Piece of the Action (15 page)

“Ya look like a boozer, Pat,” he muttered to his reflection. “Ya look like a damned Irish drunk.”

What he
felt
like doing was covering his head with vaseline like some punk rock-and-roll singer. Or just shaving the whole mess off. Wear it military-style and to hell with his image. But what he
did,
finally, was fish a can of Clairol hairspray out of a bureau drawer and coat his mane until it was stiff as a board. Which he didn’t mind all that much. No, what
really
bothered him was the sweet perfumy smell. It would cling to him for the next hour, no matter what he did.

Sighing, he turned out the lights and headed downstairs to the den. Once there, once the door was closed and he felt safe, he intended to light the biggest cigar he could find and fill the small room with smoke. Unfortunately, in order to get to the den, he had to pass through the living room.

“What’s that smell?”

Pat Cohan turned to confront his daughter. She was sitting in a leather wing chair. His
favorite
chair. And she was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Isn’t there something you should be doing, Kathleen? Maybe your mother needs help.” Ordinarily, he enjoyed her teasing, actually encouraged it.

“Mother can pray the rosary without me, Daddy. But if you’d like to go up and ask her if she wants assistance …”

That was just what he needed. A visit to his wife’s private hell, to windows and doors draped in black velvet, to an agonized, bloody Jesus hanging on the cross. The endless drone of his wife’s prayers sounded more like the hum of a mindless insect than human speech. The dead mourning the dead.

“When Stanley shows up, I want to see him.”

“Okay, Daddy. Sal’s here, by the way.”

“Patero?”

“Who else? I didn’t want to disturb you, so I put him in the den.”

Pat Cohan felt his face begin to redden. His fingers automatically drifted up to his hair, then dropped back to his side. He left his daughter and crossed the living room.

What he wanted to do was get it over with. He wanted to handle this problem the way he’d handled every other problem that stood between himself and the top of the heap. But this problem happened to be dope, and dope simply
refused
to be handled. It wasn’t clean, like gambling or prostitution. Dope was an open sewer pouring disease onto the city streets. It infected everyone around it, the innocent as well as the guilty, with a mechanical indifference that was near to maniacal.

The only way to handle dope, he’d decided long ago, was to stay as far away from it as possible, to retire before he had to deal with it. That strategy had failed. It’d failed because the same people who controlled the gambling and the whores were moving into heroin. They had no choice in the matter. The potential profits were enormous. To surrender those profits to another gang would be the economic equivalent of cutting your own throat.

He opened the door to his den and stepped through it to find Sal Patero sitting behind his desk. His handcarved, mahogany desk with the eagle’s claw feet.

“Get the fuck out of my chair.”

“Good evening to you, too, Pat.” Patero got up and moved around the desk. “Am I allowed to sit at all?”

“Cut the bull, Sal. I’m not in the mood for it.”

“What’s that smell? It smells like perfume. You wearin’ some kinda sweet aftershave?”

Cohan felt his face redden. He closed his eyes and silently counted to ten.

“Take it easy, Pat. Ya gettin’ ya pressure up. What’s the matter with you, tonight?”

How could he answer
that
one? My hair won’t stay put? I’m too old to handle the bullshit anymore? My only daughter’s future husband is a fucking
fool
?

“All right, Sal, why don’t we just get to it.” He sat behind his desk, opened the center drawer and took out a long fat cigar. The cigar was a gift from the Chief of Detectives, a handrolled Cuban import. He unwrapped it quickly, snipped off the end and lit it up.

Patero leaned forward in his seat. “I spoke to Accacio again, like you said. To get a better picture of what he wants from us. Pat, he ain’t askin’ for protection. What he says he needs is information. Like where the narcs are operatin’, their targets and like that. Accacio figures he can keep his boys out of trouble if he can see the trouble coming.”

“I suppose he expects us to hand over all the paper in the Narcotics Squad?”

“No way, Pat. Accacio ain’t stupid. He wants to operate along the East River, from Fourteenth Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge. All them projects? The ones already built and the ones goin’ up? The Housing Authority is fillin’ ’em with Puerto Rican welfare. Accacio figures it’s like a captive market. Between the welfare and the low-cost apartments, they’ll never move out. Every time one of them goes on dope, Accacio’s got a customer for life.”

