A Piece of the Action

Twelve

January 16

For Antonio “steppy” Accacio, this was the best time of the day. He was in the bathroom of his ten-room Montclair, New Jersey, home and his wife, Angela, was shaving his face. He would have preferred to have his own barber, his personal barber, do the shaving, but the ungrateful bastard simply refused to make the trip from Mulberry Street to Montclair despite everything he, Steppy Accacio, had done for the man.

But that was the way it was in life. You had to accept the bad with the good. Sure, you found some piece-of-shit swamp guinea and lent him the money to start his own business. Sure, you expected a little gratitude, something over and above the 20 % interest you were charging. That didn’t mean you’d get it.

“Hey, no laugh. You laugh, I cut.”

Steppy opened his eyes to look at his wife. She was leaning over him, patiently scraping away at his heavy beard. As usual, his eyes dropped to her breasts. Angie was ten years younger than he was and her jugs were still firm. He wanted to touch her, to feel her dark nipples pushing against the palm of his hand. But the last time he’d tried that move, she’d sliced him so bad, he ended up with four stitches in his right earlobe.

“Almos’ finish,” Angela said.

“Looks like I survived again. Right, Angie?”

“No talk.”

She wiped his face with the hot towel she’d used to soak his beard, then slapped on the aftershave. Steppy inhaled the fragrance of Roma Brava. It was sweeter than Aqua-Velva. More in keeping with the old country, which was where it came from. Which was where his wife came from. Steppy had no particular love for Italy. He’d never been there and had no desire to go, but these little touches impressed the ‘mustache Petes’ who still clung to the reins of power. Who needed to be impressed as much as they needed the millions of dollars pouring into the pockets of their six-hundred-dollar suits.

Steppy got off the chair and shrugged into the silk dressing gown his wife held out to him.

“We’re havin’ company,” he announced. “Three, four guys. Make sure you got enough coffee and pastries.” He threw her a hard look. Like most Sicilian women, she had a sharp tongue. He’d been trying to break her of the habit, but had yet to come up with a method that didn’t require breaking her body as well.

“You tell me this lassa night. Why you gotta repeat? I’m no stupido.”

What you are, Steppy thought, is halfway to being a fuckin’ nigger. It was funny how her cousins’ descriptions had left that little fact out. Olive was how they’d described her complexion. Well, there were two kinds of olives, green and black, and Angela was a lot closer to the black kind. Not that she really looked like one of them. Not that she had a flat nose and big lips. Not that anyone would actually say anything about her complexion. But, still, the cousins should have told him.

He watched her butt twitch as she walked through their bedroom, then turned to admire his own complexion in the mirror. The simple fact that his parents were not from Sicily stared back at him. Blond hair, blue eyes, milky skin that burned in the sun. One thing for sure, his ancestors hailed from the highlands of Tuscany, not the mountains of Sicily, a fact which (at least according to the prevailing mythology) meant he couldn’t rise much beyond his present station.

“Let ’em keep their secret fuckin’ society,” Steppy muttered, patting his blond hair into place. “I know where I’m goin’, even if they don’t.”

He left the bathroom, crossing his bedroom and going downstairs to the den. The journey didn’t take very long. How could it? The small frame house wasn’t exactly a mansion in Upper Saddle River. On the other hand, it was a long way from the roach-infested tenements of lower Manhattan.

The deep chimes of the doorbell interrupted his reverie and he quickly took a seat in the leather chair behind his desk. He loved making his workers come all the way to New Jersey for business meetings. He loved it as much as they obviously hated it.

“Ya company’s here,” Angie yelled from the living room.

“Send ’em in,” Steppy called back, his face reddening with anger. The bitch was supposed to usher his guests into his presence, not scream like a vendor in the Fulton Fish Market.

“Steppy,” Joe Faci said, walking into the room, “sorry we’re late. The snow held us up. How are ya doin’ this morning?”

“That depends, Joe.” Steppy rose to offer his hand to Joe and his companion, Santo Silesi. “It depends on what you’re gonna tell me. Siddown.”

Before they could begin talking, Angie Accacio appeared, pushing an oak serving cart. A small pot of steaming coffee, a creamer and sugar bowl, three small cups and saucers, and a plate of small pastries were carefully arranged on its polished surface.

“Would yiz serve, Angie?” Steppy kept his voice even, despite the fact that it wasn’t a request. He waited patiently as she filled the cups and handed them, first to the guests and then to him. Until she walked out, closing the door behind her.

“All right, enough with the bullshit,” he snapped. “The Hebe’ll be here in a few minutes. Let’s get to it. How’d ya make out, Sandy?”

