January 7
The sergeant at the duty desk, Stefan Kirsch, grinned from ear to ear when Stanley Moodrow walked into the 7th Precinct.
“Jesus, Stanley,” he said, “I thought you won the fight.”
“That’s just a rumor, Sarge. The real truth is that only the doctor won.”
Moodrow felt awkward coming into the stationhouse in a suit and tie. He’d been proud enough when he’d examined himself in the privacy of his bedroom, but now he felt almost naked. He felt like a civilian.
“Well, congratulations, anyway. You deserve it.”
“Thanks, Sarge.”
There were several other uniforms in the outer lobby, all cops Moodrow had been working with for the past five years. They, too, greeted him like the celebrity he was supposed to be. One, James Curley, walked over and ran his fingers along Moodrow’s lapel.
“Where’d ya get the rag, Stanley? Robert Hall?”
“Robert Hall? If you wanna say I’m cheap, why not try S. Klein’s?”
“Alright, S. Klein’s.”
“Jimmy, the suit’s custom-made.” Moodrow wasn’t lying, even if he’d left out the part about going down to Robert Hall and not finding a suit big enough to fit him. He didn’t mention the part about the tailor, Larry Chin, working out of his apartment on Division Street, either. Or the one about the bolt of cloth being a factory second from a mill in South Carolina.
“I’m only kiddin’ ya, Stanley.” He took Moodrow’s hand and shook it. “Congratulations on the Gold Shield. Lookin’ at your face, I’d have to say you deserve it.”
“That seems to be the general opinion.”
The needling was just what Moodrow expected. After all, he (in their minds, at least) had been fighting for every cop in the Department and for the cops in the 7th in particular. That was why they’d come to watch two men beat the crap out of each other. Because they somehow shared in the victory.
“I’ll see you later, Jimmy. I gotta report upstairs.”
For Stanley Moodrow, walking up those stairs was a far greater reward than having the referee lift his arm. Uniformed cops almost never left the first floor of the 7th Precinct. The second story contained the captain’s and the lieutenants’ offices, as well as the detectives’ squad room. Going up there was like being given a day pass to Mount Olympus.
Now, he’d be walking up these stairs every day. The squad room would be a second home, the other detectives a second family. Which is why he was hoping for a big hello from those detectives who happened to be at their desks. What he got, on the other hand, was ignored.
The 7th Precinct squad room (like every other detectives’ squad room in New York City) was nothing more than a large room crowded with wooden desks. Ancient wooden desks. Desks blackened with decades of grime and covered with unfinished paperwork. The telephones were so old, the numbers had worn off the dials.
Moodrow picked his way between the desks. He knew a few of the detectives from one or another of his fights, but even the familiar faces kept their backs turned to him. Of course, there was always the possibility that this was the way they treated all newly appointed detectives, third grade. Maybe their studied indifference was a kind of initiation rite, like fraternity hazing.
Not that he had much time to think about it. He had to report to Detective Lieutenant Salvatore Patero, the precinct whip, for assignment to one or another of the many detectives’ squads and Patero’s office was just on the other side of the room. As he knocked on the door, Moodrow wondered just where he’d be assigned. He was hoping for homicide, but it was more likely he’d begin at the beginning, with vice or burglary.
“Come on in.”
Patero’s face was buried in the Herald-Tribune when Moodrow entered the small office. He took his time before looking up, but when he saw Moodrow, he managed a smile.
“Welcome to the detectives, Stanley.”
“Thanks, Lou. Glad to be here.”
“Siddown a minute. And don’t call me ‘Lou’ or ‘Lieutenant.’ Sal’ll be fine.” Patero waited for Moodrow to seat himself before continuing. “You’re gonna be working with me, Stanley. You’re gonna be my personal assistant. At least temporarily.”
Moodrow waited for Patero to say something else, to at least explain the nuts and bolts of personal assistantship, but Patero wasn’t talking. He lit a cigarette, a Kent, and leaned back in his chair.
“Uh, Sarge,” Moodrow finally said, “the thing is that I’m not sure that I’m qualified to be your assistant. I don’t know anything about the paperwork or the procedure. I …”
“Can you drive a car?”
