Fake I.D.

Ten

I guess you could say it was a quiet Sunday night at O’Reilley’s. After the small football crowd left there were only a few customers left in the bar. I hung around most of the night sitting on a stool, drinking beer and watching TV.

Around nine o’clock, Frank showed up. He looked pissed off and went right back to his office without saying anything to anybody. I wanted to find out how things went at the precinct, but I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to bother him now. So I just stayed at the front of the bar, watching TV, figuring Frank would come talk to me when he was ready.

Finally, Frank came out front. He poured himself a pint of Guinness, then sat on a stool in front of me.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“They let Gary go,” he said.

“Really? That’s great, huh?”

“They still think he did it, but of course I didn’t want to press charges and they couldn’t prove anything anyway. He still swears he had nothing to do with it.”

Frank took a long sip of his drink then put the glass back down on the bar.

“So that’s great news,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

“Maybe he didn’t do it,” I said. “Maybe they’ll catch the guy who did now.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I think they already had the guy who did it—Gary. It figures he’d do something like this to get back at me. And, believe me, he was the only person who knew the combination to the safe.” Frank took another sip, then said, “This whole thing’s my fault. I wanted to install security cameras in here for years, but I never got around to it. Now I got burned.”

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“I forget about it, what else? Maybe in a few days Gary’ll confess and give back the money. That kid has always been the biggest pain in my ass—I wish he’d just grow up already. You should’ve seen him at the precinct—making up stories, telling the cops he had nothing to do with this. It was the same way when he was in school—he’d get in trouble and I’d have to leave work and go meet him in the principal’s office. He’d sit there lying, making a goddamn fool out of me.”

“Let me take a wild guess,” I said. “He told the cops I did it.”

Frank nodded.

“I knew it,” I said. “Sorry, Frank. I know he’s your kid and all, but this really pisses me off.”

Frank was looking at me funny.

“I hate to say this to you, Tommy, but I just have to get it over with and that’ll be the end of it. I know you’d never do something like this in a million years. Even with your gambling the way it is I know how much respect you have for me. What I mean is I know you’d never—”

“Hold up,” I said. “You think I—”

“Of course I don’t.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“But I just have to ask you anyway—to get it out of my system. I know you’d never steal from me, that you’re not the type of guy who’d do something like that.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

“Because I have to hear it—from your own mouth.”

“Come on—”

“Just tell me you didn’t take that money and I’ll never say a word about it again.”

I let out a deep breath, then I said, “I didn’t take that money, and if you don’t believe me you’ve got more problems than I thought.”

“Thank you,” Frank said. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

I got home at around two in the morning and went right to sleep. When I woke up I felt like I had closed my eyes two seconds ago, but sun was shining into my apartment. I looked at my clock and saw it was past nine o’clock. I got out of bed and called Alan Schwartz.

His snobby secretary answered. I had to go through a whole routine, explaining who I was five times, just to get her to transfer me. Then Alan came on the line.

“Hey, Alan—Tommy Russo.”

The line was quiet for a few seconds, then he said, “Oh right, Tommy, how are you?” like I was his biggest buddy in the world.

“Not bad,” I said. My voice sounded cranky from sleeping. “I just thought we could set up a time to get together, you know—meet.”

“Did you get those forms my secretary sent you?”

“Nah, they didn’t come yet,” I said. “But I have the money.”

“Terrific,” Alan said. “I have an idea. It so happens I’m meeting Pete, Rob and Steve—I don’t know if Pete told you about Rob and Steve—they’re the other guys in the syndicate. Anyway, the four of us are getting together for lunch this afternoon at a restaurant near my office. I don’t know what your schedule’s like today, but if you want to make it a fivesome—”

“Of course I can make it,” I said.

Alan gave me the name of a Chinese restaurant on John Street.

“That’s right up the block from the OTB, right?”

“Pete was right,” Alan said, “you are a real racing fan.”

He told me they were meeting at one o’clock. I said “no problem” and hung up.

I put on some sweats and took a walk to the diner around the corner. I had the bacon, eggs and hash browns special, then I came home and shit my brains out. I’d had it with cheap diner food. From now on I was going to go out to good restaurants or cook at home.

I took a long shower then I came out and searched through my closet. I wanted to look good today, but I couldn’t find anything to wear. I hadn’t gone clothes shopping in a long time and I realized that I’d have to hit Barney’s or Macy’s one of these days, spend a few bucks on some nice outfits, maybe pick up a few pinstriped suits and some button-down shirts with cufflinks.