“What they did to Rocco? I didn’t see any of it. The Jew wouldn’t let me near it.”

“This I already know. Joe told me.”

“Then you also know that he’s got me standing around in project playgrounds with fifty bags of heroin.”

Steppy Accacio smiled indulgently. Santo Silesi was his oldest sister’s firstborn, a Tuscan on both sides. That was one thing the Sicilians had right. That bit about the family. It wasn’t a foolproof protection against treachery, but it was as close as you could get.

“Just be a little patient, Sandy,” Accacio said. “I’ll pull ya outta there as soon as possible. Meanwhile, ya should watch everything goin’ on with the Jew. Where he lives. Where he goes. Who he hangs out with. When the time comes, I wanna be able to find him.”

Silesi raised his hands, palm up. “Whatever it takes, right? That’s the only way to look at it. By the way, sales were better than we expected. I moved three hundred bags yesterday.”

“The take’s better,” Joe Faci interrupted, “but that might not be so good for us. The Hebe wants to buy in quantity. He claims he’s got the bucks to go for half an ounce. He’ll package himself.”

Accacio bit into a cannoli. The crust was flaky, the filling moist and sweet. “I don’t mind so much that the Hebe’s ambitious. I mean where’s he gonna go? He can’t do nothin’ without we say so first. My problem is that I had a bitch of time gettin’ hold of the territory we got. Which, you mighta noticed, ain’t all that big. What I figured on doin’ was maximizing the profit. If I sell to the Jew wholesale, I’m gonna have to expand and I ain’t too sure I can get permission. Not right away.”

“Why don’t we just shoot the mother-fucker,” Santo blurted out. “I mean every time I turn around the sheeny’s makin’ me eat shit.” He didn’t bother to add the simple fact that he was afraid of Jake Leibowitz.

“Yeah,” Steppy said, “I heard about that. What you gotta do, Sandy, is keep ya self-control. Like I said, I’m gonna pull you outta there soon. And when I do, I’m gonna make the Hebe report directly to you. I’m gonna put you in charge.”

“He ain’t gonna like that,” Joe Faci said.

“That’s the idea.”

All three were laughing when the doorbell sounded. They were still wiping the smirks off their faces when Angie led Jake Leibowitz into the room. “Jake,” Steppy Accacio said, rising to offer his hand, “we meet at last.”

Stanley Moodrow spent most of the day thinking about what he was going to do. Thinking about whether he should do anything. Greta was already pissed off, whereas Sal Patero had stopped being pissed off. Pushing his nose into Patero’s business wouldn’t necessarily make Greta happy, but it was guaranteed to make Sal unhappy. It would be the same as calling Patero (and Pat Cohan) a liar. Of course, there was always the chance that Patero was a liar. Moodrow wasn’t sure he wanted to know that, either.

But there was also the chance that Patero was right, that Allen Epstein was simply mistaken. Maybe the sergeant was confusing Melenguez with someone else. Maybe, despite all appearances, Melenguez’s death had been a mob hit. Maybe the detectives had concluded that Melenguez was a pimp on the basis of information from their informants.

In the end, there were too many ‘maybes’ for a man as inherently curious as Stanley Moodrow. What he did was go down to the files and pull the paperwork. He didn’t expect anyone to notice and nobody did. Paperwork was Moodrow’s job.

He went through the file systematically, beginning with the patrolman’s report and proceeding to Epstein’s observations, the preliminary reports of the two detectives and the forensic unit’s description of the crime scene. Melenguez had been gunned down from inside an office on the first floor, rear, of 800 Pitt Street with a.45 caliber pistol. There was no doubt about it. Melenguez had been hit four times and all four slugs had been recovered, two from the hallway behind the victim and two from the victim’s body.

Moodrow turned to the Medical Examiner’s report. The M.E.’s description was gruesome enough-the first shot, the one that’d killed him, had blown away half his face; the next three had turned his abdominal cavity into tomato soup-but there was nothing in it to contradict the detectives’ preliminary assessments.

The witness interviews came next. There were fourteen interviews with women and one with a man, a further indication, assuming 800 Pitt Street wasn’t a nunnery, that Melenguez had been gunned down inside a whorehouse. Moodrow scanned the interviews as quickly as possible, noting the name of the only man.

Finishing, Moodrow realized that Epstein had been right about one thing: none of the witnesses, even though all had been isolated during the questioning, had been willing to admit they’d eyeballed the shooting. Which raised several questions. Melenguez had been standing in the doorway. The perpetrator had been standing inside the office. Epstein was of the opinion that Melenguez had wandered into a robbery in progress. But wasn’t it also possible that Melenguez had been the robber? According to the preliminary reports, no weapons of any kind had been found at the scene. If Melenguez had been armed, someone had taken the time to remove the weapon. Or maybe one of the whores had scooped it up with the intention of selling it on the street.

