Bronx Noir

Ernie K.’s gelding by Ed Dee

Van Cortlandt Park

All three of us turned sixteen halfway through the first summer of JFK’s presidency, when all things seemed possible. Lefty Trainor, Brendan O’Leary, and I had spent that summer caddying, drinking beer, and unsuccessfully trying to lure BICs, otherwise known as Bronx Irish Catholic girls, into Van Cortlandt Park. Okay, so maybe not all things seemed possible.

It was 9 p.m. on a hot Friday night in August and we were in our usual spot on the curb outside the White Castle under the el station at Broadway and 242^nd Street. We were checking out the skirts and wolfing down belly bombs. Local street wisdom had it that the little cheeseburgers were the best way to soak up the quarts of Rupert Knickerbocker beer we’d imbibed across the street, in the park. Three quarts of warm beer for $1.19 on a park bench had loosened our vocal chords for a doo-wop session under a streetlight we’d smashed to make it harder for the cops to zero in on us. Cops didn’t like doo-wop or guys our age. But in the dark and without the element of surprise, they were no match for us in Vanny. As my mother said, “You ran through that park like a bunch of savages.”

“Here comes God’s gift to women,” Lefty said.

“Kronek or the horse?” I said.

Patrolman Ernie Kronek was the worst human being in the Bronx. Kronek was a NYPD mounted cop assigned to patrol the 1,100 acres of Van Cortlandt Park. He’d made it his personal mission to torture us. If he’d caught us in the park drinking beer and singing he would have charged at us, swinging his nightstick like he was the King of England on his polo pony. He loved to whack us, then smash the beer. We all had bruises from Ernie K. at one time or another. He truly hated us, but he loved the girls. Every night, about this time, he’d ride across the parade ground to the southwest corner of the park. He’d sit there atop his horse and stare at the girls coming down the steps of the el station. Treating them to a gaze at his manly physique. Asshole. Everybody knew it. Even the other cops.

On the opposite side of Broadway, the local men were gathering in Hagan’s Bar to wait for the early edition of tomorrow’s Daily News. It was a Bronx ritual. Every night around this time they’d leave their apartments and walk to Hagan’s to have a cold brew and listen for the bundles to be tossed from the truck. Then they’d have one more while Irv from the candy store cut the bindings and stacked the papers on the outside racks. On Saturday nights the three of us helped Irv put the Sunday paper together. We lugged the early edition off the sidewalk and stuffed each paper with the Sunday magazine, the comics, the sale ads, and the classifleds, which had come earlier in the week. Our hands and faces would be black with printer’s ink, but we had two bucks each burning holes in our pockets. Irv always tossed in a free paper, usually a torn one, but we only read the sports section on the back five pages. Between Irv’s deuce and the money we made caddying at Van Cortlandt, the nation’s oldest public golf course, we didn’t need anyone’s free newspaper.

“It’s gotta be the horse,” Lefty Trainor said, as a tall redhead in pale blue shorts giggled and pet the big Tennessee Walker. The horse was named Con Ed for the electric company who donated him. Ernie K. called him “Connie,” but it wasn’t a female. Poor Connie had the worst of it, having to lug Ernie K.’s fat ass around. We held no grudge against the horse, who after all was just an innocent animal. The cop was another matter; we watched in disgust as he flashed his Ipana smile down on the thirtyish redhead, his square jaw jutting outward.

“Who does the woman remind you of?” Lefty said.

“Maureen O’Hara,” I said.

“No, c’mon,” Lefty said. “B.O., who do you think she looks like? Seriously.”

We’d called Brendan O’Leary “B.O.” since kindergarten. B.O. was having a lousy summer, ever since he got dumped by his girlfriend. Lefty and I had been going through every joke known to man and Milton Berle, trying to cheer him up. He’d been a real sad sack, especially when the beer buzz began to wear off. Getting him back to his happy old self was the main reason we started our vendetta against Ernie K. The nuns had taught us that the pursuit of a worthy goal can help take your mind off your own problems.

“Marilyn Monroe,” B.O. said, but Marilyn was a blonde. He wasn’t even trying. He did, however, smile and wave to his dad, as he pushed through Hagan’s door. B.O.’s dad was a detective in Bronx Homicide; that’s how we knew the other cops considered Ernie Kronek an asshole. As every Friday night, my dad was already in Hagan’s, in his corner near the window.

“I got a buck says he bags this one,” Lefty said. “She looks half shit-faced to me.”

I’d never bet against Ernie K.; his act was a smooth one. He had a nose for a certain type of woman. The type my father called “free spirits” and my mother called “hoors.” He’d quietly offer these girls a special ride. It was against the police department’s rules, but he’d make an exception in their case, winking as if they were coconspirators in some rebellious adventure. He had a soft spot for beautiful women, he’d say. Then he’d have them walk into the park, to a bench behind the trees, near the old stone house, the family mansion, now a museum. Ernie would wait a few minutes, looking around to see if anybody was watching him, then slowly amble toward the meeting spot. He’d have the woman stand on a bench, then he’d pull her up onto poor Connie, letting the woman feel his powerful arms. He had a whole routine; a slow romantic tour of the park’s historical highlights, all the while moving deeper into the dark recesses of the park, to his “special spot.” We had Ernie K.’s act down pat.

The screech of metal on metal drowned out conversation as the Broadway train clattered to a stop above us. Red sparks floated in the night air. With the exception of creeps like Ernie Kronek and a few others, this was the best neighborhood in the city. We had everything, because 242^nd and Broadway was the end of the line, the last subway stop in the Bronx. The place was always crowded, day and night. We had five bars, two candy stores, and Manhattan College just up the hill. Commuters going to or returning from school or work or partying in Midtown got off and caught a bus for Riverdale or Yonkers. Husbands, wives, or mothers, whatever, parked on the Van Cortlandt side of Broadway and waited for their loved ones. Guys bought flowers, others stopped in one of the bars for a quick pop before going home to the bride. An endless supply of skirts floated down from the subway platform above. But most of all, that park across the street. Thank you, Van Cortlandt family, for the biggest backyard in the universe.

Back to this Ernie K. thing. Looking at it now I can understand that one of the reasons we hated him was that he was successful with women. All the girls we knew acted like he was a movie star, or something. Even my sainted mother would say, “He’s a fine figure of a man.” I won’t repeat what my father said, but most of the male population of the neighborhood agreed with him. And on top of that, he was a mean bastard.

“There she goes,” Lefty said. “I told you she was a live one.”

The redhead slung her big droopy purse over her shoulder and headed off into the park. Not many woman ventured into the park alone at this time of night, so I felt pretty sure Lefty was right.

“I got a buck says he goes in less than ninety seconds,” Lefty said, holding his birthday watch up to the light. “He knows this one’s a hot number.”

“I’m not up for the hunt tonight,” B.O. said.

“Come on,” Lefty and I whined simultaneously.

We’d been tracking Ernie K. all summer. The idea was to make a record of his on-duty romantic trysts and somehow use it against him. Our plan was to send an anonymous but very specific letter to NYPD Internal Affairs and get him transferred to the ass end of Staten Island, or further, if anything was further than that. But B.O. got cold feet, afraid that somehow it would get back that he was involved and indirectly hurt his dad. He said his dad always talked about how the department hated rats. Cops didn’t turn in cops.

“We’ll turn his ass in,” I said. “Your name won’t even come up.”

“Naw, I don’t mean that,” he said. “It’s just that my stomach isn’t good tonight. We must have gotten some bad beer.”

“Beer is never bad,” Lefty said. “Food sometimes, beer never.”

The sweet smell of anisette cookies wafted up from the Stella D’Oro bakery. When I looked up to breathe it all in, Ernie K. was gone.

“It’s Howdy Doody time,” Lefty said.

It took a few minutes for our eyes to adjust to the dark. B.O. continued to express doubts, but Lefty and I kept moving. We knew Ernie took his prizes on an L-shaped route: east behind the mansion to the nature trail, then north past the lake and along Tibbetts Brook. Very romantic on a moonlit night, especially if you can ignore the sounds of the train and the roar of cars on the Major Deegan Expressway. Eventually he’d get to the black and silent heart of the park, where we were headed.

Since we knew where they’d wind up we took a diagonal route. Straight across the parade ground, the soccer and rugby fields, to the cross-country course. We all ran high school cross-country and knew the world class course by heart. Across the flat to the cow path, then a sharp left and up through the woods, up along old Mohegan Indian hunting trails. It was a steep, rocky incline to the the top of Cemetery Hill, 150 feet above sea level. B.O. stopped twice to throw up. Not that unusual. Even sober runners do it on Cemetery Hill.