But for today what I had in my closet would have to do. I put on a pair of beige slacks, a white shirt, a black sports jacket, and a pair of brown dress shoes. The shoes needed shining, I’d taken the shirt out of my dirty laundry pile, and the slacks and jacket were wrinkled. Unfortunately, I didn’t own an iron so I put the pants and jacket on as they were and I scrubbed down my shoes with an old pair of underwear. I was going to shave, but then I figured I’d look classier with a little five o’clock shadow. I put on a gold chain and unbuttoned the top three buttons of my shirt. When I was all set to go, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror.

I wasn’t in the horse business yet, but I definitely looked the part.

I took the 6 train to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was sunny and not nearly as cold as it had been the past few days. I walked around the traffic circle near City Hall Park, my leather coat open wide, a gym bag with ten thousand dollars over my shoulder. It was only 12:20 and I had forty minutes to kill so I just walked around the Wall Street area, window-shopping. Finally, at around one o’clock, I cut back up to the restaurant on John Street.

Pete was sitting at a table with two other guys. When he saw me coming he stood up and shook my hand.

“Long time no see,” I said. But I really wanted to say, Long time no smell.

He looked just about the same as the last time I saw him. He still had that big mole on his chin, but it looked like he’d plucked the hairs out of it. And he still had that awful B.O.

Pete said Alan was running a little late at his office and he introduced me to Rob and Steve. They were both short and weaselly looking. Rob had gray hair, but his face didn’t look old, and Steve had dark hair, but he looked older than Rob. They were both wearing shirts and ties.

I put my coat over the back of my chair and the gym bag down on the floor. There were two empty seats—I sat in the one farthest away from Pete. We started bullshitting. Rob worked at a bank, doing something with computers, and Steve was an accountant. They asked me what I did and I told them, “I used to be an actor—now I’m a horse owner.”

Everybody laughed, then Pete said, “Tommy works at a bar on the Upper East Side.”

“Cool,” Steve said. “What do you do there?”

Before I could say, I manage the bar, Pete said, “He’s a bouncer.”

I shot Pete a look, upset that he’d brought that up.

“The Upper East Side,” Rob said to me, “my old stomping grounds. What bar do you bounce at?”

I was about to tell him when Pete said, “Here’s the man of the hour.”

Alan Schwartz was coming toward our table. He looked like he sounded on the phone. What I mean is he looked rich. He was wearing a black overcoat over a gray suit. I didn’t know much about clothes unless I was looking at the labels, but his suit looked like it had cost him a nice chunk of change. He had a rich face too. His skin was tan and his brown hair was slicked back. But for some reason I remember his eyebrows most. They were so thin and neat they looked like they were drawn with pencil.

I stood up and shook Alan’s hand.

“A pleasure,” he said. He had a firm handshake and he looked at my eyes until he let go.

The waitress came around and we all ordered. My stomach was still hurting from breakfast so I took it easy, ordering the pepper steak and a side of pork dumplings.

When the waitress left we started talking horses. Rob, it turned out, was a big poker player and he told me a story about a game he was in down in Atlantic City at Caesar’s Palace. Then Steve told me how he was down in Florida last week, visiting his mother at a condo, and he made it over to Gulfstream Park a couple of times and hit a triple for two thousand dollars. I told him about the last time I was in Florida, six years ago, and how I hit Calder, Pompano Park, Tampa Bay Downs and a few dog tracks. Our food came and we kept bullshitting about gambling and horse racing. We started talking about next year’s Triple Crown races and the new crop of three-year-olds.

Sitting there, talking horses, I felt like I belonged. When I was at the bar, checking IDs, or at auditions with all those phony pretentious wannabes, I felt out of place. But sitting here, with a bunch of guys who loved horse racing, I felt like I fit right in. I even thought Alan was cool, definitely not as stuck-up and into himself as I’d thought he was.

“We should probably get down to business,” Alan said, then he waited until everybody at the table stopped talking and was paying attention to him. “As everyone here probably already knows, Tommy here is the fifth and final person on our little ownership team. Just to update you, Tommy, we’re planning to claim our first horse next week. Bill Tucker, the trainer we’re planning to use, has been watching a few horses in the twenty-five to thirty-five range and when he’s ready to put a slip into the claiming box he’ll let us all know. Now what else did I want to discuss? Ah, yes, insurance. I spoke with several—”

“Can I just ask you one question?” I said.

