Piece of the Action (50 page)

Boom! Boom!

“For Christ’s sake, stop doin’ that.” Jake fired through the door again. Just a single shot, this time. He didn’t want to run out of ammo before the cops made their charge.

“What do you think, Jake? You think I’m standing in front of this door? You’re doin’ a nice job on the wall out here, but you’re not doin’ shit to
me.
”

“Yeah? Well, sooner or later, somebody’s gotta come
through
that door. If your balls are as big as your mouth, maybe you’ll be leadin’ the parade.”

“If that’s the way you feel about it, why don’t you just unlock the damn thing and get it over with? This hammer’s gettin’ heavy.”

Jake took a quick look out the window. There were more cops out there, now, but they weren’t moving toward his building. They were hanging their heads while some big-shot officer chewed them out. He laid Little Richard on the windowsill and carefully sighted down the barrel.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Somewhere along the line, Jake knew, he must have pulled the trigger. Because he could see smoke curling from the business end of the .45. Only, the cops on the roof were still talking. Even as he watched, one of them leveled his rifle and fired a shot. The bullet thumped into the mattress above Jake’s head.

Jake turned back to the door. The deadbolt was definitely bent, now. Once it let go, the bed slats would have to take the heat. They wouldn’t last long.

“You still in there?”

“Yeah,” Jake shouted. “Me and my aunt. She’s sittin’ right in front of the door.”

“That’s funny, your mama told me your aunt was in the hospital. She told me the apartment was empty.”

“Mama’s got a big mouth. What else did she tell ya?” Jake wasn’t exactly in the mood for conversation, but on the other hand, he didn’t want the cop pounding on the door, either. Yeah, he was gonna die—that much was obvious—but there was no sense in rushing it.

“She told me your father was a gangster.”

“Bullshit, Mama never talks about him.
Never.
”

“Whatta ya think, I’m making this up? Your father was a gangster. They found him floating in the river. Which is exactly what the mob’ll do to you, if they ever get their hands on you. Of course, that’s not likely to happen, considering the only way you’re gonna get out of here alive is to surrender and you’re much too tough to do anything like
that.
”

“It’s too late. I nailed one of the cops on the roof. From what I could see, the scumbag wasn’t movin’.”

“Look, Jake, the thing is I told your mother if you gave yourself up, I’d protect you. She wants to see you alive. That’s why she told me where you were.”

“How many cops ya got out there? Fifty? A hundred? I never got much education, but I ain’t so stupid I think a hundred cops are here to keep me alive.”

Boom!

“Hey, whatta ya doin’? I’m talkin’, ain’t I?”

“What’d I tell you, Jake? Didn’t I say I promised your mother? Now you’re making me out a liar and I don’t like it. I gave my word and I don’t welsh. Why don’t you open the door? Why don’t you toss the gun and come on out?”

Jake shook his head slowly. He looked down at Little Richard. Thinking about how he should just put the gun in his mouth and get it over with.

“What’s ya name, cop?”

“Moodrow. Detective Stanley Moodrow.”

“Stanley? What kinda pansy name is
Stanley
?”

“You know how it is, Jake. You don’t get to pick your name. Just like you don’t get to pick your parents. Some things in life you gotta learn to overcome.”

“Like the electric chair? How do ya
overcome
the hot seat?”

“With a lawyer, Jake, like everybody else. We made almost four hundred arrests for murder last year. Four hundred arrests, but how many executions? Two? Three? I can hear the social worker testifying. Giving the judge an earful about how your father corrupted you and your mother’s crazy and you never caught a break in your life.”

Suddenly, Jake got an idea. An idea that might keep him alive for a few more hours.

“A few hours ain’t a long time,” he muttered. “Unless ya lookin’ at a few minutes.”

“I can’t hear you, Jake? If you’re talking to me, I can’t hear a word you’re sayin’.”

“Ya want me to surrender, Stanley?”

“I wouldn’t complain.”

“Then get me a lawyer.
Before
I come out. Get me a lawyer named Irving Blumstein. He’s got an office on Broadway, near the courthouse. Ya put him out in that hall, where he can see what’s happening, and I’ll give myself up.”

Silence. Dead silence. Which was about what Jake expected. Well, let them take their time. Let ’em take all the time in the world.
He
wasn’t going anywhere.