The guidebooks call it Vault Hill, because Stephanus Van Cortlandt, the first native born mayor of New York, built a vault there in 1776 to hide the city’s records from the British. Later it became the family burial grounds. Everybody around here calls it Cemetery Hill.

We ducked through a hole in the fence, then weaved between the old tombstones, all of us sweating and gasping. My pulse was thumping in my neck and I was close to tossing some belly bombs myself. We crawled the last ten yards, the wet grass cooling us down. At the edge, we overlooked a small circular clearing against the hill, hidden by trees. We figured it was once an Indian camp that the guidebooks missed. Now it was Ernie K.’s love nook. We weren’t there ten minutes when we heard a woman laughing.

“I told you he’d be in a hurry tonight,” Lefty said, as he checked his Timex with the glowing green hands and recorded the exact time for the accurate records of our planned indictment of a bastard cop. Shhh! B.O. reminded. We were above them, but only about thirty yards away. Our chins against the turf, we all clasped our hands in front of our faces, to block the sound of our breathing. Only our eyes showed over our clasped hands.

We were far enough from roads and highways to hear the sound of crickets. The moon was close to full, so the place was lit like a stage play. We’d be able to see them better, but if we weren’t careful, they could definitely see us. Then we heard twigs and brush breaking, and Connie snorting. We spotted the yellow calvary stripe on Ernie K.’s uniform pants. At least the stripe was cool. Only mounted cops were allowed to wear it. Connie stopped in the middle of the clearing. Ernie K. twisted around, lifted the woman off the horse, and slowly let her down. The guy was powerful, I had to admit that.

“It’s her,” Lefty whispered in my ear.

“Who?” I said.

“But don’t say anything to…” he said, pointing in B.O.’s direction.

What the hell is that about? I wondered.

The redhead stumbled around, more bombed than I originally thought. She put her shoes in her floppy purse and began dancing like a gypsy in the movies. Arms waving, hips swaying. Ernie K. tied Connie to a tree, as the dancing redhead began unbuttoning her blouse. I didn’t know a woman like this, how could Lefty?

“Dance with me, Ernie,” she said, reaching around to unsnap her bra. Then she danced and danced, and stripped and stripped. Tossing her clothes onto her floppy purse. Until she was bare ass. Totally bare ass.

I wish I could say we left around this point, because this part is a little embarrassing for good Catholic boys like ourselves. But no one would believe me. We never left. We always stayed to the bitter end. Give us a break; we were sixteen years old and this was the most skin we’d seen outside of National Geographic. Besides, most of the sex in Ernie K.’s nook was hidden by tree branches or blankets. Really. Well, usually. But not this night; this was Loew’s big-screen big, plus Technicolor and Cinemascope. All we needed was popcorn.

“Bridget Fahey,” Lefty whispered.

“No shit?” I said, way too loud, but the redhead’s louder singing drowned it out. I’d heard about Crazy Bridget, but couldn’t remember ever seeing her before. She’d left for California years ago, leaving only her reputation for wildness behind. The Fahey’s lived in Lefty’s building, so I believed him. And I figured if I didn’t remember her, then B.O. probably didn’t either. B.O. was the problem. The part I didn’t know how to handle. How could I tell him that this bare ass redhead was the older sister of Margaret Mary, the love of his life? But Bridget was already naked and dancing in the moonlight. The damage was done. I figured any notification could wait. Besides, the nuns always told us that some things are better left unsaid.

Leather creaked as Ernie K. removed his gun belt and hooked it over Connie. He sat on a stump and began removing the high boots. This was special. Sometimes he didn’t bother taking his boots off, but crazy Bridget was singing in Spanish and shoving her ass in his face as she pulled off his boots, like some drunken scullery maid in an Errol Flynn picture.

B.O. and Lefty were silent, and eerily still. I think we all sensed this was going to be a memorable night. For Crazy Bridget it could have been just an average night. Who knows? She bumped and grinded in the Bronx moonlight, imploring Ernie K. to hurry. The older guys in our neighborhood always smiled when they talked about Bridget. After she left, her younger sisters were kept close to the house, rarely straying from the sight of Mrs. Fahey, ever-present in her third-floor window. Lefty said that cloistered nuns had more freedom than Margaret Mary Fahey. But he never said it in front of B.O.

Naked himself, Ernie K. stepped away from the tree stump and began an awkward, limping dance. It was obvious his bare feet were too tender for God’s pebbled earth. He moved in a slow yet palsied twist. Chubby Checker would have died of embarrassment. Finally Bridget put him out of his misery and moved toward him, arms spread wide, shaking her alabaster breasts. Moving right up against him. The slap of skin on skin. Ernie K. stopped dancing and wrapped her in his arms. B.O. pulled his hands down from his mouth, to keep his glasses from fogging up.

“Over there, over there,” Bridget cried, and pointed to a grassy spot right below us. She pulled Ernie K. by his arm. To right below us. We could have spit on them. With Bridget’s insistence the cop carefully laid himself down on the small patch of grass. But no sooner had he gotten down… she sprung up.

“Wait right there, sugar,” she said. “I need something.”

She ran back across the dirt floor of Kronek’s love nook toward her floppy purse. I figured she needed some woman thing, but I was more worried about Ernie K. If he leaned back to gaze at the stars glittering over the Bronx he would have been looking right into our faces. Instead, Bridget reclaimed all his attention.

Because she came back waving Ernie K.’s gun.

For the first time in my life I understood how certain moments play out in slow motion. It seemed unreal, half dream, half hallucination. Ernie K. had his hand in the air as if it would stop a bullet. Bridget came within a few feet of him and stopped.

“Give me the gun,” he said.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“This isn’t funny, Bridget.”

“What’s my last name, you self-centered bastard?”

“You don’t want to be doing this. Put the gun down, we’ll both walk away. No repercussions.”

“No repercussions,” she said. “You don’t know the first thing about repercussions.”

“I’ll never mention this to anyone,” he said.

“I know that for sure,” she said. “You’ll never mention this to anyone.”

I felt B.O. start to forget next to me. He didn’t like stress of any kind. And this was big-time stress.

“What is my name?” she said again.

The cop, on his knees, had been slowly working his way up, but when he started to stand she fired the gun over his head. The muzzle flash lit Ernie K.’s face, showing it a sudden pale gray. But the sound, the shocking blast and its echo, caused the three of us to come off the ground. They had to hear it in downtown Yonkers. Ernie K. went to his knees, then lay flat out. We could see him trembling.

“What is my last name?” she screamed.

It was then that B.O. decided to be a hero. He stood up, yelling, “He’s a cop! You can’t shoot a cop!”

They both looked up.

“Witness, they’re witnesses,” the naked mounted cop said.

“I’ll goddamn shoot anyone I please,” Bridget said.

“But not a cop,” B.O. insisted.

“Run for help,” Ernie K. said. “Say it’s a ten-thirteen.”

B.O. turned to run. He knew the location of all the police call boxes in the park.

“Fahey,” Lefty said. “Her name is Bridget Fahey.”

And there it was, out there for all to know. B.O. stopped cold.

“Mr. Trainor is right,” Bridget said. “And this conceited, arrogant police officer knows the Fahey name all too well, do you not? All too well.”

Bridget circled Ernie K. Dust rose from her feet as she shuffled to put her back to us. Out of modesty, or a better shooting angle. I didn’t know which.

“You shoot me and these kids will tell,” he said. “Every cop in this country will hunt you down.”

“You exaggerate your popularity,” she said.

“You can’t shoot a cop,” B.O. said.

“Even one who had sex with a sixteen-year-old?” Bridget said. She said it to us. “A sixteen-year-old who happens to be my sister.”

Bridget Fahey only had one sixteen-year-old sister: Margaret Mary. The same Margaret Mary who wore the pin of the Blessed Virgin on her school uniform. The same Margaret Mary who B.O. claimed as the love of his life. I felt my mouth go dry.

“Shoot him,” Lefty said. “She has to shoot him, B.O.”

“No,” B.O. moaned, and then he babbled something and stumbled backward, banging off Van Cortlandt tombstones. He started to run, with his hands over his face. His knee cracked into a rock and he went down. Lefty and I went after him. I picked up his glasses and yelled for him to wait, but he was gone, moving fast. Lefty and I were faster, but we couldn’t catch him. The second shot brought us off the ground again, and probably on record pace. Then we saw B.O. make a right on the cowpath and we sprinted hard. Lefty finally brought him down with an open-field tackle.

B.O. was gasping, and crying, and trying to say something about hating us. I handed him his glasses and he smacked them away. But he should have put them on to see the naked redhead galloping toward us across the open field. Bridget came right at us, her hair flying in the wind. She brought Connie to a halt, then she tossed her purse to the ground. The bag was no longer floppy, but full and round. It hit with a thud.

“She cut his head off,” B.O. said.

