Piece of the Action (20 page)

But there was also the chance that Patero was right, that Allen Epstein was simply mistaken. Maybe the sergeant was confusing Melenguez with someone else. Maybe, despite all appearances, Melenguez’s death
had
been a mob hit. Maybe the detectives had concluded that Melenguez was a pimp on the basis of information from their informants.

In the end, there were too many ‘maybes’ for a man as inherently curious as Stanley Moodrow. What he did was go down to the files and pull the paperwork. He didn’t expect anyone to notice and nobody did. Paperwork was Moodrow’s job.

He went through the file systematically, beginning with the patrolman’s report and proceeding to Epstein’s observations, the preliminary reports of the two detectives and the forensic unit’s description of the crime scene. Melenguez had been gunned down from inside an office on the first floor, rear, of 800 Pitt Street with a .45 caliber pistol. There was no doubt about it. Melenguez had been hit four times and all four slugs had been recovered, two from the hallway behind the victim and two from the victim’s body.

Moodrow turned to the Medical Examiner’s report. The M.E.’s description was gruesome enough—the first shot, the one that’d killed him, had blown away half his face; the next three had turned his abdominal cavity into tomato soup—but there was nothing in it to contradict the detectives’ preliminary assessments.

The witness interviews came next. There were fourteen interviews with women and one with a man, a further indication, assuming 800 Pitt Street wasn’t a nunnery, that Melenguez had been gunned down inside a whorehouse. Moodrow scanned the interviews as quickly as possible, noting the name of the only man.

Finishing, Moodrow realized that Epstein had been right about one thing: none of the witnesses, even though all had been isolated during the questioning, had been willing to admit they’d eyeballed the shooting. Which raised several questions. Melenguez had been standing in the doorway. The perpetrator had been standing inside the office. Epstein was of the opinion that Melenguez had wandered into a robbery in progress. But wasn’t it also possible that Melenguez had
been
the robber? According to the preliminary reports, no weapons of any kind had been found at the scene. If Melenguez had been armed, someone had taken the time to remove the weapon. Or maybe one of the whores had scooped it up with the intention of selling it on the street.

Moodrow turned to the follow-ups, the DD5’s. The two detectives handling the case, John Samuelson and Paul Maguire, had interviewed Melenguez’s employer, a trucker named Levy, as well as several co-workers. The portrait that emerged was of a hard-working, ambitious immigrant. Melenguez had been in New York for slightly less than six months. He’d shown up for work every day. He had no friends outside of his fellow workers and spent his nights listening to the radio and writing letters home.

Moodrow recalled the picture Nenita Melenguez had shown him. He tried to imagine the tiny man with the jug ears packing a rod, pulling it on the pimp who ran the whorehouse. He couldn’t even come close.

The obvious next step was to speak to the suits who’d handled the case before it was farmed out of the precinct. As it happened, Moodrow knew Paul Maguire fairly well. Maguire had still been in uniform when Moodrow came onto the job and for a short time before Maguire’s appointment to the detectives, the two of them had walked overlapping beats.

That was on the plus side. There was a minus side as well. Moodrow knew he could return the file with no one the wiser. He could still put it back and forget the whole thing. But once he started talking to other cops, he had no way to predict who might whisper what message into Sal Patero’s ear. Paul Maguire had always been friendly, but how was Moodrow to know where Maguire’s loyalties lay? Ordinarily, jobs were given out to any detective foolish enough to be loitering in the squad room when a call came into the precinct. On the other hand, Patero might have personally assigned the case to Maguire because he knew Maguire could be trusted to do what he was told.

Moodrow went back to the filing cabinets and replaced the paperwork, then strolled over to the squad room and poured himself a cup of coffee. Samuelson and Maguire had back-to-back desks in a far corner of the room. Moodrow looked over, hoping they were out in the field, but found both men pounding away on their respective Underwoods. He recalled what Epstein had told him about going the distance, using time to his own advantage.

What I oughta do, he thought, is forget about this bullshit. What I oughta do is stay close to Kate and brown-nose her old man until after the wedding. What I oughta do is find an apartment in Flushing and move out of the Lower East Side. What I oughta do …

Sound advice, he couldn’t deny it, but his long legs kept moving across the squad room. Kept moving until he was standing next to Paul Maguire’s desk.