Moodrow turned to the follow-ups, the DD5’s. The two detectives handling the case, John Samuelson and Paul Maguire, had interviewed Melenguez’s employer, a trucker named Levy, as well as several co-workers. The portrait that emerged was of a hard-working, ambitious immigrant. Melenguez had been in New York for slightly less than six months. He’d shown up for work every day. He had no friends outside of his fellow workers and spent his nights listening to the radio and writing letters home.

Moodrow recalled the picture Nenita Melenguez had shown him. He tried to imagine the tiny man with the jug ears packing a rod, pulling it on the pimp who ran the whorehouse. He couldn’t even come close.

The obvious next step was to speak to the suits who’d handled the case before it was farmed out of the precinct. As it happened, Moodrow knew Paul Maguire fairly well. Maguire had still been in uniform when Moodrow came onto the job and for a short time before Maguire’s appointment to the detectives, the two of them had walked overlapping beats.

That was on the plus side. There was a minus side as well. Moodrow knew he could return the file with no one the wiser. He could still put it back and forget the whole thing. But once he started talking to other cops, he had no way to predict who might whisper what message into Sal Patero’s ear. Paul Maguire had always been friendly, but how was Moodrow to know where Maguire’s loyalties lay? Ordinarily, jobs were given out to any detective foolish enough to be loitering in the squad room when a call came into the precinct. On the other hand, Patero might have personally assigned the case to Maguire because he knew Maguire could be trusted to do what he was told.

Moodrow went back to the filing cabinets and replaced the paperwork, then strolled over to the squad room and poured himself a cup of coffee. Samuelson and Maguire had back-to-back desks in a far corner of the room. Moodrow looked over, hoping they were out in the field, but found both men pounding away on their respective Underwoods. He recalled what Epstein had told him about going the distance, using time to his own advantage.

What I oughta do, he thought, is forget about this bullshit. What I oughta do is stay close to Kate and brown-nose her old man until after the wedding. What I oughta do is find an apartment in Flushing and move out of the Lower East Side. What I oughta do …

Sound advice, he couldn’t deny it, but his long legs kept moving across the squad room. Kept moving until he was standing next to Paul Maguire’s desk.

“How ya doin’, fellas?”

Maguire and Samuelson looked up in surprise. Just as if they hadn’t seen him coming.

“What’s goin’ on, Stanley?” Maguire said.

“You know the Melenguez case?” Moodrow paused, but neither man spoke. “Well, I was looking over the paperwork.”

“Somethin’ missing?” Samuelson asked. “Not that it matters, because the case is goin’ away from us. In fact, it’s already gone.”

“No, that’s not it. Nothing’s missing.” Now that he was in the middle of it, Moodrow couldn’t decide what he wanted to ask. The two detectives weren’t any help. They continued to stare at him with blank expressions. “All right, there’s a couple of things bothering me. If Melenguez was shot from inside the office, either the pimp or someone the pimp knows had to be the shooter. How else would the perpetrator get in there? Sal thinks Melenguez was hit by a professional. But that doesn’t make sense, either. Why would anybody want to rub out Luis Melenguez?”

“Wait a second, Stanley,” Maguire interrupted. “Are you saying the lieutenant’s not happy with the work we did?”

“Just the opposite. Sal’s already signed off on the case. What I’m doing here is personal. Rosaura Pastoral, Melenguez’s landlady, happens to live in my building. She asked me to check it out.”

As far as Moodrow could tell, his explanation had exactly no effect on the two detectives. Their faces remained blank. They didn’t even look at each other.

“Everything’s in the file,” Samuelson finally said. “Whatever we found out, that’s where it is. We got nothing to add.”

Moodrow remembered to thank the men before walking away. He felt like an idiot, but the feeling didn’t make him unhappy. No more bullshit, he told himself. No more Sherlock Holmes. Mind your own goddamned business before you do something to put your ass in a permanent sling.

He went back to his own desk and began to review a case the ADAs had sent over in the morning. There were two statements missing, one from the complainant and one from the accused. The defendant’s lawyer was demanding both and the prosecutor intended to drop the indictment if they couldn’t be located.

