Piece of the Action (23 page)

Moodrow let his left fist fly. “You
don’t
talk to me, you might not live through the day.” He peered down at O’Neill, wondering if he’d actually knocked the man out. He’d never knocked a man out with a jab. But no, O’Neill wasn’t unconscious, he was just smart enough to stay on the floor.

“Hey, Al, I’m sorry,” Moodrow continued. “I don’t actually wanna hurt you, but I need to make you understand that I’m serious here. I need to make you understand that after I establish motive and opportunity, I’m gonna drag your ass uptown and persuade you to confess to this awful crime. Now, you shouldn’t take this to mean that I can’t appreciate your point of view. I can see you’re in a tough spot and maybe it’s better you should risk gettin’ electrocuted five years from now than risk gettin’ blown away next week. But I got my own priorities.”

Moodrow reached down, grabbed O’Neill by the shirt, hauled his 225 pounds upright and slammed him into the chair. He was about to resume his interrogation when he heard a voice in the hallway.

“Al, where the hell are you? What’re you doin’?”

Moodrow, caught by surprise, looked around for a place to hide, then thought better of it. The panic in Al O’Neill’s face gave him a better idea.

“C’mon in,” Moodrow said. “I’m in the office.”

The man who walked into the room was young and blond. He hesitated when he saw Moodrow, but only for a second. “Hey, what’s doin’?” he said.

“Nothin’ much,” Moodrow answered. “How’s by you?”

The man turned to O’Neill without answering. “I got a delivery for you, Al,” he said. “Collect.” He dropped a small paper bag on the desk and stepped back while a sweating Al O’Neill counted out two hundred dollars, then handed it over.

“All right?” O’Neill asked without looking up.

“Fine, Al. Just fine.” The man started to turn away, then checked himself. “I think you cut yourself, Al. Up there next to your eye. Better put some iodine on that. You don’t wanna get infected. Also, your front door’s open. That’s why I came in. I figured something might be wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Moodrow said, standing up and turning toward the much smaller man. “We’re just havin’ a conversation. A private conversation, if you take my meaning. You could shut the door on your way out.”

“I’ll do that.”

Moodrow watched the man retreat, heard the front door slam, then turned back to Al O’Neill. “What’s in the bag, Al? You gettin’ a condom delivery?”

O’Neill groaned, but made no effort to prevent Moodrow from emptying the contents of the paper bag on the desk.

“This looks like dope to me.” Moodrow pointed at the forty small glassine envelopes. “It looks like a
lot
of dope. The little lady can’t be using all this horse. You gotta be supplying it to the girls. At a profit, of course.”

O’Neill, to Moodrow’s surprise, burst into tears. “He made you for a cop,” the fat man blubbered. “I know he made you.”

“You worried about a small-time pusher? A big man like you?”

“He’s connected. If he talks, I’m dead. And he’s gonna talk.”

O’Neill was close to caving in, to spilling his guts. Moodrow could feel it. The fat man was like a little kid standing by the edge of a swimming pool. He was afraid of the water, but once he got wet, he’d stay in there all afternoon. The temptation was to push him over the edge, but Moodrow instinctively knew that wouldn’t work. He knew that this particular child had to be convinced that jumping was in his own best interest.

“Tell me what you wanna do, Al,” Moodrow finally said.

“What?”

“Look, whoever that kid was, he’s already seen you, right? We can’t take that back. Plus, a murder was committed in this room. We can’t take that back, either. So, you take it from here. You tell me what you wanna do.”

“I wanna get my ass outta here in a hurry,” O’Neill said without hesitation. “I got money put away in the bank. I wanna take it and run.”

“Good. I’m glad you said that, because it means you know that going to jail won’t protect you. Whoever’s after you can reach right into the Tombs and pluck you out. Am I right?”

“Keep goin’.”

“Okay, you told me what
you
want. Being that fair is fair, I’m gonna tell you what
I
want. I want you to tell me what happened here on December 26. All of it. I wanna know who was here and why they were here. I wanna know who they worked for and if any cops were involved. Once you make me believe that you’re telling the truth, you get to write everything down in your own handwriting and sign it. Then your wife does the same thing and we stroll over to the drug store on Delancey Street so we can have your signatures notarized. After we’re all finished, I’ll let you run as far and as fast as you can. And I won’t ask where you’re going. How’s that sound?”