When the cops on the rooftop opened fire, it sounded, as Moodrow had predicted, like WWIII had broken out. They opened up with submachine guns, shotguns and rifles. Thirty of them, firing as rapidly as possible. They concentrated their fire on the covered living-room windows, blowing the mattresses out with the first volley. Filling the room with deadly, dancing lead.

Stanley Moodrow stood, unflinching, through the two-minute volley, his eyes fixed to those of Captain John McElroy. McElroy, for his part, returned Moodrow’s stare. The two of them might have been alone in the hallway. Despite the presence of twenty crouching patrolmen, all of whom had their eyes tightly closed.

The silence, when it came, was worse than the shooting.
Dead
silence was the phrase that popped into Moodrow’s mind.

“Detective,” McElroy finally said. “Take the door down.”

Moodrow lowered the four-pound hammer to the floor. He dropped it gently, avoiding any sound, then picked up a sixteen-pound, long-handled sledge and drove it into the door. The crash was obscenely loud, a clear violation of the collective silence. As if a flasher had wandered into a crowd of mourners gathered around an open grave.

It wasn’t until the door gave way, suddenly flying open to smash against the inner wall, that Moodrow considered the possibility that Jake Leibowitz was alive and waiting. He dropped the sledgehammer, drew his weapon, then glanced up at McElroy.

“You got anything special in mind?” he asked.

McElroy didn’t bother to respond. He stepped into the doorway, leaving Moodrow no choice except to follow.

They found Jake Leibowitz’s body in a pool of blood and glass. He was lying face-down, the dozen wounds on his back clearly entrance wounds. The shotguns had done their job on the barricaded windows, but it was the rifles and the Thompsons that’d killed Jake Leibowitz. The single shotgun wound on his body hadn’t been fatal, although it must have been extremely painful. The pellets had ripped into the back of his head, tearing through his scalp and flipping it over his face.

Captain John McElroy stared down at Jake Leibowitz’s bloody skull for a moment, a thin smile pulling at his lips, then turned to face the young detective standing next to him.

“Looks like they started the autopsy without us,” he said.

“I
CHICKENED OUT, GRETA,” MOODROW
explained. “I chickened out twice. There’s no other way to look at it. When I left you and got in that car, I was determined to arrest Jake Leibowitz by myself. I wanted to drag him into the Seventh and toss him to the captain. Jake was gonna be my trophy. Proof that I was right all along. Only, I kept thinking about what might happen if he got past me. I mean he killed four men that we know about. I couldn’t take a chance, so I called in the troops. If I’d been there alone, I think I might’ve talked him out.”

He watched Greta reach into the oven and remove two sliced bagels. She dropped them onto a plate, then licked her fingers.

“Hot,” she said without turning around.

“You should use a fork.”

“One more thing to wash.” She unwrapped a bar of Philadelphia Cream Cheese and began to spread it over the bagels.

Moodrow watched her for another moment. He’d been postponing this talk for the last five days. Knowing it had to take place, despite his preoccupation with Kate and the swirl of events following her father’s suicide.

He’d come home that night to find a note:
Gone to Bayside. Back this evening. Much love.
The only problem was that “this evening” had already come and gone. Between a dead Jake Leibowitz, a dead cop named Strauss, more than five hundred rounds of police fire and fifty reports to be filed by fifty patrolmen, Moodrow, the only detective on the scene, hadn’t left the 7th Precinct until well after midnight.

What he’d assumed was that Kate had decided to spend the night in Bayside. The only question was whether she’d somehow fallen back under her father’s spell. But that hadn’t seemed possible. Not even to a thoroughly shell-shocked Stanley Moodrow. No, most likely Kate had called a half-dozen times and gotten no answer. Maybe she’d even called Greta. There’d been no way of knowing, because it was nearly one o’clock and he couldn’t make it into an emergency no matter how many scenarios he concocted.

He’d awakened the next morning to find Pat Cohan on the radio, on television, on the front page of every newspaper in New York City. The murder-suicide had transformed Jake Leibowitz and the rooftop shootout from a banner headline to an item on page fifteen.

The first phone call had come at ten o’clock in the morning: “John Hughes, from the
Journal-American.
You were Kate Cohan’s fiancé. Could you … ?”

Could you? Would you? Do you? It’d gone on for days. Despite his muttered, “No comment.” Despite hanging up again and again and again. It was
still
going on, though the volume of calls had slowed now that the funeral was over.