“Oh, stop it, all of you,” she said, as she dismounted. She hadn’t had time to dress.

Lefty pulled B.O. to his feet. We were only about fifty yards from the traffic moving on Broadway. Bridget stood in front of us, and we all stared at the ground. I focused on her painted toenails. Either dark green or black.

“I didn’t shoot him,” she said. “God knows I wanted to. But it would only make things worse.”

“If Ernie ain’t dead,” Lefty said, “he’s going to make us pay for this.”

“He’ll do nothing of the kind,” she said. “He doesn’t want anyone to know a thing about this. He’ll make up some story. Like he went in the lake to save someone, and someone stole his horse.”

“We’ll tell them the truth,” B.O. said.

“He’ll say we’re the ones who stole his horse,” Lefty said, “and we’re lying to protect ourselves.”

“My dad will believe me.”

“Your dad will never know, Brendan,” she said. “This has to remain our secret.”

“How do you know my name?” B.O. said.

“I know all of you. I know Mr. Trainor, and you, quiet man,” she said, nodding to me. “But I know you best, Brendan. For all you might think ill of me now, I’m close to my sisters. And I will do all that is necessary to protect them. Understand me?”

“He should be arrested,” B.O. said. “It’s rape. It’s statutory rape. Ask my father.”

Bridget sighed heavily. I heard the old Yonkers bus, the Bernacchia line, chugging home. I wondered if they could see us out in the open field. Or would they even believe their eyes.

“Look at me,” she said. “All of you. Look at my face.”

That wasn’t going to be easy. I knew that if I looked up my eyes would be uncontrollable, caroming around in their sockets like loose pinballs. It hurt, but I looked up, and I’d never seen so many freckles in my life. Freckles everywhere. Everywhere.

“I want you to listen carefully to me,” she said. “Especially you, Brendan.”

“He should pay for what he did,” B.O. said.

“We cannot have him arrested,” she said. “And after I leave here, none of us will ever speak of this again.” She took B.O.s hand. “I truly hate to tell you this, but Margaret Mary didn’t want to leave you this summer. She had to go away.”

In that moment I think we all realized we had just acquired the first deep secret of adulthood. We understood it was a test of what kind of men we would become.

“You know how this neighborhood is,” she said. “They’ll destroy Margaret Mary. That’s why she needs your loyalty and your unconditional love. And in a few weeks, when she returns, I want you to act like nothing happened.”

“You got it,” Lefty said. “What do we do now?”

She kept her eyes on B.O., as she handed Lefty Ernie K.’s gun belt. His revolver was back in the holster.

“Wipe this clean and reload the two bullets,” she said. “Get rid of the empty cartridges. Then deliver this horse to Hagan’s bar. Say you found him wandering in the park. I want this man humiliated.”

“We’ll do it for Margaret Mary,” B.O. said. He wiped his eyes with his shirt and put his glasses on. Then he took the gun from Lefty and reloaded. “I’ll toss the cartridges down the sewer,” he said. “Then I’ll tell my dad I found the horse in the park.”

Bridget smiled and put her finger to her lips in a gesture of silence.

“You okay, B.O.?” Lefty said.

“Fine,” he said.

“Take one last look,” Bridget said, and whirled around, a blur of red hair and freckles upon alabaster.

We helped B.O. fold Ernie K.’s uniform and tie it to Connie’s saddle. She’d even kept his underwear. Bridget dug in her purse for her clothes.

“We’ll take care of the humiliation part, Bridget,” Lefty said, but she’d already dressed and was running toward the subway.

The nuns were right: Pursuit of a worthy goal takes you mind off your problems. I felt oddly relieved, as Lefty and I walked to the phone booth near the White Castle. I grabbed the phone book and began looking up numbers. Lefty, using an accent that sounded like no ethic group I’d ever heard, called the police to report a crazy naked man threatening people near the lake in Van Cortlandt Park. We called the Fire Department, the Parks Department, the Yonkers PD, the FBI, and every newspaper we could think of. We had to go get more dimes.

In less than five minutes, a dozen emergency vehicles were searching the park. Their sirens were almost drowned out by the blare of car horns. traffic backed up at least three blocks on Broadway. They were all in a line behind Brendan O’Leary, who led Connie right square down the middle of Broadway. He actually looked even better than his happy old self. A man on a mission.

The prince of Arthur Avenue by Patrick W. Picciarelli

Arthur Avenue

Frank Bernardo stood ramrod straight in front of the fulllength mirror in his bedroom for his daily self-inspection. It was a ritual before he left his apartment that he had not missed for as long as he could remember. The black silk suit draped perfectly on his six-foot frame; his alligator loafers shined to a deep gloss, his white-on-white shirt starched stiff as a pizza crust. He smoothed a red-and-black patterned sevenfold silk tie and pinched a perfect dimple under its Windsor knot. A silk pocket square picked up the red in his tie, and his diamond pinky ring shone like a thousand suns.

He ran his hands lightly over his full head of silver hair, careful not to muss what took him nearly ten minutes to style into place. He was fifty-eight, and any man thirty years younger would have killed to have his thick mane. His eyes still sparkled despite what they had seen during his lifetime of service to the Genovese crime family. His had been a life of discipline, honor, and loyalty; a devotion made all the more important since his wife had passed away from the ravages of cigarette smoking. They hadn’t had any children, not for lack of trying, and medical tests pinned the cause on a childhood infection of Marie’s. It mattered little, La Cosa Nostra was his family. It was all he had these days, and he liked that just fine.

Frank Bernardo was a traditionalist. Despite his wealth, he had remained in the Pelham Parkway apartment over whose threshold he had carried his wife upon returning from their honeymoon thirty-five years ago. He still shopped in the same grocery store, still traded stories about the old neighborhood with the same barber who had been cutting his hair since before it went gray. Lose tradition and you lose your humility, your sense of place. Tradition creates order, and order was what la famiglia was all about; order was what put the word “organized” in organized crime.

These days tradition was going to hell. The younger generation of hoodlums were little more than wind-up dolls. No moxy, no balls. Half the new breed would flip on the family if they got a traffic ticket. The last ten years had seen scores of made men running to the feds for deals rather than serve one day in jail. Pussies.

He’d never aspired to be anything higher than a captain, knowing how difficult it would be to control over a thousand soldiers as a boss. He was smart enough years ago to realize that this thing of theirs was soon going to get out of control with the passage of draconian federal laws designed to dump their ranks in jail with hundred-year sentences.

Frank Bernardo ruled with an iron hand. No one in his crew ever so much as walked down the same side of the street as a fed, let alone ratted against the family. To even mention a cop show on television brought a barrage of cursing from Frank that would make even the toughest soldier wince. Anyone caught discussing business on a telephone would be severely disciplined.

It was because of the no-phone-for-business rule that Frank found himself preparing for a face-to-face with one of his most trusted lieutenants, Sonny Pescatore. An infraction had been committed and they would meet at Frank’s restaurant on Arthur Avenue to discuss what to do about it, or more simply put, Frank would be issuing an edict and Sonny would be carrying it out.

Frank Bernardo walked to his restaurant, the Roman Cave, every day. It was a hike, a little more than a mile, but he wouldn’t give in to old age and worse, show his crew that he was getting soft. He’d been making the trek since he bought the joint years ago. Another benefit of the stroll was being able to meet and greet “citizens,” as people in his world referred to those who were not “friends” of theirs. Another tradition — and not bad for the ego.

He eschewed a top coat on this brisk spring morning, took the stairs from his sixth-floor apartment to the spotless lobby, and headed west along sun-drenched Pelham Parkway. This was a pleasant residential neighborhood of modest homes and apartment buildings on treelined streets. In recent years most of the Italians were bailing for the suburbs. Those who remained were entrenched, mostly around his age or older, the type of person who was born, married, raised kids, and died in the same house. These were the people who waved, offered condolences for his recently departed wife, and sought counsel. Frank was a man who could bestow favors, solve problems, and put the occasional wayward husband back on the straight and narrow.

Today was no different than any other day. By the time he was approaching Arthur Avenue, he had spoken with over a dozen people, some whom he knew, others who dropped names. One elderly man actually kissed his pinky ring, a symbol of respect befitting a man of Frank’s stature. He kept a notepad with him so he could write reminders of phone numbers, people he promised to call, dates he intended to keep, as he strolled and counseled those who needed his help and advice.

Frank entered Arthur Avenue from 189^th Street. The avenue was jammed as usual. Tourists looking for a great meal in one of the area’s fine restaurants mingled with neighborhood wiseguys, mommies pushing strollers, and the occasional meter maid out to spoil everyone’s day.

