Piece of the Action (10 page)

In the course of his candy store education, he’d also come to learn that many of these neighborhood establishments had back rooms that catered to the needs of adults. As he watched Patero cross the room without acknowledging the elderly man behind the counter, he had a pretty good idea of where they were going and what they were going to do. He was glad that he wasn’t inside one of his old haunts, that he didn’t, for instance, know either of the two customers sitting at the counter.

But Moodrow
did
know Joey Fish. Or, at least, he knew Joey Fish’s kid, Alan, from high school.

“Jeez,” Joey Fish said as Moodrow ducked through the doorway, “what happened to
him
?”

Moodrow responded with the blank stare requested by Sal Patero.

“I remember you.” Fish shook his finger at Moodrow. “You’re that kid who used to fight in the Gloves. The big one who went to school with Alan. Whatta ya, still fightin’?”

Moodrow continued to stare and Joey’s face underwent a transformation as he put Moodrow’s hostility together with his reputation. Joey Fish turned as white as the chalked odds scrawled on the blackboards covering the walls.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Fish said, turning to Patero, “whatta ya doin’ here? You puttin’ the muscle on me?”

“Cut the crap, Fish. You got what you owe me?”

“Lieutenant …”

“Just tell me. Yes or no. Without the bullshit.”

Fish opened the desk drawer and withdrew an envelope. He passed it to Patero who weighed it in his palm.

“It’s
all
here, right? Current and past due?”

“Every penny. And ya didn’t need to bring in a palooka ta get it. I told ya I had a problem. Some of the boys was past-postin’ at Hialeah and I got my balls caught in the squeeze. All I asked was a few weeks to recover.”

“Don’t bother me with ya problems, Fish. You got a business to run. Did ya call the phone company and tell ’em, ‘I can’t pay my bill because some hustlers past-posted in Florida’? What you shoulda done was collect from the bums that cheated you. Not hold out on me.”

Fish glanced at Moodrow, then shrugged. “Some guys you gotta pay. Even if they’re cheatin’ ya. Even if ya
know
ya bein’ cheated. Some guys ya gotta pay.”

“Very sharp, Joey.” Patero was already heading for the door. “Some guys ya
do
gotta pay. And
I’m
one of ’em.”

They continued to make the rounds for the rest of the morning, neither of them speaking very much. Moodrow spent the time reflecting on the felonies he was committing, one after another. For Patero, on the other hand, the business they conducted was routine, a time-honored ritual that predated the existence of the modern NYPD by fifty years. Gambling and prostitution were tolerated in certain neighborhoods because the voters
wanted
gambling and prostitution. No matter how often or how loudly Cardinal Spellman condemned the sins of the flesh. Of course, the citizens weren’t especially fond of the violence that flowed naturally from the existence of an institutionalized underworld. But wasn’t that where the cops came in?

The unspoken policy was control and containment. And how could you complain if the cops in charge of implementing this policy, in return for breaking the oath they’d taken to support the Constitution of the United States and enforce the laws of New York State, felt they needed a bit of extra compensation?

“Stanley, you ready for lunch?”

“Whatever you want, Sal.” It was the only thing he
could
say, under the circumstances. Besides, his stomach was rumbling like a Con Ed steampipe about to explode.

“See if ya could work your way over to Grand and Mott. The Castellemare Café.”

Moodrow took a left on Delancey and began to fight his way through the traffic. Delancey Street was the connecting link between the Williamsburg Bridge on the east side and the Holland Tunnel. Jersey-bound trucks, loaded with Brooklyn freight and headed for points west, packed Delancey Street from early morning until after dark.

“Light up the bubble, Stanley. I’m in a hurry.”

Moodrow put the red light on top of the Chevy and flicked the switch that set it spinning. The truckers, grudgingly, began to move out of the way. A cop directing traffic at Delancey and the Bowery stopped all north- and south- bound traffic as he cleared a lane for the white Chevy. Moodrow recognized the patrolman. His name was Paul Scotrun and he’d made the mistake of spending most of a night tour in a bar on Second Avenue. The duty sergeant, by way of teaching him a lesson, had placed him in a position of high visibility. Now, his face red with cold, he managed a smile and a wistful salute as the Chevy passed.

