. But I
am
saying we should let the investigation take its course. It was a
homicide.
”

“You finished, Sal?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now, I want to speak to you about my prospective son-in-law.”

“Stan ‘The Man’ Moodrow? The hero?” Patero laughed softly, covering his mouth with his hand.

“Shut up, Sal.” Pat Cohan’s voice demanded obedience. He waited until he got it, before continuing. “If you think what he did was nothing, boyo, you could always arrange to get in the ring with him. Maybe you could teach him a lesson.”

Patero’s face reddened. Like most cops, he didn’t react well to having his courage challenged, but he couldn’t very well punch the shit out of Pat Cohan, he being a lousy detective and Patrick Cohan a full inspector. Besides, Pat Cohan wasn’t that far off the mark. Salvatore Patero would sooner have been assigned to the Bomb Squad than get in the ring with Stanley Moodrow.