Whereas he garnered deference and admiration among the older inhabitants of Pelham Parkway, here he felt the emotion go toward fear. Frank was recognized immediately by a group of young men who sported what he liked to call ninety-mile-an-hour haircuts and Mr. T starter sets of gold chains, barely hidden behind a uniform of billowing silk shirts jammed into tight jeans. They averted their eyes as he passed by them, some muttering, “How ya doing, Mr. B.?”

Without losing a step and not making eye contact, Frank shot back, “Don’t you fucking guys have jobs?” He got no reply, but hadn’t expected any.

Others in the know gave Frank a wide berth, the occasional tourist following suit and wondering just who the hell this guy was. Less than two blocks from the Roman Cave, Frank eyed the competition. Good restaurants the lot of them, but what the tourists didn’t know was that many of the established Italian eateries were now owned by Albanians who were passing themselves off as Italians. A lot of the local wiseguys had relocated a few years back because of an overzealous federal prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani who made it difficult for them to run their illegal gambling establishments. This left room for the Albanians to come in and take up the slack, their illegal profits funding new restaurants. But Frank hadn’t been scared off because he didn’t fear Giuliani or anyone else. People feared him, and from that fear came respect, even from a hotshot federal prosecutor with a bad comb-over. No one fucked with Frank Bernardo.

What the hell, Frank thought, more than enough for everybody, and lamented the passing of the old days. But there were still a few of the multi-generational joints left. Ameci’s, where the actor Joe Pesci once worked as a waiter until being discovered by Robert DeNiro, was still going strong. Fucking Pesci, Frank thought; guy makes it big and never comes back to the old neighborhood except to shoot a movie and leave in a limo. Another pussy.

A little further down the street Frank waved to the owner of the Full Moon, where Paul Newman ate while filming Fort Apache, the Bronx. It used to be called the Half Moon before they expanded. Frank figured maybe in a couple of more years when the Roman Cave was doing even better than it was now he’d buy the place next door (whether the owner was selling or not) and change the name to the Roman Coliseum.

He crossed the street by Mario’s Restaurant, thereby avoiding a bunch of Scarsdale mamalooks who wanted to chow down on some meatballs and spaghetti in the same place where Michael Corleone blew away two guys in a scene from The Godfather, and walked past the storefront where a lot of the action took place in A Bronx Tale. Yeah, Frank mused, the world’s a friggin’ stage.

The Roman Cave was gearing up for the lunch rush when Frank walked in. Two waiters were folding napkins and a porter was waxing the wooden floor with a power buffer. The restaurant was long and narrow, with two rooms, lighting dimmed to an intimate duskiness. The bartender, a neighborhood fixture named Cheech, was preparing his bank behind the mahogany, black leather — railed bar in the first room. He was wearing the prescribed uniform for the service staff: white shirt, solid red tie, both under a black vest that matched his pants. He smiled and waved with a fistful of cash.

“In early today, Mr. Bernardo.”

The restaurant’s staff were all men, mostly older neighborhood guys who had honed their skills in the finer restaurants in Manhattan, and were working toward their golden years in a joint closer to home. Frank nixed waitresses early on because he thought they detracted from the upscale theme of the place.

“Hey, Cheech. Got a meeting with Sonny. He in the back yet?” Frank stole a glance at himself in the gold-flecked mirror behind the bar. Looking sharp.

“Yeah, he got here about twenty minutes ago.”

Frank nodded. Next to a rat in the ranks he hated to be kept waiting the most, and his soldiers knew it. Sonny, a good kid, was always early. He breezed past the handful of tables in the barroom and through an alcove that led to the dining room.

Sonny Pescatore was seated at Frank’s personal table, which was situated in the rear of the dining room and far enough away from the other tables to avoid conversation being overheard. The walls were covered with red and silver wallpaper that Frank had imported from Italy, and each of the twenty-two tables was covered with a crisp linen tablecloth, folded linen napkins, sparkling glasses and utensils, and a footlong candle supported by a gleaming silver candlestick.

Sonny waved and Frank smiled. Sonny Pescatore, at forty years old, was Frank’s personal choice to replace him should the time ever come, though Frank was not entertaining thoughts of retirement, and Sonny knew it.

Sonny stood as Frank approached.

“Frank, how are you? You’re looking very fit.” He pulled a chair out for his captain and waited for Frank to sit down before he followed suit. There was no handshaking, a custom which didn’t fall into Mafia tradition.

Frank patted his stomach. “You watch what you eat, Sonny, get good exercise, and you keep a flat belly. You don’t see too many fat old people, you know?”

Sonny smiled, nodding. For ten minutes they made small talk, Sonny knowing that when Frank was good and ready he’d tell him why he had been summoned.

Finally Frank said, “Something’s gotta be done about Augie.”

Sonny looked confused. “Augie? Which Augie, Frank?”

Frank stared at his lieutenant. The kid was sharply dressed in a dark gray pinstriped suit and a floral tie, and he imagined his shoes were brushed to a high shine. One thing Frank demanded was that his crew dress well anytime business was being conducted; this meant suits, not sport coats, and the first person to grow a mustache would have each hair gouged out with a dull knife. Men in La Cosa Nostra were clean-shaven as a matter of tradition.

But as sharp as Sonny was, sometimes he didn’t think.

“Augie Pisano,” Frank said. “We got only one Augie.”

“Hey, sorry, Frank. Coupla new guys we got working the terminal, thought we had another Augie in there somewhere.”

“Well, we don’t,” Frank said. “Keep up, kid. This is your crew.”

“Okay, okay. So what’s the beef?”

“The beef is, Sonny, that I called Augie last week for a sitdown and he didn’t show. No fucking phone call, no nothing. He had me down here playing with myself for over an hour.” Frank’s hands were white-knuckled on the tablecloth, which wasn’t missed by Sonny. “So this is why he’s gotta go. I called him and he didn’t come. He’s a dead man.”

“Frank,” Sonny said, leaning closer conspiratorially, “no disrespect, but maybe we should give Augie a pass. He’s a good guy, good earner.”

Frank waved a hand. “Fuck him. I hear he’s also talking subversive about me. You hear anything about him talking subversive?”

Sonny shook his head. “No, Frank. It’d be my job to know that. My ear’s to the ground, always is. I don’t hear nothing about Augie talking subversive.”

“Kid, listen to me. Remember Joey DiChicco? Remember I said a few years back that I thought he was talking to the feds? Remember that? Was I right or was I right?”

“Yeah, Frank, you were right.”

“You’re goddamn straight I was right. If you hadn’ta clipped him we’d be having this conversation in friggin’ jail.”

Sonny held up his hands. “Hey, when you’re right you’re right, boss.”

A waiter passed through the dining room and breezed into the kitchen. They waited less than a minute until he came back out carrying a case of Scotch, disappearing toward the bar before they resumed their conversation.

“Okay, so maybe he ain’t talking to the feds, but he’s sayin’ things behind my back, about the way I’m runnin’ this crew. That’s talkin’ subversive. I want you to take care of the problem. Do the Bronx Park thing like we did with that asshole Petey. Bury the prick next to Petey; they can bullshit together about how fuckin’ stupid they are.” Frank chuckled. “That fuckin’ Petey. He knew he was gonna die and all he wanted was that we didn’t plant him without his shoes. What an asshole.” Frank sat silent for a moment. “I granted him his last wish. If they ever find him, he’ll be wearing a pair of alligators.”

Sonny swallowed. “You’re all heart, boss.”

Frank leaned across the table, his eyes cold and piercing. “Listen, kid, watch your mouth. I brought you into this crew and I can have you taken out. You know what I mean?” Disrespect. He hated it.

Sonny let out the breath he’d been holding for what seemed like an hour. “Sorry, Frank. It won’t happen again.”

Frank examined a well-manicured hand. “Ah, it’s okay. Let’s eat.”

They ate a leisurely lunch of sautéed eggplant, washed down by a twenty-year-old bottle of Chianti Classico. Frank reminisced about his crew’s greatest hits (“and I ain’t talkin’ about the friggin’ Top Forty here”), while Sonny nodded in deference to his boss. Shortly after they had finished several cups of espresso and an equal number of cannoli, the Roman Cave opened for business and the lunch crowd surged in. As a handful of tourists mingled with neighborhood people and waited to be seated, Frank dismissed his lieutenant.

“Too many ears here now,” he said as he gripped Sonny’s shoulder. “Do what you gotta do and call me when it’s done. You should be callin’ me sooner than later, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Sonny stood up. “Understood.” He nodded and turned, leaving Frank to savor the dregs of his espresso.

Sonny Pescatore stood on the sidewalk, a hand reaching into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, dragged deeply, and surveyed the street. Halfway down the block, parked in a bus stop, a shiny black Chrysler 300 with tinted windows flashed its headlights. Sonny smiled, took another pull on his cigarette before flipping it into the gutter, and walked toward the car.