The sad part was that he’d answered every call, each time hoping to hear Kate’s voice. His own calls out to Bayside had been fielded by any number of unidentified friends and relatives. Most had been firm, but polite. A few had called him a bastard. One, a woman, had fairly hissed at him.

“Haven’t you done enoughhhhhhhhhh?”

Desperate, he’d driven out to St. John’s Cemetery in Flushing and watched the funeral procession pass through the cemetery gates. He’d seen Kate in the back of the limousine following the casket, a small veiled figure encircled by men in black overcoats. Were they relatives or cops? And where were the women? The helpful aunts? The trusted friends?

The questions were making him crazy. He’d sought Greta’s advice, then Allen Epstein’s. Both had delivered the same message: give her time to sort it out. Time was the
only
cure.

He should, he knew later, have taken their advice, because when he’d finally driven out to Bayside, the trip had made him even crazier. Kate’s Uncle Bill, her mother’s brother, had answered the door. An elderly man, he’d looked embarrassed at first. Then he’d invited Moodrow inside.

“She’s not here, lad,” he’d said. “You can look if you want.”

Moodrow, a cop to his bones, had taken the old man up on the offer, wandering from room to room. He’d found a lot of empty space and a single locked door. It led, he knew, to Rose Cohan’s bedroom.

“It hasn’t been cleaned,” Bill Brannigan had said apologetically. “It’ll have to be cleaned soon, I suppose. If we’re to put the house on the market.”

Moodrow had responded by kicking the door off the hinges. Only to find that Bill Brannigan hadn’t been lying. The room was covered with dried blood. The furniture, the floors, the walls, the ceiling. Brannigan, staring helplessly at the carnage, had begun to cry.

“Take as long as you have to, Bill. I’m not leaving until you tell me where she is.”

“She’s on retreat.” Brannigan had peered at him through bewildered eyes. “Holy Mother Church has taken Kate to her sacred bosom.”

“Stanley, you want lox on your bagel?” Moodrow looked up quickly. Telling himself to stop drifting off. Willing himself to remain in the present. Reminding himself that his career was on the line, that he had to be in Deputy Chief Milton Morton’s office in less than two hours and that he’d better be ready.

“Yeah, fine.” He sipped at his coffee and ran his fingers over his newly shaven face. “What was I saying?”

“About chickening out. Which only a
meshugganer
could believe you’d do.”

“Yeah, right.” Moodrow watched Greta set the plate down in front of him. “I guess ‘chickening out’ is a kid’s way of putting it, but I had choices and I made them. I didn’t have to call in the troops, but I did. And I didn’t have to obey the captain, either. When he so much as
told
me that he wasn’t gonna give Jake a chance, I didn’t have to help him create a diversion. I could have taken the gold shield and rammed it up his ass. Why not, Greta? If my mother could use a hatpin, why couldn’t I use a badge?”

“
Nu,
because a captain is not a horse.”

Moodrow bit off a chunk of bagel and began to chew thoughtfully. “I loved the hunt,” he said after a moment. “You know, the investigation. Tracking Jake down. Boxing him into a corner. That’s the way I fought in the ring. The way I
had
to fight. I was too slow to catch anybody on the run.”

“Stanley, please. Life is difficult enough. Only a
shlemiel
goes through life making things more difficult. A man is killed; a killer is dead.
Nu
?”

“Yeah? Well, it wasn’t ‘
nu
’ for Al and Betty O’Neill. Maybe they were a couple of pimps, but they didn’t deserve the death penalty.”

“This was your fault?”

“And then there’s Rose Cohan. And Kate.”

It was Greta’s turn to fidget. She brushed a small pile of crumbs into the palm of her hand and dumped them on the edge of her plate. “She’ll come around, Stanley. It’s only been five days.”

“You do one thing and ten things happen. There’s no way to control it.” He shook his head. “It’s like throwing a punch at your opponent and hitting a spectator.”

“Stanley, could I tell you a story?”

Moodrow smiled for the first time in days. “Please,” he answered.

“This happened in nineteen thirty-three. A strike at Goldman Furs. At the time, I was pregnant with my second and I wasn’t even working. But Yussel Mittman, from the union, came to me and begged me to help out. ‘It’s a
mitzvah,
a
mitzvah.
Please, we need a woman and there’s nobody else.’ ”