“Yeah. Of course. How can you be a cop if you can’t drive?”
“For now, that’s all you gotta know.” Patero pushed back his chair and grinned. “What’s the matter, Stanley? You don’t look happy.”
What Moodrow felt was cheated. He wasn’t sure who’d done the cheating, but he knew that he hadn’t fought his way to a Gold Shield in order to become Sal Patero’s chauffeur. Or his secretary, either. Moodrow felt the anger begin to rise, but when he spoke, his voice was calm.
“I was hoping to, you know, just start in the regular way.”
Patero leaned over the desk. “In that case, maybe you should’ve become a detective in the regular way. But you didn’t, Stanley. You got here because you met the right people, not because of what you did on the street. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not puttin’ you down. In the job, politics is what it’s all about. Everybody knows that. But when your rabbi’s an inspector and when you’re engaged to your rabbi’s daughter, there’s no more regular to your career. You’re gonna ride with me and neither of us has any say in the matter. If you got a problem with that, go to your future father-in-law. Capish?”
“I understand.”
“I wanna get along with you, Stanley. Because, personally, I think you’re a good guy. I doubt very much that Pat Cohan bothered to look at your service folder, but I went through every inch of it. I liked what I saw. And I’m also glad to hear that you want to go into one of the squads. Eventually, if I can swing it, you will. But right now your job is to learn how things work and my job is to teach you. Take the keys to my car and go make sure it isn’t blocked in. You won’t have a problem finding it. Being as I’m a big shot in the Seventh, I get a white Chevy instead of a black Chevy.”
Patero’s white ’57 Chevrolet, though unmarked, was far from unrecognizable. Moodrow, sitting behind the wheel with the engine running, recalled a time when he’d been working traffic on the corner of Houston and Clinton. The kids were coming out of school and his job was to get them safely across
Houston Street’s eight lanes of cars, trucks and buses. Patero had come cruising up Clinton in his white Chevy. A bunch of kids, grammar school kids, were following behind, yelling, “Here comes the lieutenant. Here comes the lieutenant.”
Maybe, Moodrow figured, if he spent enough time with Patero, the kids would call out, “Here comes the lieutenant’s dog.”
Patero strolled out ten minutes later, still carrying the Herald-Tribune. He got in the car, instructed Moodrow to drive over to Madison and Montgomery Streets, then buried his face in the newspaper. Moodrow, not knowing what else to do, pulled the car away from the curb and began to work his way along the narrow Lower East Side streets. They were stopped at a light when Patero spoke up.
“Stanley,” he said, “ya wanna hear somethin’ funny?”
“Anything.”
“Awright, you remember a kid named Bobby Gaydos?”
“The kid who killed his mother?”
“Right. Cut her throat with a Boy Scout knife last Thursday. Well, yesterday, four detectives take him over to the funeral home where she’s laid out and he breaks down and cries for two hours. Boo-hoo-hoo. Whatta ya wanna bet some commie judge sends him to a nut house for treatment? Instead of the electric chair, where he belongs. I mean the kid made a goddamned confession.”
“Two goddamned confessions.” The truth, and Moodrow knew it, was that the kid had withdrawn his confessions and his grandmother was providing him with an alibi for the time of the murder. Moodrow also knew that interrogating officers routinely extracted confessions the way dentists extracted teeth. But he didn’t say any of what he was thinking. Partly because his own thoughts ran counter to an official NYPD myth that blamed all crime on bleeding-heart judges and partly because he was a detective, third grade, and Sal Patero was a detective lieutenant. The difference between Patero’s rank and his own was like the difference between champagne and vinegar.
When they arrived at the intersection of Madison and Montgomery, Patero ordered Moodrow to make a right and park.
“We’re goin’ in there,” he announced, pointing to a candy store halfway up the block. “When we get inside, I don’t want you to say a word. Not a fucking word, capish?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You’re here to learn. You don’t have no opinions in this matter. But, maybe you could still help me out with somethin’. The guy I’m gonna be talkin’ to-his name is Joey Fish-is givin’ me trouble. I want you to stand there and stare at him. Don’t say nothin’, right? Just keep your eyes in his face. The way your mug looks, you could scare a gorilla.”