The front passenger door cracked an inch and Sonny grabbed the handle and slid onto the front leather seat. The driver looked at Sonny through tinted glasses.

“How’d it go?”

Sonny shrugged. “Like we expected. Fucking shame.”

The man nodded. “Who does he want whacked this time?”

Sonny smirked. “You’re not gonna believe this. Augie Pisano.”

The man’s eyes widened noticeably under the shades. “You gotta be shittin’ me. Doesn’t he know Augie’s been dead since what… 1988?”

“Eighty-seven,” Sonny corrected. “And Frank oughta know, he clipped him.”

“Jesus,” the man said, “is he that far gone?”

“I’ll tell you how far gone he is. We sat in that friggin’ shithole for an hour and he was convinced he was at his old table in the Cave.”

The man turned away from Sonny and stared across the street at the McDonald’s from which Sonny had emerged. He shook his head. “I heard about people who have this shit, but never knew nobody who actually had it.”

Two women in their twenties sashayed by, short skirts clinging tightly to their rock-hard asses. Sonny followed them with his eyes until they turned the corner.

“Your Aunt Connie gets it,” Sonny said, “my Uncle Bennie, no problem; they can’t hurt us. But Frankie was shootin’ off his mouth about guys we had whacked for the last twenty years. He can hurt us.”

“That shit he remembers; that he wears the same friggin’ dirty sweatsuit every day, that he forgets.”

“Go figure,” Sonny said. Frank Bernardo had been a powerful captain, an old-school Mafia boss who believed in omerta, the rule of silence, like kids believed in Santa Claus. But after his wife died fifteen years ago and the Roman Cave was burned to the ground by a bunch of Albanians out to thin the competition, Frank began to lose his grip. Maybe old age had something to do with his decline, Sonny thought. He was, after all, pushing eighty, but the reasons for Frank’s condition weren’t the family’s concern. The damage Frank could inflict on the family was.

Frank had become an embarrassment. Demoted to soldier and given virtually no responsibilities, he’d been carried by the family for the last several years despite the fact that he was becoming a Class A pain in the ass. Unshaven and slovenly, he always wore that same moldy sweat suit of indeterminate color, bathed only occasionally, and harassed everyone on the street with whom he came in contact. It’d gotten so bad lately that when people from the neighborhood saw him coming, they’d duck into the first available storefront.

And forget about the young punks. Sonny had bitchslapped two of them for spitting on Frank just a few weeks ago. But loyalty only went so far; honor and fearlessness were for the young and able. And then there was that bullshit about loose lips sinking ships. Too many ships with valuable cargo floating around Arthur Avenue to be scuttled.

“When?” the man asked.

Sonny pulled an untraceable prepaid cell phone from his coat pocket.

With a tangible sadness in his voice he said, almost inaudibly, “No time like the present,” and punched buttons on the throw-away phone. He waited a few seconds and said, “Okay,” when a male voice answered. He gestured to the driver. “Head slowly down the street when I give you the word.”

They waited in silence for a few minutes until two young men dressed in black leather jackets walked briskly up the street toward the fast-food joint.

Sonny poked the driver in the side. “Now.”

With the car in gear and slowly rolling up the block, Sonny gazed with a look of melancholy through the plateglass window at the old man hunched over a cup of tepid coffee, muttering to himself and running his fingers over a bald pate. There were a few patrons in the place, but they all gave Frank Bernardo a wide berth, not out of the respect he once enjoyed, but because he was a slovenly old man who didn’t smell right.

The two young punks breezed through the door, now with ski masks securely in place. The Chrysler was almost adjacent to the storefront, and Sonny stared transfixed as the two men extended their arms, black automatic pistols at the ready in gloved hands.

Sonny had to crane his neck as the car cruised past the restaurant. He saw Frank stand, throw back his shoulders, and shake a fist at approaching death.

Sonny grabbed the driver’s shoulder. “Stop the car.”

“Here?” The driver was incredulous.

Anger flared in Sonny’s eyes. “Stop the fucking car!”

The Chrysler came to rest in the middle of Arthur Avenue, engine idling while Sonny watched an old soldier muster up a final bit of pride and face what he knew was his assassination. In those few seconds clarity returned; Frank was once again strong and would face death like a man.

Words that Sonny couldn’t hear were exchanged as the gunmen fired a barrage of rounds into Frank Bernardo. Patrons tossed Big Macs and shakes and planted themselves firmly on the greasy floor facedown. Sonny saw Frank mouth a torrent of words, though they were muffled by the thick glass and ringing shots. But Sonny knew what those word were.

Assassinato, assassinato.

As the bullets found their target, the old man got stronger. He pushed the table aside and lunged for the shooters, who retreated as they continued to fire.

“Jesus Christ,” Sonny said softly, “he’s gotta have ten slugs in him.”

Finally, Frank fell to his knees. One shooter stepped deftly around the old man, put the muzzle of the gun to the victim’s bald head, and fired one final round. Frank Bernardo toppled over like he was pulled down by a ship’s anchor. The two men spit on their motionless victim, dropped their guns, and ran to the door, flinging it open and slowing to a walk as they calmly made their way up the street to where Sonny’s car still idled. As they walked they high-fived each other like two adolescents congratulating themselves after winning a soccer game.

The driver threw the car in gear.

“Wait,” Sonny said, and clamped a hand on the driver’s arm. In the distance the muted sound of sirens pulsated.

The driver was visibly agitated. “Jesus Christ, Sonny! We gotta get outta here.”

“In a minute,” Sonny said, and stepped out of the car. He walked across the street and waited.

The two gunmen were laughing now and rapidly approaching Sonny. They smiled, seeing their boss and knowing that if this didn’t get them their buttons, nothing would.

Sonny let them get to within twenty feet before he pulled a nine-millimeter pistol and cut the two shooters down with one shot each to their torsos. Surprise and pain swept across the faces of the killers as they dropped to the ground and began crawling away. One made it under a parked car, but left no room for his partner.

Sonny, in a controlled anger, straddled the exposed shooter and put two rounds in his back. Blood pooled on the sidewalk as Sonny carefully stepped over the dead man, leaned under the car, and emptied his magazine into the remaining whimpering wounded hit man.

A crowd had gathered, and when Sonny stood up they turned their backs in unison and began scattering. Sonny jammed the gun in his waistband, walked quickly to the car, and got in. The sirens were louder now, easily within two blocks of the scene.

“What the fuck?” the driver said, as he forced himself not to leave twenty feet of rubber getting off the block.

“The old man deserved better than that. He was a caporegime, for Christ sake! Spit on a made man? Laugh? I don’t fucking think so.” Disrespect, Sonny hated it; he had learned all about respect from the late Frank Bernardo.

Sonny lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as the car drove onto the Major Deegan Expressway. If the cops could find anyone to admit being at the scene of the killings, they wouldn’t be able to remember a face, let alone an age or the race of the shooter.

This was, after all, Arthur Avenue.

You want i should whack Monkey Boy? by Thomas Adcock

Courthouse

The young guy sitting next to me at the bar looks like an escapee from one of those rectangular states where blond people live who wind up in Los Angeles where my own kid went to escape from me.

He’s wearing a cashmere turtleneck and matching tobacco-colored corduroys and a green suede jacket that would be a couple of months’ pay if my secretary had to buy it. He’s blond, of course, with California teeth and a hundred-dollar haircut.

Two minutes ago he walked in and looks around the place like he knows everybody. Which he doesn’t. Then he walked over my way and took a load off.

How this guy found his way to a dive like the Palomino Club, let alone the Bronx, I am about to find out.

So who am I, sitting next to this Jack Armstrong type and doing my bit to be one-half of an odd couple? And what’s this bar about?

The Palomino Club is neutral territory for a bunch of us who depend on one another to keep the criminal justice system of the Bronx a going concern. Meaning the cops and the crooks and guys like me, since all roads lead to lawyers.

Over the bar right where I’m sitting, there’s a creased photograph of a curly-haired squirt with his ears folded under a cowboy hat and he’s sitting up on a big cream-colored horse with a flowing white mane. At the bottom of the picture it says, Camp Hiawatha 1953.

That’s me in the saddle, by the way. I always sit near the picture of my youth.

I am now a grown-up man of five-foot-six, if you can call that grown. I am sort of round and practically bald-headed. I have lived on the Concourse since my days in short pants. The fact I now get my suits made by a tailor with liver spots over on Grant Avenue who claims he sewed for Tony Curtis after he stopped being Bernie Schwartz from Hunts Point doesn’t fool anybody. So says my kid.

My kid says I’m so Bronx haimish there’s no way my name could be anything besides Stanley, which it is.

So imagine how curious I am about this tall, sun-kissed, golden-haired guy — goy — who took stool next to me when he could have sat down in a lot of other spots.