Two hours later, the missing statements found and already on their way to the DA’s office, Moodrow signed out and began to walk through the remains of the morning’s snowstorm to his apartment a few blocks away. He was due out in Bayside at eight-thirty and his thoughts were on Kate and what she might have told her father. The last time they’d spoken, he’d begged her to defy the priest. Kate, after much argument, had agreed to think about it. What bothered her was the distinct possibility that Father Ryan might decide that, despite the theoretical sanctity of the confessional, it was his Christian duty to have a little talk with Pat Cohan. It had happened too many times in the past to be entirely discounted.

“Stanley.”

“Huh?” Moodrow turned to the man who’d fallen into step beside him. It was Paul Maguire.

“Just keep walkin’, Stanley. I wanna have a little talk with you.”

“Whatever ya say, Paul.”

“The thing of it is, Stanley, that this conversation never happened. Understand? Never.”

“Sure.”

“Because if it gets back to Sal Patero, I’ll be walkin’ a beat in Far Rockaway. It gets real cold out there near the ocean. The wind never stops blowin’.”

“Paul, I get the message.”

“Okay, what you said about Melenguez? You’re right. There was no hit and Melenguez was in the building to get laid. One of the whores told me she’d just finished takin’ care of him.”

“I didn’t see that in the interviews.”

“Maybe somebody took it out. Maybe your buddy, Sal Patero, took it out. I’m not here to solve this crime. All I wanna do is whisper a few words in your ear. Then, it’s up to you. You hearing me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“O’Neill runs the house. Him and his wife. I’d bet my gold shield that both of them were in the office when the shooting went down. Someone put a heavy beating on the pair of ’em and it sure as shit wasn’t Melenguez.”

“The beating wasn’t in the files, either. What you’re sayin’ is that somebody’s covering up a homicide. A fucking homicide.”

“Stanley, I’m here to give you a piece of advice. If you’re smart, you’ll keep your nose out of it. This goes a lot further than Sal Patero. But, if you’re stupid, here’s what you should do. O’Neill and his old lady are still running the show on Pitt Street. Squeeze ’em. Squeeze ’em like tubes of fucking toothpaste. I got a hundred bucks here that says the same guys who pounded on O’Neill and his old lady shot Melenguez. I got another hundred that says O’Neill knows the shooter.”

Stanley Moodrow knew he’d stepped in it when the door of Kate’s home opened to reveal her mother, Rose. Decked out in widow’s weeds, the small slight woman took a backward step and raised her fist to her mouth. A rosary, its onyx beads as black as her dress, dangled from bony fingers.

“Mr. Cohan wants to see you,” she hissed.

“Where is he?”

She continued to back away until her heels were against the first riser of the staircase. Then she turned and fled.

Moodrow stood in the open doorway for a moment. A mixture of emotions coursed through him-dread, rage, fear. He didn’t want to sort them out; he wanted to flee from the situation, just as Rose Cohan had fled. It’s bad, he thought. It’s so bad it can only get worse.

He recalled a day, early in his fighting career, when he’d been asked to spar with a hotshot middleweight named Virgil Thomas. Already over a hundred and seventy-five pounds and cocky as hell, he’d jumped at the chance. Thirty seconds later, as the slap of leather against flesh echoed through the small gym, he’d known he was in deep trouble. He also knew there was no remedy except to go through with it and that was what he’d done. Now, he was going to have to go through with it again.

Moodrow crossed the living room and opened the door to Pat Cohan’s den without knocking. He’d been hoping against hope to find Kate inside, but Cohan was alone.

“You don’t knock?” Cohan asked.

“Where’s Kate?”

“What’s the hurry, Casanova? You so horny you can’t spend a few minutes talking to me?” Cohan lit the stub of a cigar and sucked it into life. He was fully dressed, his jacket and vest buttoned, his hair sweeping out and back like the lion’s mane he imagined it to be.

“Where’s Kate?” Moodrow stepped forward. There was a chair between him and Pat Cohan’s desk. He swept it away with a casual wave of his right hand. “Where’s Kate?”

“I thought it best she not be here for this.”

Moodrow watched Cohan shrink back in his chair. The Inspector was staring, not into his eyes, but at the still-red scar on his brow. Moodrow, like all fighters, drew energy from his opponent’s fear.

“Why’s that?”

“Look here, boyo …”

“I’m not your fucking ‘boyo,’ Pat. I’m twenty-five years old. And Kate’s not your ‘darlin’ Kathleen,’ either. She’s a twenty-two-year-old woman. You can’t keep her in diapers forever.”

“I didn’t call you in here to fight with you, Stanley.”

“This I already figured.”

Pat Cohan’s face contorted with anger. “Listen, you little prick, I made you and I can break you.”

“That works both ways, Pat. The way I see it, we’re in this together. Till death or the Department do us part.”

