No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (16 page)

"OK, I heard you. Now, let me ask you something.
Why is it, I get laid, just once, it's supposed to be the end of the
world? Since the world began, Joey, when was there a time  when
guys didn't want something on the side? Back in Sicily, where if you
fucked around with a girl, her husband and father would kill you. If
you fucked a guy's wife, he would kill everybody. In the Bible, they
punished adultery by stoning people to death. So even with that kind
of overreaction did you ever once hear of someplace where adultery
became extinct? You know when a piece on the side will become
extinct? When men and women are born without the parts to do it
with," I said with an appropriate gesture.

He laughed. Thank God.

"It's just I like Glenda, and she's good for
you, and I don't want you to blow it."

"You know what, I like Glenda too, and I agree
with you, she's good for me. Now that group therapy is over, let's
pretend this is an office again." .

“
Sure. By the way, I think you done good down in
D.C., at least you didn't embarrass me and they think you do a good
Al Pacino."

I brought him up to date. The thing that pleased him
most was the billings we were racking up, courtesy of the Wood
estate. Then he asked me to cover a surveillance for him that night.
A divorce thing, an easy tail.

"My grandchildren," he explained, "are
visiting their grandmother. They're four and five now."

I said that was OK. I called the judge. He couldn't
see me till the next day anyway. I called Christina. I talked to her
machine. Then my mother called me. I told her I was alive, that
Glenda was healthy, that Wayne was larger and learning to play
squash. We made a dinner date. Christina called me back. I jumped in
a cab.

She was on the phone when I got there. But it started
without waiting anyway. When I began to stroke her hair, she arched
against me catlike. I bent and kissed her forehead, her cheek, her
ears. She put her hand over the phone and offered me the heat of her
mouth. Ignition. She stood and leaned her back into me. My arms went
around her, and my hands found the flesh of her waist and belly. She
said a few strangled things into the phone, hung up and we went to
bed. There have been enough women in my life to have stopped the
count sometime back. I've done most of the things that I've conceived
while  masturbating. And ever since the first, the worst I've
had was good. But Christina's sexuality and mine were better
custom-cut than her father's Savile Row suits.

In the sweating and sounds that weren't words, I
heard a voice say, unexpected and unbidden, "I love you."
It was my voice. She held me harder. Her arms clamped around me to
force my body into the sink of hers.

Later, in the shower together, she said, "You
shouldn't say things like that," with her eyes, her voice, her
body contradicting the words. "I'm glad," she said, "that
you have someone else. I don't want you to be my problem."

"Sure," I said, and kissed her beneath the
spray.

When I left we shuddered like a fabric was being
torn, the separation palpable.

Joey D' was waiting for me at Forty-ninth and
Madison. He was too sharp not to notice my hair was still damp, but
all he said was, "Thanks for covering me, kid," and went
off to see his ex-wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

Within ten minutes, by four-thirty, the hordes were
starting to flow from the towers. I was looking for one rock in the
slow rolling landslide, but my subject made it easy, trying to rush a
half-pace harder than the rest of the herd. A typical adman type from
Doyle, Dane: health-clubbed and tan, yet harried and drawn, with
plenty of money that wasn't enough. At least not for what his wife
wanted to do to him.

He turned north. He went only half a block and turned
into what was once the Arch Diocese of New York and is now a hotel,
through the cobbled courtyard, into the vaulted lobby and down the
marble steps. He turned left into Harry's Bar. Diocesan wood and
leaded glass separate Harry's from the lobby, so I didn't even have
to enter to watch.

He sat at the bar, watching the door, watching his
watch, trying to slow his drink but rushing it. Then she came in. She
was nothing special. Every head in the bar did not turn, dazzled by
her length of leg, flaunt of bosom or swing of butt. But to him, she
was the everything. He emerged from anxiety like a butterfly into the
sun, and I could see the bar fade away, with it the rest of the
world, as they shone for each other.

The shutter of my mini-camera opened and closed
silently over the frames of ASA 1000 Kodak color negative, capturing
another Kodak moment to remember in court. He tossed a bill on the
bar; they walked out; I followed. They only went as far as the
elevators. I got right in with them. I exited after them. Their eyes
were only for each other.

When they stopped and embraced in front of the hotel
room door, I strolled on as if I had someplace to go. When I heard
the door close behind me, I turned around. I found the service closet
and stepped in. I opened my briefcase, took out the microphone and
recorder. I buried the tape machine in some towels. The microphone,
with its tiny suction cup, went on the upper-right-hand corner of the
door. The transmitter went on the top of the doorframe, stuck with
double-face tape. I went back to the closet, checked if it was all
operational and left.

I killed forty-five minutes in Harry 's, went up,
flipped the cassette, then gave them another forty-five and collected
everything. The early evening was warm; the sun slid a shaft onto the
steps of St. Patrick's cathedral down the block. I sat on the broad
steps of the church and spot-checked the tape.

If there was sufficient dirt, the job was done; if
not, I would go aback and roll another reel.

The Account Exec was thrilled. He got it up so
quickly with her. And it was so nothing limp with his wife .... I
fast-forwarded, and it turned to a high-pitched squeak in the
earphones .... And so often! . . . She liked his tongue just there,
just there! And slower, slower . . . whack! He liked his ass slapped
while he put it to her ....

We had him. You gotta pay to play, that's what the
wives say. When his wife had stripped him down to his toothbrush and
jockey shorts, I wondered if he would lose his tootsie too. It often
happens that way. Another job, successfully concluded.
 

