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“Let me read these over tonight,” Betty said, accepting the envelope. “We’ll do interviews over the next few days.”

Leonora Higgins followed with a quick rundown of the two agencies involved in regulating New York real estate. “I should be able to get you a profile of the landlord within a few days. It’s all on computer now. And there’s one other possibility I hadn’t thought of before. The building is almost certainly owned by a corporation. I can’t say I’m up on corporate law, but every corporation doing business in New York has to file tax returns and I think the original charter, which would be on file with the Department of State in Albany, lists the president and the treasurer. They might not be stockholders, but they’d be a good place to start if you wanted to find the stockholders.”

“Perfect,” Moodrow declared when Leonora had finished. “I’m glad everybody took the time to come down here. I thought we needed to get started right away, but it’s too soon to meet out in Queens. Better to let the people get over the…Better let them get over what happened.” He surprised himself by not being able to say the word “death,” but refused to spend any time thinking about it. Dunlap was next and Moodrow had to find some way to let the sergeant know that he was working
under
Stanley Moodrow without driving him away. Of course, if Moodrow had known that Porky Dunlap was so eager to be a cop he’d willingly serve under the deadest hairbag juicer, in or out of the job, he might have been a little more confident. Nevertheless, finesse not being one of Moodrow’s greater accomplishments, he launched into his own plan.

“Sergeant Dunlap and me are gonna investigate the arson. It’s too much coincidence that it happened to start right under the apartment of the leader of the tenants’ association and that the way it went off there was no damage, except smoke, to any part of the building. We’re gonna make sure nobody buries this fire, because it’s too hard to prove arson one way or the other. That’s tomorrow, right, Paul?”

Dunlap, caught off guard, could do no better than affirm Moodrow. “Yeah, the marshals gonna be on the scene tomorrow morning.”

“Whatta ya say we join him? Look over his shoulder.”

Dunlap shrugged. “No problem,” he said.

“Once we finish up with the fire marshal,” Moodrow continued smoothly, “we’ll talk to Precision Management and at least get the name of the lawyer representing the landlord. We can also press Rosenkrantz for an exact schedule of repairs. Not that he’s gonna do anything, but the sooner we expose him for a liar, the sooner the other tenants’ll come to the association.” Moodrow turned his attention to Jorge Rivera. “In the end, it don’t matter what we do here, if the tenants don’t hold together. It’s your home, Jorge. You gotta stand up and fight or you won’t be able to live there six months from now.”

Much to Moodrow’s relief, Dunlap had made no protest at Moodrow’s assertion of his own authority and Moodrow was ready to dismiss the group, when someone knocked firmly on the door. Moodrow, who was anxious to be alone with Betty, called out for his visitor to enter. The short, thin young man who pushed the door open was a stranger to everybody.

“Hi,” the man called out, his active features seeming to go in all directions at the same time. “My name’s Innocencio Kavecchi. Forget the ‘Innocencio.’ Call me, Ino. Eeeee-no. I’m third generation, right, but my father had this weird sense of humor. Is this the place where I can find Betty Haluka?”

“I’m Betty Haluka,” Betty said. “You’re the paralegal, right?”

“That’s me,” Kavecchi said. “Eight years with Legal Aid. Talk about your basic death-in-life, right? The whole time with the housing division. There’s nine parts in Manhattan Tenant-Landlord Court and I know every judge in every part. I can walk over to HPD and talk personally to every clerk on the floor. You need a printout on violations for a building, but the landlord should never know, so you don’t wanna write up an order? Ten bucks during business hours. Twenty at night. I tell ya, boys and girls, when it comes to housing, I’m an effing freak.”

“What about evictions?” Jorge Rivera interrupted. As a man who coveted his own dignity, he was offended by the paralegal’s strident voice and sharp mannerisms. “Can you do somethin’ for evictions?”

“Actual evictions? That gets hard.”

“He means dispossess notices,” Betty broke in.

“I got it.” Kavecchi turned back to Rivera. “Legit dispossess or b.s.?”

“The second,” Jorge replied.