“How ya doin’, fellas?”

Maguire and Samuelson looked up in surprise. Just as if they hadn’t seen him coming.

“What’s goin’ on, Stanley?” Maguire said.

“You know the Melenguez case?” Moodrow paused, but neither man spoke. “Well, I was looking over the paperwork.”

“Somethin’ missing?” Samuelson asked. “Not that it matters, because the case is goin’ away from us. In fact, it’s already gone.”

“No, that’s not it. Nothing’s missing.” Now that he was in the middle of it, Moodrow couldn’t decide what he wanted to ask. The two detectives weren’t any help. They continued to stare at him with blank expressions. “All right, there’s a couple of things bothering me. If Melenguez was shot from inside the office, either the pimp or someone the pimp knows had to be the shooter. How else would the perpetrator get in there? Sal thinks Melenguez was hit by a professional. But that doesn’t make sense, either. Why would anybody want to rub out Luis Melenguez?”

“Wait a second, Stanley,” Maguire interrupted. “Are you saying the lieutenant’s not happy with the work we did?”

“Just the opposite. Sal’s already signed off on the case. What I’m doing here is personal. Rosaura Pastoral, Melenguez’s landlady, happens to live in my building. She asked me to check it out.”

As far as Moodrow could tell, his explanation had exactly no effect on the two detectives. Their faces remained blank. They didn’t even look at each other.

“Everything’s in the file,” Samuelson finally said. “Whatever we found out, that’s where it is. We got nothing to add.”

Moodrow remembered to thank the men before walking away. He felt like an idiot, but the feeling didn’t make him unhappy. No more bullshit, he told himself. No more Sherlock Holmes. Mind your own goddamned business before you do something to put your ass in a permanent sling.

He went back to his own desk and began to review a case the ADAs had sent over in the morning. There were two statements missing, one from the complainant and one from the accused. The defendant’s lawyer was demanding both and the prosecutor intended to drop the indictment if they couldn’t be located.

Two hours later, the missing statements found and already on their way to the DA’s office, Moodrow signed out and began to walk through the remains of the morning’s snowstorm to his apartment a few blocks away. He was due out in Bayside at eight-thirty and his thoughts were on Kate and what she might have told her father. The last time they’d spoken, he’d begged her to defy the priest. Kate, after much argument, had agreed to think about it. What bothered her was the distinct possibility that Father Ryan might decide that, despite the theoretical sanctity of the confessional, it was his Christian duty to have a little talk with Pat Cohan. It had happened too many times in the past to be entirely discounted.

“Stanley.”

“Huh?” Moodrow turned to the man who’d fallen into step beside him. It was Paul Maguire.

“Just keep walkin’, Stanley. I wanna have a little talk with you.”

“Whatever ya say, Paul.”

“The thing of it is, Stanley, that this conversation never happened. Understand?
Never.
”

“Sure.”

“Because if it gets back to Sal Patero, I’ll be walkin’ a beat in Far Rockaway. It gets real cold out there near the ocean. The wind never stops blowin’.”

“Paul, I get the message.”

“Okay, what you said about Melenguez? You’re right. There was no hit and Melenguez was in the building to get laid. One of the whores told me she’d just finished takin’ care of him.”

“I didn’t see that in the interviews.”

“Maybe somebody took it out. Maybe your buddy, Sal Patero, took it out. I’m not here to solve this crime. All I wanna do is whisper a few words in your ear. Then, it’s up to you. You hearing me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“O’Neill runs the house. Him and his wife. I’d bet my gold shield that both of them were in the office when the shooting went down. Someone put a heavy beating on the pair of ’em and it sure as shit wasn’t Melenguez.”

“The beating wasn’t in the files, either. What you’re sayin’ is that somebody’s covering up a homicide. A fucking
homicide.
”

“Stanley, I’m here to give you a piece of advice. If you’re smart, you’ll keep your nose out of it. This goes a lot further than Sal Patero. But, if you’re stupid, here’s what you should do. O’Neill and his old lady are still running the show on Pitt Street. Squeeze ’em. Squeeze ’em like tubes of fucking toothpaste. I got a hundred bucks here that says the same guys who pounded on O’Neill and his old lady shot Melenguez. I got another hundred that says O’Neill knows the shooter.”