“Of course you can, Tommy. What is it?”

“You were talking about Bill Tucker. When do we meet him?”

“Well, we all met Bill a few weeks ago out at Aqueduct,” Alan said. “But we’ll all meet him again when we go to the track to claim the horse.”

“And about the horse,” I said. “You said Tucker has a few horses he’s watching. Do we get to help decide which one he claims?”

“We’ve discussed that already,” Alan said, “and if you don’t have a strong objection we’d prefer to leave that decision up to Bill Tucker. The way we figured it, we’re not down at the track every day, watching the horses train, so we might as well leave the hands-on decisions to someone who knows more about the business than we ever will. It’s like owning a baseball team. When the owner starts jumping in, making decisions for the manager, the whole team gets screwed up. But when the manager makes the on-the-field decisions the team has a chance of winning.”

I asked Alan which horses Tucker was thinking about claiming and he told me the names. I’d heard of all of them, except the one Tucker liked the most—a filly named Sunshine Brandy. She had a great pedigree, Alan explained—her grandfather was out of Secretariat—and she’d recovered from physical problems that had plagued her early in her career. She had done most of her racing down in Louisiana, which explained why I never heard of her. Tucker thought that if we could claim her for thirty or thirty-five grand it would be a steal.

Alan started to talk about insurance again, then I said, “I have one more question. Let’s say we claim the horse for thirty-five K. We have fifty K in the pool total, right? So what happens to the other fifteen Gs?”

“Good question,” Alan said. “Training costs, insurance, a lot of other expenses that the packet I’m going to give you will get into more. You know owning a race horse isn’t inexpensive. Owning just one horse could cost as much as twenty grand a year with various fees and expenses. Hopefully the horse’ll be making some money so we can get some of that back, but we also have a bimonthly billing plan worked out that we’ll adjust against any profits at the end of the year.”

Everybody was talking at once and I was busy day-dreaming about what it would feel like to be a horse owner, to sit in one of those owner’s boxes, smoking a cigar.

Then I heard Alan say, “Before we go I just have to say something that needs to be said and if no one else is going to say anything then I will.” He was quiet for a couple of seconds, then he looked at Pete and said, “I really don’t want to embarrass you, but I’ve brought this up with you before and you haven’t done anything about it so I have to say something again. Can you do us all a favor and start wearing some deodorant?”

Rob and Steve were trying not to laugh and I thought it was pretty funny too.

“What?” Pete said, sniffing his underarm. “I don’t smell.”

“I don’t want to argue about it,” Alan said. “You might not think you smell, but other people think you smell, and if other people think you smell then you smell.”

Rob and Steve couldn’t hold back anymore and they started laughing hysterically. Alan was smiling too, but I could tell he was really upset.

“Nobody else thinks I smell,” Pete said to Alan. “You’re the only one who thinks I smell.”

“Do we really have to go through this at every meeting?” Alan said.

“I don’t smell,” Pete said. “If I smelled wouldn’t my wife say something to me?”

“Maybe she smells too,” Rob said. Now I couldn’t hold back—I started cracking up, and Alan started laughing too. The only person who wasn’t laughing was Pete.

“Hey, don’t make jokes about my wife,” Pete said.

“Come on,” Rob said. “Where’s your sense of humor?”

“Seriously,” Alan said to Pete. “Why can’t you put on some deodorant?”

“Because I don’t smell,” Pete said, “and I’m sick of you guys saying I do.”

“All right, you want to get an objective opinion,” Alan said. Then he looked at me and said, “Tommy, your honest opinion—do you think Pete smells?”

I played it good—with perfect comic timing. Everybody at the table got quiet. Then I looked at Pete, staring him down, and said, “Like a hot piece of shit.”

Everybody at the table laughed, including Pete. I really liked these guys a lot.

Finally, we all settled down. Pete said he’d start wearing some cologne if it would make everybody happier. The waiter came to take our dessert orders. I was handling my food pretty good so I ordered two scoops of vanilla ice cream.

The waiter came back and put the desserts on the table. We were all laughing it up, having a good time, then I said to Alan, “Before I forget—I want to give you the money. You know, the ten grand.”

“Oh, right,” Alan said. “I guess that’s a good idea.”

I reached under the table, picked up the gym bag, and started to pass it across the table to Alan. Everybody stopped eating and was looking at me.

“‘What’s this?” Alan asked.

“It’s a gym bag,” I said, “but don’t worry—it’s been laying around my closet forever. Toss it out when you get home—I don’t need it.”