16
JUDGE

HIS HONOR JUDGE
Paul
Stewart McCarthy let loose a nonjudicial pealing laugh when I
finished summing up, as coherently as I could, the SEC transcripts of
Edgar Wood.

"The thing that's funny," he explained when
he was able, "is that if that was all Wood had to show when he
came back for resentencing, you know what I would have had to say? .
. . Three to five, Attica."

"Did you expect him to come up with more than
that?"

"Interesting question. Order us another round
and let us cogitate." It was more Jameson's for him, beer for
me.

"At the sentencing," he said when he had
wet his dry, "the man was extremely upset. Shocked I would say,
but then they were all shocked." He chuckled at the memory.

"He promised he was going to blow the lid off.
Expose the whole filthy crew."

"Do you remember exactly what he said? Exactly?"

He closed his eyes, flipping through the cellular
file in his skull. The lids snapped open and he recited, in a
monotone,

"The whole fucking bunch is as bad as I am. The
whole fucking barrel is rotten. Superwasp Choate Haven, that
cocksucker Goreman, fuck Culligan, Scott and Shaw . . ." He
blinked and paused. "I'm not sure that last trio is right, but I
think it is. They're all at Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, etcetera, I
think."

"Yeah, they are," I said.

"You know what it is that's a real pity, "
he said, swallowing more of the Irish. "Today's cursing is of a
very low order. It's all simple fucking and cocksucking. Back when I
was a lad they would have said Choate Haven, that smug and superior
son of Satan, sittin' and sniggerin' in his super clubs, is a
low-life, lickspittle scum of an informer who would sell his own dear
mother to the Black and Tans for the price of a used roll of asswipe.
The decline of the language, even if it is English, is a sad and
piteous thing."

"When," I asked, "did you get so
Irish?"

"I think maybe I'm trying to escape the reality;
it's wearing on me, truly it is."

"What else did Wood actually say?"

"To business. To the point," he complained.
"But without the asides, this life would be a desperately dreary
thing .... Let's see now, did he mention any other names.... No. But
there were two or three fellows there from Over & East. Klughorn
was one. I remember because he testified. And . . . Silly? Sally?
Diller, it was. Wood pointed at them and said, 'You fucks are going
down with the ship. You won't fuck me up the ass and get away with
it.' "

"How did they react?"

"All very 'tsk, tsk,' and proper they were. As
if Edgar should have taken it like a man. It never does surprise me
when they break down. It always surprises me when they don't. Anyway,
it used to surprise me."

"Did you have any reaction at the time? Did Wood
say anything that sounded like he had something special on someone?
Did anyone react to his threats like they were scared?"

"At the time . . . I thought it could turn into
quite the event. Scandal of the year. Particularly with that bunch
from Choate, etcetera. Such a bastion of respectability they are, so
lily-pure and snowy-white. What a shame, I thought at the time, that
it probably wasn't the lawyers he would tell his tales on, but the
corporation. I wasn't so much looking forward to that. You expect
scandalous doings from a thing like Over & East. That makes less
of a scandal, do you see?"

"That doesn't give me a whole lot to go on,"
I sighed.

"The lad wants a lead."

"Frankly, Stewart, it is going to be very
difficult to investigate them without one. The only thing to do is
look for paper, and they've had legions, with warrants, doing that
for years. If the IRS with unlimited everything, including desire,
can't nail them, how can I?"

"Tony, boyo, I'll say something that will make
it even worse. It occurred to me at the time of the trial that if our
Mr. Wood really had anything so tremendously hot, he would have used
it long before it got so far as sentencing. He would have bought
himself a deal with the D.A. "

"Shit," I said.

"You know what your problem is?"

"Your Honor, as much as I like and respect you,
and you 're the only judge in New York I would trust with subway
fare, I am sick and tired of people telling me what my problem is."

"You get to taking it personal." He went on
as if I hadn't spoken. "And it's not, of course. If you want to
find out who did the deed, that's your business, but it's not your
life."

"I saw that movie. 'It's not personal, it's just
business.' "

"The thing of it is, boyo, that it is. You don't
understand that. It's what made you a good cop, and it's what ruined
you as a cop. Hell, my boy, I would imagine that you probably fall in
love every time you get laid. That is a woman's thinking."

"What is it about me, Your Honor, that makes
everyone feel so astute?"
 

I7
PASTA FAZOOL

ONCE UPON A
time my
father's older brother, Vincent, was my favorite uncle. The one who
always drove the new car and came with big presents.

I don't entirely know what happened. My father was a
construction worker. Before the war he had been a union organizer;
after, a union official. In the fifties the government and the
racketeers joined forces to purge the union of leftists. They let my
father keep his card, they let him work, but they eliminated him from
union politics. More to take up time and save himself from bitterness
than to make extra money, my father became a part-time contractor.

Getting together with his brother was a natural.
Vincent had the money. He had the contacts. He was doing big business
over in Jersey. They went partners in Brooklyn. Then they quarreled.
I don't know what the quarrel was about. I was only eight at the
time. Later on, my father would never be explicit about the details.
The next time I saw my uncle was at my father's funeral, fifteen
years later. Our next meeting was only one week afterward. I came in
with an attitude. My father had wanted nothing to do with Vincent.
They had not spoken from the time of the quarrel to the day my father
died, leaving me to assume that Vincent represented all that my
father fought, the things he despised. Then this stranger—and by
then he was a stranger to me--assaulted me with emotion over veal
picata as if I were the prodigal son and it was I who was returning.
He offered to pay for my education. To introduce me to the people who
could help me. To guide me through life, now that I was an orphan and
had no father to help me. That lunch was the last time, deliberately,
that I saw him.