O’Neill stared up at Moodrow, his look a mixture of confusion and hope. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “All I know is that I’m screwed.”

“Why don’t you start with the night of December twenty-sixth. Somebody came into this office and assaulted your wife. Why? Were they here to rob you? Was it another pimp? Tell me what happened, Al. These people are gonna to kill you if they get the chance. You don’t owe them anything.”

“There were three of them,” Al O’Neill finally began, “and they were here because I was late with my payments.”

S
TEPPY ACCACIO WAS IN
a towering rage. In the first place, it was only eleven o’clock in the morning,
way
too early to be dealing with major problems. In the second place, his bitch of a Sicilian wife was nowhere to be found.

“Where ya hidin’, Angie?” he shouted. “Ya humpin’ the paperboy? Ya humpin’ the goddamn Fuller Brush man? Who ya humpin’, Angie?”

Accacio roared through the house, screaming his wife’s name at the top of his lungs. He knew he was wasting time, wasting
valuable
time, but he couldn’t help himself. When his temper went off, it went off. There was nothing he could do except ride it out.

Still, he’d feel better when he found his lazy wife and gave her a few good reasons to answer him the first time he called her name. When he let the pressure roaring in his temples out through his fists.

He was down in the basement, still shouting, when he heard his Cadillac (his brand-new Cadillac) pull into the garage. There she was, out shopping when he wanted her. Playing around in the department stores. Buying some kind of bullshit they didn’t need and never would need.

“Welcome home, bitch,” he hissed as she came into the kitchen with a bag of groceries in her arms.

“I got fresh rolls,” Angie said, holding the paper bag between them. “And some fruits. For you breakfast.”

Steppy Accacio slapped the groceries out of her hand. The truth was that he didn’t care
what
was in the bag. He didn’t give two shits if it was filled with hundred-dollar bills. The bitch was gonna get what she deserved. Even if she didn’t deserve it. He slapped her in the face, then slapped her again.

“I want you here when I want you here,” he shouted. “I don’t want you somewheres else.”

She made no move to defend herself, her arms limp at her sides, head lowered. For some reason, this made Steppy Accacio even angrier. It made him want to
really
work her over, to bust her ribs, crack her nose, split her lips. He could almost taste the blood.

But there was no time for it. Joe Faci and Santo Silesi were on their way over. If he did the job on Angie, she’d require some kind of medical attention and that would only complicate what was already getting out of hand.

He reached out and pulled her coat off, then grabbed her blouse and yanked it so hard the buttons flew across the kitchen.

“Get out of those clothes,” he ordered. “You could sit up in your bedroom for the rest of the day. I don’t wanna see ya dressed. Maybe you won’t go nowheres if ya tits’re hangin’ out.”

Angie, already tugging at the hooks on her bra, started to walk past him, but he pushed her back against the kitchen table. “Do it here. I wanna make sure ya don’t defy me. Bein’ as ya not a person I could trust.”

Steppy grinned, enjoying her obvious humiliation. She was probably blushing, he decided, even if you couldn’t see it through that dark Sicilian skin. Angie was a devout Catholic, and despite all the bullshit about Sicilians being so lusty, sex with her was an obligation, like going to church on Christmas and Easter. Ordinarily, he much preferred the kinds of games he played with the whores under his control, but this was different. This was an opportunity. He felt the blood pounding in his temples start to pound in his crotch.

“Nice tits, Angie. I admit it. Ya got a nice set of bazoomas.”

And it was the truth, too. Maybe, someday, their kids (if they ever managed to
have
kids) would drag those grapefruits down to her waist. But for now they rode high, pointing right at his lips. He reached out and took her nipples between his fingers and twisted until he was sure it hurt. She didn’t cry out, of course. She
never
cried out.

“Keep goin’, Angie. I’m gonna give ya what ya deserve.”

He watched her step out of her shoes. Watched her wriggle out of her skirt, then slide her panties down over her hips.

“Open ya legs. Open ’em wide. That’s a good girl. That’s a very good girl. See how nice I am when ya give me what I want? Now, turn around, Angie. Show me that sweet brown ass.”

He stepped forward, pushing his crotch into her buttocks, then slammed her down against the tabletop.