Without waiting for an answer, Patero stepped out of the car and began to walk up the block. Moodrow, scrambling to follow, banged his ribs against the steering wheel (cars didn’t fit him any better than off-the-rack suits) and let out an involuntary yelp.
“What’d ya say?” Patero stopped and turned to face his assistant.
“I hit my ribs. They’re still pretty sore from the fight.”
Patero’s smile was friendly and open. “Jesus, Stanley, what you did to that fireman …” He shook his head. “Don’t worry. You ain’t gonna have to fight anyone today. The kind of problem we got with this jerk, we don’t handle with our fists. You’re kinda like a … What’s the word? Reinforcement. That’s right. You’re a visual aid.”
The candy store in question was as nondescript as any of the hundreds of others dotting the Lower East Side. Newspapers lay on a shelf near the cash register. A long counter, covered with formica and lined with revolving stools, ran all the way to the back wall. Racks of magazines, school supplies and greeting cards paralleled the counter. Moodrow had spent a good part of his childhood in stores exactly like this, graduating from penny candies to chocolate egg creams to banana splits as he moved through grammar school and junior high.
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 Cafe.”
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 Cafe. 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.
“Andrea grew up in one of those apartments on Queens Boulevard, the kind with the fountains in the lobby. That’s what I liked about her. She was innocent, a child with a woman’s body. In fact, I was so crazy about Andrea that I didn’t give a lotta thought to what was gonna happen after we got married. Which I should’ve, because it turned out she couldn’t take Red Hook. She tried like hell, but it was too much for her. Too rough in every way. Meanwhile, I’m makin’ four thousand dollars a year and there’s no way we can afford to go anywhere else. When Andrea offered to find a job, her parents went through the roof. They couldn’t live with the disgrace of their daughter having to go out to work. They offered to give us money.
“I don’t wanna make a long story outta this, but the moral is I should’ve thought things out before I got married. Only I was too much in love to think about anything but the wedding night. You? You’re in the same boat. Or, at least, that’s what Pat Cohan believes. You and Kathleen come from two different worlds. Her world is easy to get used to. Yours ain’t.
“You know what a house costs today? Even a little house out in Flushing goes for nineteen thousand. Whatta you make, six thousand five hundred? You’re on the pad for four bills a month. With that kind of money, plus what you’re gonna get from the wedding, you could set yourself up with something nice. You could even afford to give your father-in-law the grandchildren he wants.”
Moodrow took his time answering. He’d calmed considerably by this time. Mainly because most of what Patero was saying had already occurred to him. Most white people on the Lower East Side were either moving out or planning to move out. The Jews, the Italians, the Poles and Russians and Ukrainians-they were all heading for suburbia. “White flight” is what the newspapers called it. Moodrow wasn’t sure whether they were fleeing the tenements and the poverty or the Puerto Ricans who were coming in by the thousands.
The Puerto Ricans didn’t particularly bother Moodrow. He’d known any number of black and Puerto Rican fighters. Some of them were okay and some of them were assholes, just like his white neighbors. The problem was Kathleen. It was all right for a girl to work before she was married, but afterward she was supposed to stay home and take care of the house and kids. Kathleen might be willing to hold onto her job for a few years, but the Church (to say nothing of Pat Cohan) was opposed to any kind of birth control and Kathleen was as religious as they come. Once they were married, she’d want kids.
“Four hundred bucks a month, right?”
“Give or take a few. Plus it goes up if you get promoted or pass the sergeants’ exam.”
“What about being a detective? What about making arrests?”
Patero shook his head. “Ya still ain’t figured it out, Stanley. I’m the precinct whip. My job is to supervise the detective squad, the whole squad, and I’m real good at it. The crap we’re doin’ now only happens the first few days of the month. The rest of the time, I do my work like any other cop. As for you, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. You’re gonna get your collars and you’re gonna move up in the job. With Pat Cohan for a rabbi, it’s guaranteed.”