“For b.s. evictions, we go into Supreme Court and say, ‘Your honor, my clients will suffer irreparable harm if not given immediate injunctive relief.’ Then the judge says, ‘Get yer ass outta my courtroom and back to Tenant-Landlord Court before I report you to the Ethics Committee of the New York State Bar Association for terminal stupidity.’ Then you go to the Tenant-Landlord Court and,
if
you got all your tenants organized, you consolidate the cases and only have to go into court once. That’s for a baseless dispossess. For a legitimate dispossess, we use time. There’s eight judges hearing landlord complaints and there’s thousands of complaints. Ya think ya just hop in and outta there? I mean in Tenant-Landlord Court you could stretch time as thin as the security in a welfare hotel. Ten months to a year before the landlord can get a tenant off his property.”

“What about complaints against the landlord?” Dunlap asked. “How much time does the landlord get?”

“Same thing for both sides, right? Fair is fair. If you could stretch out your problems, why shouldn’t the landlord be able to stretch out his? And don’t forget, you got eight judges hearing landlord complaints in Manhattan every day. There’s only one judge hearing tenant complaints. But it’s the same in every court. If all you need is time, you could make it go on practically forever.”

Betty was sitting at the foot of the bed, her back to Moodrow. She was dressed for bed in a gray T-shirt and a pair of white gym shorts with a thin red stripe running along each hip. Moodrow, who knew she was thinking about her Aunt Sylvia, watched her sturdy, muscular body carefully, noting both the wide back and the slumped shoulders.

“Are you ever afraid to die?” Betty asked without turning around. Her voice was softer than usual, but there was curiosity there, too.

“I don’t think so,” Moodrow answered quickly. “I know it’s hard to be sure about something like that, but I think I’m more scared of other people dying.”

“But you’ve been in situations where you might die?” she persisted. “Where you had to arrest someone who turned out to be armed, for instance.”

“Actually, the fires are the worst. Where you have to go inside and try to warn the people. I’m not that good about fires. I don’t know what could happen, and most of the time I didn’t have any backup.”

“Were you afraid in the fires?”

“Definitely. But even fires weren’t the worst. No, the most I was ever scared was in a fight I had with an EDP on a roof. That’s ‘Emotionally Disturbed Person’ for you civilians. The guy thought I was a devil. He called me ‘Moloch.’ Kept screaming, ‘We die together, Moloch.’ ”

Betty, turning for the first time, stared directly into her lover’s eyes. “You thought he might push you over the edge of the building.”

“Yeah. He was chargin’ me and I was dodging out of the way. It was late at night and we were in the shadow of a much bigger building, so it was very dark. I was wearing my winter blues, still on patrol, and I couldn’t move very well.”

“Did you think…”

“All I could think about is how much I wanted to shoot the fucker. But the EDP didn’t have a gun, so I couldn’t use deadly force. Never mind about the mutt wants to cross-block me into the next universe. That’s only my judgment and my judgment don’t count. If I shot that bastard and claimed self-defense, I’d have to prove it in a courtroom and, guaranteed, I’d be off the force no matter how the trial came out.”

“So what did you do?” Betty asked after a moments silence. She was turned all the way round, sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed. “You must have been terrified by the thought of going over the edge of that roof.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Moodrow declared innocently. “The mutt had a heart attack. Right in the middle of the fight, he grabbed his chest and went belly-up on the tarpaper. Started flopping around like a fish on the beach. Crazy, huh? Turned out he’d found three gallons of turpentine in an abandoned basement and been soaking it up for almost a week. Musta gone to his head.”

“Are you making this up, Stanley?” Betty had cross-examined hundreds of cops in the course of her, career. She could smell perjury like a beagle scenting a fox. “I
know
you’re making this up.”

“Yeah,” Moodrow grinned. “It didn’t really happen like that. Actually, I shot the fucker right away, then planted a knife on him.”

“Now you’re lying about that, too.” She took a swipe at his leg, but caught the sheet instead, pulling it off his body. She stared at him for a moment, impressed with his bulk. He really didn’t have any fat on his body and it seemed immoral, to Betty, that a human being that big should go through life without a weight problem. She ran a finger over his calf, curling it over the tips of his toes. “Will you make love to me?” she finally asked.

“It’s not my strong point,” Moodrow replied, “but if ya let me wear the tiger-stripe panties, I’ll do my best.”