Cohan managed a thin smile. He sucked on his unlit cigar. “That’s not entirely true, Stanley, but I’m not here to threaten you. If you remember, I only asked one thing of you when you requested permission to see Kathleen. I asked you to keep her pure until after the wedding.”

Moodrow finally sat down. He shook his head in disgust. “Why don’t you cut the bullshit. Stop living in Never-Never Land. She’s a woman, that’s all. And this ain’t the fucking junior prom. Nobody cares unless the woman gets pregnant. And the people I grew up with don’t even care about that. As long as you do the right thing.”

“She committed a sin, Stanley. And you should have known better. You should have stopped her. Kate is innocent. She’s inexperienced, naive.”

Moodrow thought back to that morning when she’d shown up on his door- step. Innocent? Naive? What she really was was stupid for going to the wrong priest. What she really was was weak for not telling him to stick his penance in his breviary.

“All right, Pat. Let’s say it was a sin. Let’s even say that I took advantage of a naive young girl. So what? It’s over now and there’s nothing you can do to fix it. Kate and I are engaged. That means whatever advantage I took, I’m gonna be makin’ it up to her for the next forty or fifty years. Ya know, when I went to Catholic school, the nuns taught me that my sins were between me and God. So what are you doing here? You so high up in the job, you think you’re God?”

Pat Cohan put the stub of his cigar in the ashtray. He ran his fingers through his silvery hair and leaned forward. “What I want, Stanley, is for you to go away. Take it from a man trapped in a miserable marriage, you and Kate aren’t right for each other. You’re not even close. So why don’t you tell me what you want?”

“What I want is Kate. And if you say she doesn’t want me, if you put that lie in her mouth, I’ll drive my fist through the back of your head.”

“I believe you would, Stanley. But I’m not here to lie to you. I haven’t sent Kathleen to a convent. She’ll be home tomorrow. In the meantime, why don’t you think about what I’ve said? Do you want Homicide? Narcotics? Safes and Lofts? How about a jump in rank? Detective, second grade, with a guarantee of first grade in a year.”

Moodrow felt his anger begin to evaporate as the central truth of Pat Cohan’s message sunk in. This man, Kate’s father, had decided to prevent the marriage. It was just that simple.

“Why are you doing this, Pat? And don’t tell me it’s because we went to bed together. You don’t give two shits about the Church. You’re the biggest goddamned thief in the Department.”

“I’ll ignore that last comment, boyo.” Cohan opened the center desk drawer and took out a fresh cigar. He studied it for a moment, then turned to Moodrow. “As for my reasons, I don’t know where to begin. I thought you were a tough guy, but I was wrong. You’re only tough in the ring. Mentally, you’re not prepared to do what’s necessary to guarantee Kate and her children the kind of life I want them to have. I wouldn’t say it’s your fault, exactly. No, I’d have to say the error was mine. But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

“Keep going.”

“You’re impulsive and headstrong. Maybe that’s what comes from being victorious. You fought your way into the detectives, just like you fought your way into your engagement. But you never stopped to consider the consequences. You’re like a traveler who desperately wants to arrive at a certain destination without any clear understanding of what he’ll do after he gets there. Patero’s afraid of you. He thinks you’re unpredictable. Of course, Patero’s right in the middle of it, so perhaps he has a right …”

“Bullshit.” Moodrow stood up. “All those rounds? All that training? I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be a detective. You made me into the precinct bagman. As for Kate, you think I’m using her the way I used the ring, but that’s not true. I love Kate and I want her to be my wife. Now, here’s something you might wanna think about: if you fight me and I win, I’m gonna take Kate and migrate to California, like everybody else in the country. Kate’s a religious girl, Pat. She takes all that bullshit about ‘love, honor and obey’ very seriously. If I tell her we’re going, she’ll pack her bags and get on the plane.”

“You’re quick with the threats, Stanley.”

“What have I got to lose?”

“Everything, boyo. Everything.”

“Ya know what I think, boyo? I think your promises are bullshit. Once you’ve got Kate under control, you’ll fuck me any way you can. That’s your rep, Pat. That’s what they say about you. Inspector Cohan never forgets. Never forgives, either. I got nothing to lose.”

Moodrow backed toward the door. He expected Cohan to make some sort of protest, but Cohan merely lit his cigar and leaned back in the chair.

“Something else you might wanna think about, Pat.” Moodrow opened the door without turning away. “Luis Melenguez. You lied to me about Luis Melenguez. It wasn’t a little white lie, either. It was a big black lie. Go confess to Father Ryan. Maybe he’ll order you to tell me the truth.”