Five minutes later they were seated at a small table in the Castellemare Café. The restaurant, in the heart of Little Italy, was decorated in the best tourist trap tradition. Gondolas made their way along the walls and the bar was dominated by a highly polished cappucino machine. All the waiters wore white aprons and the tables were covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths. The neighborhood had been solid Italian before the war. Now, the sons and daughters of the immigrants who’d founded Little Italy were leaving as fast as the moving industry could supply the trucks. On the other hand, the tourists, pie-fed Midwesterners mostly, couldn’t seem to get enough
calamare fra diavolo.
They were thicker than ever.

“I gotta use the toilet, Stanley. Order me a Rheingold and get whatever you want for yourself.”

Patero left without waiting for his assistant to answer. He made his way to the bathrooms in the rear, but instead of entering the door marked “KINGS,” he knocked on an unmarked door, then quickly pushed it open.

“How come ya don’t wait for someone to say, ‘Come in’?” Joe Faci’s tone was mild, his face expressionless.

“Because you already knew I was comin’. You knew I was here before I got to my table. Ain’t that right?”

Faci shrugged. “It don’t make a difference anyway.” He opened a desk drawer and removed an envelope. “Mr. Accacio wants to know how things worked out. With the Puerto Rican.”

“I’ll bet he does.” Patero put the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket. Stanley, he reflected, wouldn’t be seeing this one. “I’ll bet it’s real important to
Mister
Accacio. That’s why I wanna deliver the message personally.”

“I could take it to him. I got Mr. Accacio’s complete confidence.”

In Sal Patero’s opinion, Joe Faci was an amazing guy. You couldn’t make him mad—at least not so it showed—but it was fun trying. “Cut the crap, Joey. Stop makin’ out like you got Lucky Luciano in the back room.” He gestured to a door in the far wall. “Steppy’s a neighborhood punk who’s tryin’ to make his way up. He ain’t the fucking
capo di tutti capi
or whatever you’re callin’ the big boss these days. I got a message to deliver and I wanna deliver it personal.”

Patero’s message was simple enough: the situation had been contained, but
don’t
let it happen again.
Don’t
kill civilians. Except for the smell, nobody cares about dead gangsters in the trunks of cars. But if you start blowing away citizens, sooner or later you’re gonna kill someone who matters.

The intercom on Faci’s desk emitted a sharp buzz. “Send him in, Joey.” The voice belonged to Steppy Accacio. “So I could hear his message personal.”

Moodrow sat quietly at his table, sipping at a Schaefer. He was monumentally pissed off. Not that he was surprised by what Patero and he had been doing all morning. He wasn’t even opposed to it. Not really. Cops referred to it as ‘the pad’ and it had been going on for a long time. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov had explained it before Moodrow took the entrance exam.

“If you become a cop, Stanley, sooner or later people are gonna offer you money. What you gotta understand is that, as far as the Department is concerned, there’s clean money and dirty money. The boss in the coffee shop won’t let you pay for lunch? That’s clean. That’s
expected.
Likewise for the mechanic who tunes up your car for half-price. But don’t take money from a burglar. Or a dope addict. Or, God forbid, a rapist. That’s as dirty as it gets. You know about the pad?”

“No.”

Uncle Pavlov had gone on to explain the setup. Every precinct had a bagman who collected from the bookies and the pimps. The captain took the biggest piece, then the lieutenants got theirs, then the sergeants, then a few detectives.

“Beat cops like me get nothing,” he concluded.

“You’re saying that the money just comes along like your paycheck?”

“See, that’s the thing, Stanley. Is the pad clean or is it dirty? Not everybody participates. In fact, if the captain’s clean, there ain’t no pad. If the captain’s clean, then it’s every cop for himself. By the way, I’m sure you heard that gettin’ transferred out to Staten Island is a horrible punishment for a cop. Ask yourself why that should be? A lotta cops
live
on Staten Island. There’s no
violence
out there. You could do your tour without worrying that someone’s gonna toss a brick off a roof. So I ask ya, Stanley, why is gettin’ transferred out to the boondocks a punishment?”

“Because there’s no money out there. No pad.”

“Congratulations, my boy, you’ve just won a free trip to the real world.”