The guy orders a cosmopolitan. Nate the bartender cuts me a look that says, Nu?

Naturally, I am wondering myself. So I start chatting up Jack Armstrong.

“Look at these,” I tell him, holding up both hands so he can see my pink palms. “Soft, hey? Nice?”

“For crying out loud, Stanley—”

This is from Nate, who is rolling his eyeballs like Jerry Colonna used to do on The Ed Sullivan Show. I am not currently speaking to Nate on account of he encouraged my kid to break up the firm of Katz & Katz.

Yeah, I get your point, he says to my kid. You got to be your own person, he says to her. You have to find your own space. Feh! Since when is Nathan Blum talking hippie?

“—Not with the schtick already, Stanley.”

I think about telling Nate, Life is schtick, numb nuts. But instead I keep him on my list of people to ice, which I hope irritates him like a nail in the neck. He picks up another Hamilton from the little pile of cash on the wet mahogany in front of me and pads off, knowing to bring back another Grey Goose marty, the hump.

I get back to business.

“No kidding, Jack,” I tell the golden boy. “Look at these hands.”

“It’s Blake, actually.” He smiles, which blinds me. “Blake Lewis. I’m in from the coast.”

Who says this?

Well, what did I tell my kid about Hollywood guys with the teeth she thinks are so freaking fabulous? Phony-baloneys, all of them. No parents in the history of the world ever gave the name of Blake to their innocent little boy, not even to Jack Armstrong here.

“So, Blake, feel the hands.”

He touches one palm, then the other one.

“Soft,” he says. “Nice.”

“Smooth like a baby’s pilkes.”

“You must be terribly proud of those hands,” says Blake Lewis with the suede and cashmere. He sounds terribly like somebody who doesn’t want you to know he grew up in a splitlevel eating casserole and Jell-O. “You didn’t have to work hard — like your father did.”

This golden boy, he knows?

“My old man painted houses,” I tell him, playing it casual, like maybe Lewis here hit on a lucky guess. “He had hands rough as shingles. Me, I don’t paint.”

“I heard that. I heard you’re an attorney.”

“Not an attorney. I’m a lawyer.”

Lewis smiles and swivels on his barstool to scope out the place again. The usual suspects I mentioned are here.

Three fat capos by the names of Peter “the Pipe” Guastafaro and Charlie the Pencil Man and Nutsy Nunzio are eating bloody steaks in a corner booth. The steaks are so big they’re going to have meat breath for the next couple of days.

Down the middle of back dining room is a long table full of potato-faced Irish detectives in shiny suits. They’re drinking champagne to celebrate a take-down that’s going to earn everybody commendations, and making eyes at the bling-bling brown-skinned girls the latest gold-toothed hip-hop prince on his way to bankruptcy court brought along with him.

The local Chamber of Commerce boys are here, with long-legged women they’re not married to. One of them decides to showboat. He hands over an intriguing wad of cash to a crewcut desk sergeant from the 44^th Precinct and says, “Take care of the other guys too.” He has not yet learned that sending money by cop is like sending lettuce by rabbit.

Hanging around the bar to either side of me are solid-built guys keeping a quiet eye on one another, along with some tabloid guys, including Slattery from the Post.

Slattery came with the detectives from his tribe, but now feels the need to drink something that’s not bubbly. He’s got buck teeth and a mustache from the ’70s he ought to get rid of.

The solid-built guys are nursing seltzer. Their fingers on the glasses are as thick as rolled quarters. They’ve got enough firepower concealed under polyester suit jackets to hold off an invasion.

Down at the end of the bar, the D.A. himself is getting a bang out of showing a gaggle of Wall Street attorneys the other side of the tracks. And working the room, of course, are my comrades of the Bronx criminal defense bar. They’re handing out business cards.

Lewis turns back to me and says, “I hear you’re a lawyer who knows how to motivate certain types of people.”

He says this with no sense of irony or amusement. I notice I’m still sitting here with my pink palms up in the air, like I’m about to get mugged by a guy who’s prettier than anything I ever saw walk out of a Jerome Avenue beauty salon.

This good-looking mugger, he glances up at the memento from Camp Hiawatha a long time ago and says, “You’re Stanley Katz, aren’t you?”

Then he sticks out a hand that’s smoother than mine and I shake it because what else am I supposed to do.

It takes me a long minute, but I am now recovered. Because now I figure what’s with the golden boy.

“You know my kid out in Los Angeles.” I don’t say this like it’s a question.

“I do indeed. Wendy said I’d find you here. She says your office is nearby.” Lewis nods his expensive haircut in the right direction while he’s saying this. Then he says, “According to Wendy, they call you Consigliere.”

“Nobody named Stanley was ever a consigliere. Except for me,” I tell him. “But that’s mostly for laughs.”

“But not strictly.”

He’s got me there.

“Counselor, I could use your help,” says Lewis.

“For what?”

He tells me.

“You want I should whack Monkey Boy?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Later, when I’m home after listening to this disturbing proposition, which I admit has got a certain appeal, I get Wendy on the horn. It’s around midnight in the Bronx, which I know is only 9 o’clock in California.

“Your boy Lewis, he clocked me at the Palomino.”

I inform her of this right in the middle of when she’s answering “Hello” into the phone.

Even though Wendy is my flesh and blood, I can’t help being impatient with her since she’s out there with the phonybaloneys now. Which I know all about from reading the unpleasant memoir of a New York writer who went to Hollywood once. The title of this memoir, it’s Hello, He Lied.

Six months ago — before she started up with her my-own-person business — I gave Wendy the loan of this book, figuring it would disgust her enough to keep her home where she belongs, namely in the Bronx with me. I figured wrong.

We had the knock-down-drag-out.

“How can you bust up Katz & Katz?” I asked her, again in my impatient way. “We got a nice long-standing clientele of decent New York criminals.”

“It’s not like it’s fatal,” she said. “Partners split up all the time.” She was cool, like she had the questions and answers doped out ahead of time. Like I taught her.

“Right here in New York, kiddo, you got a big future.”

“As what? Daughter of the great Stanley Katz who doesn’t paint houses? The consigliere? I’m already Stanley Katz’s kid. It’s not a skill. I have to be my own person, find my own space.”

Oy vey.

“In Los Angeles? What’s out there for a lawyer?”

“Entertainment law. Like I told you a hundred times.”

“A hundred times I still don’t get it. What do they know from murder in Hollywood?”

This could have been the stupidest thing I ever said. So I tried to brighten up the moment with a blast from the past.

“Say, kiddo, what’s the best thing about a murder trial?”

Wendy didn’t give me the setup like years ago when she was a little girl all excited about the game of Papa’s punch line.

So I answered me: “One less witness.”

“That is so ancient, Daddy.”

“You’re breaking my heart. Don’t leave me. I’m lonely.”

“It’s a lonely world, Daddy.”

“Which makes it a shame to be lonely all alone. You look like your mother. I miss your mother.”

“Me too, Daddy. But she’s gone. You know.”

Then Wendy and the blue suitcases her mother and I bought her for college walked out of my life.

“California is not out of your life,” she tells me whenever I call these days and start up with the you-walked-out-of-my-life business. Wendy informs me, “They’ve got airplanes now.”

Okay, I should fly out and visit.

But right now, I need to talk.

“You hear me? Your boy found his way to the Palomino Club.”

“Oh — hi, Daddy.”

“This guy, Lewis, he’s for real?”

What am I saying?

“You can bank on Blake Lewis,” says Wendy. “He’s a legitimate television producer. He’s big-time.”

“For me, all he’ll produce is a visit from the feds.”

“Like they’ve never been to your office.” Wendy says this with a sigh, like when she was a teenager complaining how I embarrassed her in front of her friends. Then she laughs and says, “Don’t you want to be on TV, Daddy?”

Is my own kid in on this proposition I got last night?

“Why me?”

“Blake’s looking for consultants. It’s what he does for his kind of shows.”

“What’s he calling this one?”

“Unofficially, it’s called The Assassination Show. Keep it hush-hush, okay? Blake only told me because he had to ask about — well, technical advisors, let’s say.”

I’m thinking over a number of things I don’t want to say to Wendy until I think them over. This seems to make her nervous.

“Well, so, naturally, I sent Blake to you.” Naturally.

“Ideas get stolen in the television business, Daddy. So hush-hush.”

“Television’s for cabbage-heads.”

“Speaking of cabbage, did you talk money?”

“Money I don’t care about.”

“I do. I’m only just getting off the ground here. I did a couple of five-percent series contracts, but you know how that goes.”

“Yeah, you sent me copies of your work, kiddo.”

“It’s mostly boilerplate according to the unions and the producers’ association. About a hundred ifs in there between a lousy ten grand, which doesn’t even pay the rent, and the sky.”