Stanley Moodrow knew he’d stepped in it when the door of Kate’s home opened to reveal her mother, Rose. Decked out in widow’s weeds, the small slight woman took a backward step and raised her fist to her mouth. A rosary, its onyx beads as black as her dress, dangled from bony fingers.

“Mr. Cohan wants to see you,” she hissed.

“Where is he?”

She continued to back away until her heels were against the first riser of the staircase. Then she turned and fled.

Moodrow stood in the open doorway for a moment. A mixture of emotions coursed through him—dread, rage, fear. He didn’t want to sort them out; he wanted to flee from the situation, just as Rose Cohan had fled. It’s bad, he thought. It’s so bad it can only get worse.

He recalled a day, early in his fighting career, when he’d been asked to spar with a hotshot middleweight named Virgil Thomas. Already over a hundred and seventy-five pounds and cocky as hell, he’d jumped at the chance. Thirty seconds later, as the slap of leather against flesh echoed through the small gym, he’d known he was in deep trouble. He also knew there was no remedy except to go through with it and that was what he’d done. Now, he was going to have to go through with it again.

Moodrow crossed the living room and opened the door to Pat Cohan’s den without knocking. He’d been hoping against hope to find Kate inside, but Cohan was alone.

“You don’t knock?” Cohan asked.

“Where’s Kate?”

“What’s the hurry, Casanova? You so horny you can’t spend a few minutes talking to me?” Cohan lit the stub of a cigar and sucked it into life. He was fully dressed, his jacket and vest buttoned, his hair sweeping out and back like the lion’s mane he imagined it to be.

“Where’s Kate?” Moodrow stepped forward. There was a chair between him and Pat Cohan’s desk. He swept it away with a casual wave of his right hand. “Where’s Kate?”

“I thought it best she not be here for this.”

Moodrow watched Cohan shrink back in his chair. The Inspector was staring, not into his eyes, but at the still-red scar on his brow. Moodrow, like all fighters, drew energy from his opponent’s fear.

“Why’s that?”

“Look here, boyo …”

“I’m not your fucking ‘boyo,’ Pat. I’m twenty-five years old. And Kate’s not your ‘darlin’ Kathleen,’ either. She’s a twenty-two-year-old woman. You can’t keep her in diapers forever.”

“I didn’t call you in here to fight with you, Stanley.”

“This I already figured.”

Pat Cohan’s face contorted with anger. “Listen, you little prick, I made you and I can break you.”

“That works both ways, Pat. The way I see it, we’re in this together. Till death or the Department do us part.”

Cohan managed a thin smile. He sucked on his unlit cigar. “That’s not entirely true, Stanley, but I’m not here to threaten you. If you remember, I only asked one thing of you when you requested permission to see Kathleen. I asked you to keep her pure until after the wedding.”

Moodrow finally sat down. He shook his head in disgust. “Why don’t you cut the bullshit. Stop living in Never-Never Land. She’s a woman, that’s all. And this ain’t the fucking junior prom. Nobody cares unless the woman gets pregnant. And the people I grew up with don’t even care about
that.
As long as you do the right thing.”

“She committed a
sin,
Stanley. And
you
should have known better.
You
should have stopped her. Kate is innocent. She’s inexperienced, naive.”

Moodrow thought back to that morning when she’d shown up on his door- step. Innocent? Naive? What she
really
was was stupid for going to the wrong priest. What she
really
was was weak for not telling him to stick his penance in his breviary.

“All right, Pat. Let’s say it was a sin. Let’s even say that I took advantage of a naive young girl. So what? It’s over now and there’s nothing you can do to fix it. Kate and I are engaged. That means whatever advantage I took, I’m gonna be makin’ it up to her for the next forty or fifty years. Ya know, when I went to Catholic school, the nuns taught me that my sins were between me and God. So what are you doing here? You so high up in the job, you think you’re God?”

Pat Cohan put the stub of his cigar in the ashtray. He ran his fingers through his silvery hair and leaned forward. “What I want, Stanley, is for you to go away. Take it from a man trapped in a miserable marriage, you and Kate aren’t right for each other. You’re not even close. So why don’t you tell me what
you
want?”

“What I want is Kate. And if you say she doesn’t want me, if you put that lie in her mouth, I’ll drive my fist through the back of your head.”