Pat Cohan suddenly relaxed. He leaned back and tried, unsuccessfully, to run his fingers through his stiff white hair. “Sal, the public sees dope as worse than murder, worse than rape. We’re under tremendous pressure to do something about it. Think for a minute. Drugs are federal. The FBI goes after drugs. The FDA goes after drugs. Suppose the feds
really
turn up the heat. Suppose they put a hundred agents in Manhattan. Suppose they analyze our paperwork and discover that arrests for heroin are virtually non-existent in a certain section of the Seventh Precinct. Suppose …”

“Accacio understands that, Pat. He told me he didn’t care if we busted every junkie in his territory, because they come right back to the needle as soon as they get out of jail. He doesn’t care if we bust a few of his street dealers, either. All he wants is enough advance warning to keep the people close to him out of it.”

“That way he protects his dope, right? That way he makes sure we never seize enough to really hurt him.”

“Pat, we could do this all night. My problem is I don’t see an easy way out of it, short of committing suicide. We’re in too deep. If Accacio drops a dime on us? I don’t have to draw no pictures, do I?”

“Stop right there, Sal.” Cohan set his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Are you tellin’ me the little greaseball actually
threatened
us?”

Patero shook his head. “You know, it’s funny, Pat. You didn’t turn a hair at the idea of covering up a homicide. But now you’ve got your balls in an uproar because Accacio dared to challenge your authority. It sounds like you’ve got things all backwards.”

Pat Cohan ignored the jibe. “What you said before? About Accacio dropping a dime on
us
? Well, Sal,
I’ve
never met the man, have I?”

It was Patero’s turn to blush and Pat Cohan watched the process with satisfaction.

“We’re the cops, Sal, remember? There’s twenty-four thousand of us. Prostitution? Gambling? The last I heard, they were called vices. And we
own
the Vice Squad. What we could do, if we wanted to, is hit every one of Accacio’s outlets on the same night. Teach the wop a lesson. If we wanted to.”

“He could still give my name to Internal Affairs.”

“Nobody cares about the pad, Sal. The pad is clean. Plus, the
one
thing we are in the Department is loyal. If Steppy Accacio breaks the faith, I’ll see to it that he never operates in New York City, again.
Never.
”

“I appreciate that.” Patero, much to his surprise, felt a wave of emotion roll over him. It took him a moment, but he finally recognized the emotion as pride, not gratitude. He was proud of an NYPD that protected its own, proud of a Pat Cohan who put loyalty before everything else, proud of himself for being part of the process. “I mean it, Pat. It makes a difference.”

Pat Cohan cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “Meanwhile, we haven’t been threatened. All it is, when you think about it, is a simple request. So, let’s consider it. How much are we talking about here?”

“Right now, we’re gettin’ a grand a month out of Accacio. Six hundred for you, four hundred for me. We help him out and he’ll double that, for starters.”

“Can we do it? Assuming we want to do it. The Narcotics Squad is pretty clean. If anyone’s taking, they’re keeping it to themselves.”

“Pat, I’m a Boy Scout. I come prepared. Ya know Wolf? The Jew in Safes and Lofts? Well, he’s in my pocket. Been there for more than a year, so I know he ain’t gonna fold. What I wanna do is transfer him over to Narcotics. Nobody’ll think twice, because I been under pressure to beef up Narcotics, anyway. Wolf’ll be my ears inside the squad. Accacio says all he wants is information, so information is what we’ll give him.”

Pat Cohan relit his cigar. “The thing is we
can’t
stop it. I mean the dope. Maybe if we’d started right after the war, when it was still small, we could’ve done something, but now it’s out of control.”

“For once, I gotta agree.” Patero sat up in the chair and crossed his legs. “The only thing we can do is
regulate
it.”

“Tell ya what, Sal. You go see Accacio tonight. Tell him we accept his offer, but it’ll take some time to set things up. Which it will, of course. Just make sure you tell him we’re expecting the first payment
now.
That’ll give us a month to make up our minds.”

They were silent for a moment, their silence constituting a kind of agreement. Pat Cohan, satisfied with his decision, let his thoughts wander lightly over his possessions—his home, his numerous bank accounts, his sad, sick wife, his only daughter. They finally came to rest on what had been bothering him all along. Stanley Moodrow.

“Let’s talk about Stanley for a moment,” he said.