“But when you get up there, it’s dizzy time. When are you coming home?”

“I kind of want to, Daddy, but what I need right now is a real show-runner client like Blake Lewis. A big fish who can pay me a big commission. I need you to help me reel him in.”

“You should have called me, Wendy.”

“Where would that have got me? You would have blown me off, right?”

“Not necessarily.”

As soon as I say this, I know she’s got her foot in the door. And I know she knows that I know.

“Listen, Daddy, this is a good piece of business. It gets me in solid with the biggest thing going out here.”

“What’s that?”

“Reality TV.”

“There’s an oxymoron for you.”

I have got many things on my mind this morning in the November drizzle that’s making my shoes squeak. Not only that, I accidentally step on a liverwurst sandwich somebody dropped on the sidewalk. So this is not a good omen.

I am on the way from my place on the Concourse over to the office on 161st Street around the corner from the marble glory of the Bronx State Supreme Court. This is where it’s my calling to help little people through the meat grinder of their lives and take from the big people what the market will bear.

When it looks to me like they can hack the payments, the working stiffs pay me with their little credit cards. Or else I take IOUs, which I almost never collect on. The big people — your old-fashioned wiseguys, your rap music moguls, your disgraced politicians — they pay cash, and lots of it.

In case you hadn’t noticed about the times we are living through, weirdness and rudeness is rampant. And it’s not just up there at the top, either, it’s now trickled down to the bottom of the food chain. Never mind, for me business is brisk.

So here I am running a healthy enterprise for which I could use the help of somebody I can trust, namely my kid. I wrongly thought she was happy being molded into the person who would take over everything her mother and I built up in the Bronx. Which is not a bad little empire.

For instance, I own the building on the Concourse where I have lived since pulling up to the curb in a yellow Cirker’s moving van back when Ike was the president. I’ll never forget that Saturday afternoon.

My old man was delirious with joy about leaving the Lower East Side behind us for a new life in the North End, which is what you called the South Bronx back then.

“Can you believe it, Stanny-boy, I got us a big apartment with sun in the windows where rich people used to live,” he said to me that Saturday. He’d gone to the library to read about the new neighborhood. “Right on the Grand Concourse, copied off the Champs-Élysées in France and built in 1909 in the Bronx — by an immigrant. Imagine that. An immigrant just like me. You know, I was in Paris after the war, Stanny, and I painted. And I don’t mean houses.”

Right across the hallway from our sunny apartment I met a chubby girl my age with blue eyes and red cheeks and frizzy black hair.

Her name was Miriam Smart, which was perfect for her. Some people get named like that. Like Billy Strayhorn just had to be a jazz musician, and Johnny Stompanato had to be a wiseguy.

Anyhow, I called her Mimi. We were married on her nineteenth birthday.

Mimi and I were the first ones in our families to go through all twelve grades. After Morris High School, we graduated City College together in the days before tuition. I went on to law school and wound with a job in the domestic violence bureau at the Bronx D.A.’s office, where mostly I sent up slobs who fell in love with a dimple but couldn’t handle the fact that a whole girl came with it.

Mimi, she was the brains of the Katz family operation. She went to work in the real estate business on account of being sadly inspired by her grandfather, who had a little farm stolen out from under him back in Romania.

“You should never leave your place,” Mimi would say, repeating her grandfather’s stern counsel, “no matter how they try to run you out, which they will try to do over and over in different ways.”

Sometime in ’78 or ’79, when a Hollywood movie actor was running for president — such a gag, everybody thought — he brought a gang of reporters along with him to the South Bronx on a campaign tour. Which didn’t make sense to people in the neighborhood because we don’t vote for actors.

Up until then, I appreciated Hollywood for the movie memories I own, like the first time I held Mimi’s hand in the mezzanine of Loew’s Paradise up at 188th Street. But this mutt running for president, he said right in front of the cameras on the evening news that my own neighborhood was the worst place you could ever be in the United States of America.

Okay, we had problems. In those years, who didn’t? But scaring people so they’ll vote for you?

I was angry at this actor. Being the brains of the operation, Mimi figured something besides an insult was going on. “Aha! Now they send in the scary clowns to run us out,” she said. So we did not leave our place.

But just about everybody we knew did.

As the neighbors on our floor left, Mimi took over their leases one by one — at quite favorable terms, thanks to a landlord dumb enough to be scared by an actor who played second banana in a picture about a chimpanzee.

On our dime, Mimi kept our floor beautifully maintained and sublet to nice people who were just like the old neighbors except their skin was darker. She never worried how the dumb landlord let the other floors go to hell and generally ignored everything for years, including his unpaid property tax bill. By which time we could afford to buy him out at a distress sale.

Then Mimi put up the apartment house as collateral on a loan to acquire a few likewise distressed commercial spaces surrounding the courthouse, which we rented out to lawyers and bail bondsmen in order to pay our mortgage notes.

Plus, we had plenty left over for Wendy’s education, a proper storefront for Mimi’s real estate business, and a nice house on a few acres in the Catskills for summer weekends. Mimi loved the country place because of her grandfather’s stories about his farm in the old country. I thought about maybe buying a cream-colored horse but I never got around to it.

Also, we had money from not being scared so that I could switch teams and hang out a shingle as defense counsel. This was in one of Mimi’s buildings near the courthouse, so I have never had to pay rent. God bless America, as she used to say.

When you have somebody like Mimi Smart behind you, you don’t need to be too smart yourself. Or as she used to say, If law school is so hard, how come there are so many lawyers?

Mimi taught me to pick my clients right so I wouldn’t have to worry about revenues and so I could have a little fun besides — such as when I represented a guy with carnal knowledge of chickens, which is another story. Mimi taught me something every day, until she got sick.

One Sunday morning after a long bad night, I was holding hands with Mimi again. This was in our bedroom in the country. She’d been resting up there for months, lying mostly on her side in order to see her flower garden through the window, and the pond. She was so thin. She said to me, for the last time she said anything, “We did all right, Stanley, you and me.”

Now every morning, no matter what I have going, I think about Mimi while I’m walking to the office. In my line of work, it’s good to have a pleasant thought to begin the day — as opposed to what I had to think about next.

It should impress the hell out of my Rosary Maldonado, my secretary, that Blake Lewis, big-time television producer, is supposed to drop by. Rosary watches television like most people breathe.

“Don’t say a word,” Lewis said to me last night, before he’d take an answer on his proposition. “Sleep on it. We’ll talk in the morning. I’ll be around.”

I didn’t sleep so good.

Just thinking about this guy in my office, I get itchy like I’m coming down with hives on my back. Never do I have such a feeling before talking to some wiseguy who I know from previous experience is hinky as Halloween, and if I displease him he could jump across my desk and bust my face; or some mook with one eyebrow who goes off his nut and picks up a tire iron when he finds out Sweetie-pie’s been playing hide-the-salami with his best friend.

Which is not to mention the celebrity trade of pea-brained rappers and politicians who think with their little heads.

But now here with Lewis, the territory is unfamiliar to me. The pols and the rappers are forever paying the stupid tax. The mook and the wiseguy do what they do for honor, even if their sense of what’s honorable is a little cracked. But Hollywood’s about money, so you never know what’s coming at you.

Speaking of which, half a block away my secretary is flying out the door of Katz & Katz and running up the street at me like a Puerto Rican banshee, waving her hands and hollering n Spanish. Lucky for her she gets to me, because she breaks a heel and almost goes ass-over-teakettle, but I break the fall.

“What’s—?”

“Mr. Katz,” Rosary interrupts, using the name she reserves for important occasions. Otherwise she calls me Poppy. “J’you know who come to see you?”

I take a wild guess. “Blake Lewis?”

Rosary has newfound admiration for me. She says, “J’you know hing?”

I lay a steadying arm around her shoulder and she hobbles back to the office with me.

It’s not just Lewis who’s there. It’s the steak-eaters and a contingent of polyester suits. Also Slattery.

“Consigliere!” Lewis says as I walk in. Slattery writes this down in his notebook.

I cock my head and say, “Let’s go,” and the steak-eaters and Slattery follow me into my private office. Rosary, who is flush in the face, stays outside with the polyester.

“What the—?”

Nutsy Nunzio cuts me off from dropping the f-bomb. “Jeez, Stanley,” he says. Clear from the other side of my desk I smell the breath. Like a doggy bag you bring home in a taxi. “You think it’s okay we do this TV job?”

Nutsy is wide-eyed like an innocent kid. Though knowing of his problems with anger management, it is hard for me to imagine Nutsy ever being a squirt. The Orphan Annie expression also goes for Pete the Pipe and Charlie the Pencil Man.

Lewis is sitting there like the cat that ate the canary. Today he’s in one of those outfits like the TV hair helmets wear in war zones: blue denim shirt, safari jacket, starched dungarees.