“Reach behind ya, Angie,” he hissed. “Reach behind and take it out for me. I’m feelin’ lazy at the moment.”

Thirty minutes later, when Joe Faci and Santo Silesi finally arrived, Steppy Accacio’s mood had gone from bad to good to bad again. The way Accacio saw it, the small, fragile niche he’d managed to carve for himself on New York’s Lower East Side, his stepping stone to bigger and better things, was being threatened by forces he’d thought were under control. True, he didn’t have all the facts yet. Maybe, just maybe, his young nephew had misjudged the situation. Maybe Sandy had simply panicked. But one thing for sure, the bosses who’d given him permission to occupy his little niche would yank that permission the minute they felt he couldn’t control his territory. There was no shortage of aspiring businessmen looking for the same chance he’d been given.

Accacio didn’t bother showing Faci and his nephew into the den. With Angie naked in their bedroom, there was little chance of being overheard. He didn’t bother with espresso and pastries, either. What Accacio felt as he led the two men into the living room was cold hard fear. It was like being nineteen years old and back in the army again, back in that minefield in France. The lieutenant had led them into that field as if they were taking a stroll through Central Park. It wasn’t until the first mine exploded, showering the platoon with bloody chunks of PFC Trevor Jones, that the dumb bastard figured it out. The following hour had been the longest in Steppy Accacio’s life. He still dreamed about it.

“Awright, Sandy,” Accacio said, his voice surprisingly quiet, even to himself, “let’s hear it.”

“There’s not much to tell. I’m supposed to go into O’Neill’s twice a week to drop off forty bags of dope. If he needs anything extra, he sends one of the whores out to pick it up. Yesterday, I’m making my regular delivery and I find the front door wide open. I knock and call out, but O’Neill doesn’t answer, which is very unusual because he mostly stays by that door. Now I don’t like the situation, but I still wanna deliver the dope because I’m finished for the morning and if O’Neill doesn’t take it, I’m gonna have to hold onto the forty bags all day. So, I’m walking back to the office, still calling O’Neill’s name, when someone says, ‘C’mon in.’ Me, I think it’s O’Neill, but when I go inside, I find this cop sitting on O’Neill’s desk. My first instinct is to get the hell out of there, but I manage to hold together and make the delivery. I figured the cop would be more suspicious if I ran.”

“But you didn’t actually
hear
what they were talkin’ about,” Accacio said. “For all ya know, they coulda been talkin’ about the weather. I mean it coulda been the cop was tryin’ to shake the pimp down. Happens all the time.”

“I thought about that and I guess it’s possible. But what keeps bothering me is the look on O’Neill’s face when I walked into the office. I thought the pimp was gonna have a heart attack. I’m telling you, Steppy, his face was dead white, like he was looking into his own coffin. Then the cop tells me that him and O’Neill are having a
private
conversation.”

“Did O’Neill say anything? Anything at all.”

“Not a word. But his hands were shaking so bad, he could hardly count out the two hundred.”

“If the situation was so fucking serious, how come you waited this long to tell me?” Accacio’s voice rose as he asked the question. He could feel his anger returning. !

“The kid didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Joe Faci interrupted. “Him and the hebes had to go to Jersey in the afternoon. Then he had to go back in the projects at night. He called me as soon as he was finished, but you was already outta touch by then.”

“Yeah,” Sandy said quickly. “The thing was I didn’t wanna tell Jake before I spoke to you. The job we had to do in Jersey with SpeediFreight? If I didn’t show up for that, Jake would’ve
known
something was wrong. He’s not a dope, Steppy. He’s smart, like all the Jews. What I did was go through the day like nothing happened. Then, after I got finished in the projects, I found Joe and told him exactly what I’m telling you.”

Steppy Accacio leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. His nephew’s story was based on nothing more than instinct. Instinct, Steppy knew, was important. You couldn’t really make your way in this business without it, but you could also let it get away from you. Facts were a lot better, but sometimes facts were hard to come by. You might spend weeks digging out the facts and, meanwhile, your whole life was going down the drain.

“Could you describe this cop? Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“That’s easy,” Santo Silesi replied. “He was a fucking giant. Six-five, at least, and built like a refrigerator. Plus, he had a scar in his eyebrow. The scar was still red, so he must’ve gotten it recently. I could make out the stitch marks.”