T
ALKER PURDY WAS HAVING
the hardest time getting used to his new digs. He hadn’t felt so unnatural, so out of place, since his mother had dragged him from the teeming slums of London to deposit him, at ten years old, in the teeming slums off Fourth Avenue in South Brooklyn.
That
took a lot of getting used to, because the neighborhood was mostly Spanish and the other kids spoke and understood broken American-English. At best.

So, Talker, despite his belief that he’d emigrated to an English-speaking country, had quickly discovered that his East End yowl might as well have been Hungarian for all the effect it had on his ability to communicate. The local kids at P S. 242 had instinctively begun to treat him like a freak, to pack up and to use him for a target. A few confrontations, however, had put an end to that. As it turned out, Talker Purdy was dead game and had the scars to prove it. Dead game kids were hard to find, even in Sunset Park, and Purdy had cooperated in his own acceptance by learning Puerto Rican Spanish. And thus earning his nickname: Talker. His real name was Percival. Percival Purdy.

After passing that first test of heart, very little of what he encountered in the course of a rebellious adolescence bothered Talker Purdy, and he finally developed into a taciturn (though criminal) young man. Even when the pigs took him over to the baby unit on Rikers Island for the very first time, he accepted each indignity with grace and patience. Sure, they’d try to fuck him. The other prisoners, especially the black ones who took him for some sort of half-breed Rican, would move on his ass; they’d move on his gold, too, or even his fucking sneakers. They’d move on whatever he had, regardless of its value, because that’s the way it was in the baby jail on Rikers. But he knew people, too, and he knew enough to service his own pack. Take someone else’s ass. Take someone else’s gold. After a week, he had a place in a serious crew and steady access to the pleasures of prison.

What he really couldn’t get through his head was that the Spanish people who lived in the apartments surrounding his new home went to work in suits. He knew they were Spanish, because they spoke Spanish to each other, but they were as far from his bro’s in
el barrio
as the old white people who kept appearing in the lobby to stare at him through thick, cloudy glasses. Where were the kids?

How come these white people didn’t have babies? How come the Spanish people who did have babies kept them locked up in their apartments? And what about the wogs? He knew all about the wogs; he’d been old enough when he’d come over to remember the wogs from London. What he remembered is that you could do almost anything to the wogs and they wouldn’t fight back unless they outnumbered you ten to one. Then they’d tear you to pieces.

Talker Purdy’s best friend and mentor in the criminal world was Rudy Ruiz, who was called Rudy-Bicho by his friends even though
bicho
meant “prick” in Spanish and should have been an insult. Talker and Rudy-Bicho were testing out the lobby of their new home in Jackson Heights, sitting on a small ledge that, once upon a time, had held house plants. They were listening (or, at least, Talker was listening; Rudy-Bicho was somewhere else altogether) to the Spanish jazz of Hilton Ruiz. The prominent horns slashed at the staccato beat, exciting Talker Purdy, who tapped out the stops and starts of the exotic rhythms perfectly.

“
Mira
, check out these feets, man,” he told Rudy-Bicho seriously. “I shoulda been a dancer. Or I shoulda been a singer.”

“You should take your fucking head out of your
culo
and start lookin’ around.”

“What’s the matter with you, man?” Talker asked sincerely. They’d both shot the sweet
decata
only two hours before and they were waiting for an afternoon delivery from their new regular connection, who lived above them on the fifth floor. They did armed robberies to support their moderate habits (not bullshit street rip-offs, but jewelry dealers, furriers, securities messengers). The man they worked for, a wiseguy who lived in Bensonhurst, provided information and bought all the merchandise for twenty cents on a dollar. Not a lot, but since the individual hits were big and came off reasonably close together, Rudy-Bicho and Talker Purdy were living the rent-free high life in Jackson Heights. Which is why Talker Purdy was so surprised by his partner’s mood.

“I don’ like the way these
patas
keep watchin’ me like I’m some kinda bug,” Rudy-Bicho finally said.

Talker Purdy, who hadn’t realized he was being insulted by his fellow tenants, blushed bright red. For all his learning Spanish and dumping his cheapside English accent, he couldn’t rid himself of a schoolboy complexion that flashed a deep scarlet whenever he did something stupid. Which was often. “But we livin’ here for nothin’, man. And we got dope right next door. And don’ forget there’s no peoples here to rip us off. I don’ even see no cops.”