I ask him, “What did you tell my clients?”

He shrugs. “I hung around the Palomino after you left. I met some people. I gave them the elevator pitch.” He turns to Slattery and explains, “That’s when you have to put across your big idea to a studio exec before the elevator gets to where he’s going.”

Nutsy and Charlie nod as the Pipe passes judgment: “Sounds like a plan to me.”

Pete does not get his moniker from smoking a meerschaum. It’s from rumors when he started off his career and was seen around leaky gas valves that caused industrial accidents around the city. Nowadays he considers himself a good citizen for being involved in the political life of his country. Meaning he takes bets on elections, sometimes doing things to improve the odds in his favor.

“The putz we got in the White House,” says the Pipe, “we should do everybody a favor and put Charlie on him.”

Which prompts the Pencil Man, alleged to have erased people, to chime in with, “How about I explode his freakin’ mountain bike?”

Everybody enjoys a nice wet laugh, including Slattery, who is no doubt dreaming up a streamer for the cover of tomorrow’s paper, something cute like, CAN A KILLER TV SHOW CANCEL BUSH?

“You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?” I ask Lewis. “For instance, what’s Slattery doing here?”

“He’s my whole advertising budget — zero down for an exclusive on The Assassination Show,” says Lewis. “One story in one New York paper and — whammo! — everybody and his brother are providing us free publicity.”

Nutsy gets excited.

“The dough he don’t spend for ads, it’s that much more for us,” he says. “Jeez, I’d like to see the frat boy meet up with some permanent violence. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“I’m not going there,” I tell Nutsy, who now has a pair of blue veins throbbing on his temples. “And I’m surprised you’re all speaking to me like you are. In the past, you’ve been circumspect. Which I appreciate.”

“If I catch your drift,” says the Pipe, “you shouldn’t worry, because Blake here says free speech is legal under the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

Charlie says, “We come here this early in the a.m. out of respect for you, Mr. Katz. We don’t want to do nothing without your blessing. Besides which, we’re cutting you in.”

Blake makes like the canary again. With all that’s going for him, he doesn’t need my blessing and he doesn’t need to make an elevator pitch. Hollywood’s going to be showering him with money for the honor of underwriting the minimal costs of The Assassination Show.

I put my head in my hands.

The deal that’s making my scalp hurt is this: Starting with George W. Bush, a couple of hand-held cameras record the pungent conversations of three alleged hoodlums from the Bronx who are plotting to assassinate the president of the U.S. of A., maybe with advice and counsel from their consigliere, which I haven’t decided yet.

Such a gag, everybody out there in TV Land is going to think. Which it is: a great circular joke starting with the misnomer “reality TV” and winding up right back to the truth of the phrase, which is a lie.

But since we don’t pay attention to the criminal whoppers that Monkey Boy and his crew tell us every day, why get our national panties in a twist over television fibs? Maybe you’ve noticed that from coast to coast, every TV news anchorman and giggly lady has the same sign-off nowadays: “We’ll see you here tomorrow night.” Really?

Some newspaper critic is bound to call Blake Lewis a hip, groundbreaking genius. I suppose he is. A smart person knows what smart people want. A genius knows what stupid people want.

Let’s say my clients don’t advance the plot anywhere near Monkey Boy during the ten weeks Lewis has got by way of network commitment to his groundbreaker. Tension will mount just the same. The Secret Service will go ballistic. The Christers will go as bonkers as Nutsy Nunzio. And you can rely on the members of Congress for their usual discernment and maturity in dealing with public controversy that gets them air time.

And at the end of an unsuccessful ten weeks’ hunt for Monkey Boy, Lewis simply recruits another pack of “technical advisors” to see about snuffing some other annoying potentate someplace else in the world. The tension mounts all over again. Pure genius.

As I mentioned, I have seen the series contracts Wendy has drafted. Five-percent commission on the tens of millions that Lewis stands to accrue for the worldwide premiere, followed by hundreds of millions more on the succeeding ten-week collections, followed by millions more for repeat performances and millions more for spin-off rights…

…Well, doing the math, even on Wendy’s small-fry projects, I just about fainted.

No wonder the kid wants in on the racket. I’m thinking Mimi would be proud. But when she’s got all the dough anybody would ever need, will Wendy come home?

It’s now late afternoon and it’s a matter of hours before the bulldog edition of the Post is on the streets and the s-bomb hits the fan.

Lewis and his advisors and polyesters have gone to lunch at the Palomino and come back, to where Rosary is entertaining them with the story of chicken man that I mentioned.

“Sometimes I think there’s a very big neon sign floating over this office,” she says, flirting shamelessly with Lewis. “It reads, Strange people — welcome.”

Anyhow, she relates the referred case of a cash-paying client from Westchester who was nabbed in a naughty motel by the Bronx vice squad. The cops found him bare naked under the covers and happy about it. There were no girls in the cheap room with him, or boys. But there were maybe a dozen chickens from La Marquéta under the Queensboro Bridge.

“The live birds are there to boil and pluck,” says Rosary, blushing in Lewis’s gaze. “It’s against the sanitary laws of the city, but there you are.”

“Is your name actually Rosemary?” Lewis asks her.

“Oh, it used to be. I go to mass every day, so I changed to Rosary. J’you like it?”

“It’s charming.”

Rosary continued with the story of the suburban geek, a CEO called Bill Cunningham. What Cunningham did to violate his secret aviary caused the sheets and walls and carpeting to become sticky with chicken blood, tomato-red turning to rust-brown. Little chicken heads were in a heap by the bathroom doorway, where Cunningham’s pinstripes were carefully hung on the knob.

The birds had put up a spirited fight, especially the roosters. There were feathers everywhere.

The D.A. indicted Cunningham for animal cruelty. The geek was sorely embarrassed in front of his golf club buddies, but they rallied around him in support of a sick man. Cunningham kept his mouth shut like I told him.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said at the concluding day of trial. Then I said what I always say: “I’ll be short. No — I’m already short, I’ll be brief.”

A laughing jury is not a hanging jury.

I had earlier produced the sole defense witness — Juan Baltasar, proprietor of a chicken stand at La Marquéta. Baltasar testifled that Cunningham had been particular about his purchase, insisting that the chicken heads be severed before paying.

“Thus, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Cunningham had his way with dead chickens — not live chickens. Therefore, he violated no law, because a man cannot commit cruelty against a fowl corpse.” I spun around on my heels to address the assistant D.A. at the prosecution table, a sallow-faced guy with the likeability factor of an IRS auditor. “Case closed,” I said.

Then I addressed the good jurors and the judge.

“I would only add my personal promise, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Cunningham — with not so much as a speeding ticket heretofore and who is, as you have heard, innocent before the law — will nevertheless enroll in psycho-sexual counseling at a mental hospital in White Plains. He is a deeply disturbed man, my friends. Yet who among us would care to stand before the scales of justice to hear of our own sins of thought — and actions for which we were never ourselves apprehended. For what it is worth, Mr. Cunningham will dwell among his own disturbed kind as he seeks redemption, beyond the reach of the dear hearts and gentle people of the Bronx. This I promise, on the grave of my own sweet wife.” I turn to the bench. “How’s that, judge?”

He raps down his gavel and Cunningham scrams out of court, never to be seen in the Bronx again, right as the judge says, “Whatever.”

Hearing Rosary tell the story again gives me an idea for the limited counsel I suddenly decide to give Nutsy and the Pipe and Pencil Man. I hand one of their polyesters a couple of hundred bucks and tell him, “Buy some groceries, then hit the mattresses. Capice?” Then I give a nod to Lewis to come with me. And before the polyester leaves my office, I tell him, “Send me another button and I’ll return him with Blake here — blindfolded, so he can’t spill the location where he can film. Same goes for me if I decide to show up. I don’t want to know from the mattresses.”

Lewis and I walk around the corner to the Palomino, which is mentioned as the genesis of Slattery’s story that is now all over town. He’s very proud of himself, this Hollywood producer. My friends buy him drinks.

I tell Lewis I need a minute to make a discreet phone call. So I slip out into the street with my cell. But I don’t call right away.

I wait for the cars I know are going to show up. The dark blue, unmarked Chryslers with the no-nonsense guys inside. They get out of the cars with their hands firmly inside of their coats, where they’re wearing shoulder holsters and federal badges.

I dial my kid’s number out in Los Angeles.

She’s on the line right when Lewis is bum-rushed out of the Palomino Club.

“You should come home, kiddo.”

“We’ve been all over that—”

“Your big client, Blake Lewis, he’s been arrested.”

“Where are they taking him?”

“Search me. Maybe Guantánamo.”

I walk back to my building on the Concourse and I slip into bed and sleep like a dead person.