Patero sighed, shrugging his shoulders. “I already clued you in, Pat. Stanley’s not a bad kid, but these things we’re doin’ ain’t right for him. And it ain’t his fault. It’s yours. You rushed him along too fast.”

“But he hasn’t actually
refused
to cooperate?”

“Do I have to go through it again? I gave Stanley a list of burglaries. I told him to include
all
of them in Zayas’s confession. He didn’t do it. Detectives, third grade, are not allowed to make their own decisions. It’s that simple. Plus, even if he
did
go along on the collections, I could see he didn’t like it. He
asked
to be put in one of the squads. Pat, I know you got a special interest here, but I ain’t got the time to be your future son-in-law’s psychiatrist. Either straighten him out or get Kathleen to find another boyfriend. Meanwhile, there’s somethin’ I ain’t told ya, somethin’ I didn’t wanna talk about over the phone.”

Pat Cohan sighed. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Ya remember the spic who got iced on Pitt Street? In the whorehouse?”

“I’m not senile. Yet.”

“Well, Stanley asked me about him this afternoon.”

Cohan’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. He rejected his first thought, that Stanley Moodrow was one of the headhunters from Internal Affairs, because it was too gruesome to contemplate.

“It ain’t what ya thinkin’,” Sal continued. “The spic, Melenguez, was a friend of one of Stanley’s neighbors. All Stanley wants to know is how it happened and where the investigation’s goin’. I told him I’d check on it and get back to him.”

“This is what happens,” Cohan grunted, “when you put a cop in his home precinct. Cases become personal. It destroys perspective.”

“The
perspective
here is that we’re not doin’ shit to find the perpetrator. The
perspective
is that even if we don’t know who the shooter is, we know who sent him. Now, whatta ya wanna tell Stanley?”

Pat Cohan took his time thinking it over. He re-lit his cigar, then blew on the ash until it glowed. “The first thing we better do is take it out of the precinct. Kick it up to the Organized Crime Task Force. They’ve already got a backload of mob killings that’ll keep them busy for the next five years. I expect to see Stanley tonight. I’ll tell him the spic was a pimp and we think his killing was mob-related, part of a turf war.”

“Sounds okay.” Patero glanced down at his watch. “Jeez, it’s almost nine o’clock. I ain’t laid eyes on my kids in two days. Lemme get the hell out of here. Maybe I’ll be home before they go to bed.”

Pat Cohan left his desk as soon as the door shut behind Sal Patero. He walked across the room, to a small table near the window, and sat down. A half-finished jigsaw puzzle lay on the table and he began to pick up individual pieces and fit them into an apple tree in the right hand corner of the puzzle. With his hands busy, his mind was free to consider his daughter’s boyfriend.

That’s the way he wanted to think of Stanley Moodrow—as a boyfriend, an unsuitable suitor, not as Kathleen’s fiancé. Cohan had been aware of Moodrow’s independent streak all along. Aware of it as a potential problem, especially if Stanley had a conscience to go along with it. Now the chickens were coming home to roost. Or, better still, the fox was in the chicken coop.

Like any good farmer, Cohan understood that the fox had to go. One way or the other. Unfortunately, the chicken, in this case, couldn’t be replaced by a fertilized egg. He thought, briefly, about living alone in his fine big house. Alone except for his crazy wife. He was fifty-nine years old. Retirement was coming, whether he liked it or not. He’d been counting on Kathleen and the grandchildren she’d give him to make that retirement bearable. If he forced her to choose between himself and Stanley Moodrow, there was always the possibility she’d choose Moodrow. He, Pat Cohan, was far too close to the situation to make an accurate judgment.

What he needed to do, he decided, was to move slowly. Wait for Moodrow to fall on his face. The kid was headstrong, stubborn. Sooner or later, like any other beginner, he’d make a mistake. And when he did, Pat Cohan would be standing there, shotgun in hand, like any good farmer with a fox in the coop.

Ten minutes later, when Moodrow knocked on the door, Pat Cohan was ready.

“It’s not locked,” he called, moving back to his desk.

“Evening, Pat.”

“Ah, Stanley. Yer lookin’ good, son. Swelling’s gone down. Bruises almost gone. Lookin’ good, all right.” He fumbled in his desk drawer. “Have a cigar?”

“No thanks, Pat. You know I don’t smoke.”