“I don’t mean the gym bag,” Alan said. “I mean what’s inside it?”

“The ten grand,” I said, wondering what the big problem was.

“You brought cash?” Alan said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You told me to, didn’t you?”

Alan smiled.

“This is a joke, right?” he said.

“No, what kind of joke would this be? You told me to bring you the money, I brought you the money.”

“I thought you’d bring a check.”

“I don’t write checks,” I said.

“Then a money order, whatever. I can’t accept your money in cash.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

“It’s real money,” I said. I unzipped the bag and took out some wads of bills. “See?”

“What did you do,” Rob said, “rob a bank?”

“What do you mean?” I said, wondering what everybody’s big problem was.

“That’s a lot of cash to be walking around town with,” Pete said.

“I took it out of the bank this morning,” I said. “Alan told me on the phone to bring the money.”

“We just had a little misunderstanding,” Alan said. “It’s no big deal. We know you’re serious now and that you’re good for the money. I don’t think anyone will object if you get me a check later in the week.”

Now I knew what was going on—Alan was just trying to bust my chops, pulling a power trip. Maybe my first impression of him was right after all. If I’d brought my checkbook he probably would’ve said, “Sorry, I only take cash.” Uppity bastard. Well, there was no way I was going to screw around with checks or money orders. I wasn’t stupid. I knew if I went to the bank or post office with hot money, started filling out slips, it couldn’t lead to anything good.

“Money is money,” I said. “Why don’t you just take it the way I brought it, and that’ll be the end of it?”

“Because this is a business transaction,” Alan said. He wasn’t yelling, but his voice was getting louder. “I need a check for accounting purposes. I’m not going to go to the bank and deposit ten thousand dollars in cash.”

“Look,” I said, “let’s not make a big deal about this, all right? Just take the money.”

“I can’t accept cash,” Alan said.

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. Weren’t you listening to me? Are you some kind of idiot?”

I was about to jump over the table and bust Alan’s head open.

“Hey, cool down guys, Jesus,” Pete said. “So there was a little misunderstanding—what’s the big deal? I know what we’ll do—I’ll take the money. I’ll deposit it in my account and write Alan a check directly. Then, Alan, you can write Tommy out a receipt for your records. How’s that sound?”

“I guess that’s all right with me,” Alan said. “If you feel like doing that.”

“How does that sound to you, Tommy?”

“I don’t have a problem with that.”

“Anybody else have an objection?”

Steve and Rob shook their heads.

“Good, then the issue’s resolved,” Alan said. “See, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Christ, maybe the MSG from this food is going to all your heads.”

Steve or Rob, I forget who, laughed. I was still looking at Alan, trying to figure out why he was being such a dick.

While we finished our desserts, Alan just talked like Mr. Know-It-All about “finances” and “insurance.” I knew he was just trying to show everybody up, talking about what he knew. I could’ve done the same thing if I started talking about acting or working in a bar. I wanted to see him read a line from a script or try to explain how to make a Long Island Iced Tea. Finally, Alan said he’d be calling everybody in a couple of days to tell us what was going on with Bill Tucker. There was a chance Bill might want to claim a horse later this week or early next week and Alan said that if that happened we’d all meet down at the racetrack to watch the horse run. The check came and we split it evenly. Usually, I didn’t have a problem splitting checks, but Alan’s part of the bill was five bucks more than everybody else’s and you’d think a big-shot Wall Street guy, probably with more money than he knew what to do with, could pay his own way.

Pete left the restaurant with me.

“Don’t worry about Alan,” he said when we were on the sidewalk. “He’s a really great guy once you get to know him—hell of a stockbroker too. That’s how I met him. He got me into Microsoft at thirty bucks a share.” Pete laughed. “Anyway, you wait—you’ll see what a great guy he is too. When I first met him we didn’t really hit it off. He likes to do things his way and that’s it. So—besides Alan—what do you think of the syndicate?”

“It all looks cool to me,” I said. “I guess I owe you one.”

“Ah, forget about it,” Pete said. A strong wind blew down John Street. It seemed colder than before.

“Well, I better take off to the bank,” Pete said. “This bag of money’s getting heavy.”

“Take it easy,” I said.

Pete walked toward his car and I went the other way, toward the Broadway-Fulton Street subway station. For a while, I was still pissed off at Alan, but then I started to forget about him. I was officially part of a horse syndicate now, and I really didn’t care about anything else.