What had stuck in Moodrow’s mind was the part about “not everybody participates.” He’d never given it much thought while he was fighting his way into the detectives, but he’d expected to have a choice, to think about it before it was shoved into his face. Sure, people wanted to make bets. They wanted to get laid, too. But when these same people got in over their heads, the bookies sent guys with baseball bats to do the collecting. And the pimps weren’t any better. They controlled their stables with anything that came to hand. Fists, chairs, lit cigarettes, razors, knives. Anything.

Moodrow had seen it close up. It was always a beat cop who arrived first when the bookies got through collecting. A beat cop who picked up the pieces and loaded them into an ambulance. Besides, the story Moodrow kept hearing was that the bookies and pimps were employees. They worked for bosses who also distributed the heroin that’d hit the Lower East Side like a biblical plague.

What it needed was sorting out. No matter
what
the cops did, even if they never took a dime from
anybody,
the gambling and the whores would still be there. You couldn’t stop it and the politicians would never legalize it. The cops were the regulators, the
only
regulators. It wasn’t what they were set up to do, but if they didn’t do it, the situation would be a lot worse.

“You in dreamland, Stanley?”

Sal Patero was smiling. He had no inkling of what was going on behind the swelling and the bruises on Moodrow’s face. Fighters are trained not to show an opponent what they’re feeling. A triumphant grin might inspire a beaten fighter to give it one more try. Showing fear or pain, on the other hand, encourages an even greater beating. If you were smart, you learned to show nothing. You learned, for instance, to hold yourself erect after a left hook just turned your liver to jelly.

“No, no. I’m here. I was just thinking.”

“Have something to eat. It helps prevent that condition.”

The waiter was already standing by the table. He took their order, veal for Patero and the shrimps in hot sauce for Moodrow, then disappeared into the kitchen.

“I was thinking about what we’ve been doing all morning,” Moodrow said.

“I was afraid you were gonna say that.”

“The thing of it is that if you’d given me a choice, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Whether I would’ve gone into it or not. But now that I’m already in the soup, I wanna try to understand what I’m eatin’. So’s I don’t get indigestion.”

“Keep goin’, Stanley.”

Patero was obviously irritated, but Moodrow wasn’t really concerned about Patero. Pat Cohan had set this up and unless Pat Cohan decreed otherwise, they were stuck with each other.

“This is the pad we’re doing, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re the precinct bagman, right?”

“Don’t make this into a cross-examination, Stanley. I don’t feature being interrogated. Especially by you.” Patero’s ears were red, the veins along his temples swollen.

“How often do we have to do this?”

“Whenever I say so.”

“C’mon, Sal. I got a right to know. Is this it? Eight hours a day, five days a week until I earn my pension?”

“You want out? There’s ten thousand cops who’d give their right arms to be in your position. You want out, just say the word.”

“That’s not what you told me this morning. This morning you told me if I had a problem, I should take it to Pat Cohan.”

“Fuck Pat Cohan.”

“Ya know, Sal, you should try to put yourself in my position. Five years I’m a cop and the most I ever got out of it was a free hamburger. I’m a detective for five hours and I’ve committed five felonies. Five counts of bribery, if not outright extortion. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming
you.
But I think I got a right to know what’s going on. You haven’t even told me what my piece is.”

Patero stared into Moodrow’s eyes for a moment. “You tryin’ to tell me that Pat Cohan didn’t spell this out for you? That’s impossible.”

Moodrow leaned over the table. “He didn’t tell me shit.”

Instinctively, Patero sat back in his chair. There was something unpredictable about Stanley Moodrow, something he didn’t care for at all. “Pat Cohan is a prick.”

“This I already know.”

“He wants to see what you’ll do. Before you marry his daughter. In a way, you can’t blame him.”

“But what does the pad have to do with it?”

“You grew up here, on the Lower East Side, right?”

“So?”

“Me, I grew up in Red Hook, near the docks. My father was a longshoreman. When I was ten years old, someone put a hook through his head. Left him in the hold of a banana boat. I never found out who did it. I never even found out why it was done. That’s the way life was in those neighborhoods. Still is, for that matter. Anyway, right after I came into the job, I married a Jewish girl from Forest Hills, Andrea Stern. I loved the hell out of her, but our marriage didn’t work out.