I took the box from the table, shoved it on a shelf in my bedroom closet behind a pile of sweaters, then went to the door where the buzzer was making another series of angry noises.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“A couple o’ guys knew your father,” came the reply. “We gotta talk to ya.”
I looked through the peephole, which makes every apartment its own sort of speakeasy. Two rather wide men were standing there, looking uncomfortable or unhappy or both. Maybe they didn’t like being up this early.
One of them looked vaguely familiar.
“I’m not dressed,” was all I could think of to say, realizing how lame that sounded.
“Who gives a shit?” a second voice asked. “We didn’t come here to dance with ya.”
“We were friends o’ Blackie’s,” the first voice said. “We gotta talk with ya.”
I figured, hell, if they gotta talk with me, they were gonna talk with me some time or another. I opened the door.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
They pushed past me like I was the swinging door in a Dodge City saloon and made themselves comfortable on my living room couch. I followed them inside.
“It looks like you don’t remember me,” the smaller, familiar looking man said as he had a look around. He was in his sixties, mostly bald, with a wide nose you earn from finishing second in too many fist fights. He didn’t offer his name to help me along.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head as if I should feel bad about offending two thugs who had just bulled their way into my apartment at seven thirty in the morning. “I don’t.”
He smiled, a not altogether unpleasant smile. “Blackie and me, we went back a long way. I saw you when you was a kid. Probably wouldn’t a’ recognized you either, if I saw you on the street or something.”
I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say about that, so for a change I kept my mouth shut.
“Let’s get to it,” the younger, larger man said.
Blackie’s friend said, “You remember your father’s, uh, his, uh, friend, Big Mike?”
“You mean his boss?”
“Yeah. I didn’t wanna say it like that, but yeah. You knew Big Mike, right?”
“I knew who he was.”
“Yeah, well, you know when your dad died—I feel bad to have to bring this up—but when your dad passed, he and Mike had some unfinished business.”
“And you’re coming here to discuss this now? Six years after Blackie died? Not to mention, I heard Mike died too.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Blackie’s old pal was shaking his head, like he couldn’t believe it either. “Time passes, eh? But the business goes on, if you know what I mean. Mike is gone, but someone takes over.”
I was still standing there, wearing nothing but a white terrycloth bathrobe and shearling slippers, staring down at two hoodlums who had come by to roust me about something that happened more than six years ago. My entire life, it seemed, was suddenly being lived in the past.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to seem rude, but if you knew my father and you remember me, then you must know I never had anything to do with his business. Never,” I repeated, thinking how proud my mother would be to hear me say that.
“I know, I know, but—,” the older man said, leaving whatever thought he might have had hanging on that last word.
The younger man interrupted with an impatient shake of his head. “What is this,” he wanted to know, “old fucking home week? Look kid, your father was into the boss for some scratch back when, never straightened it out. Now we hear you got something might belong to your father, which means it belongs to the boss. Or a piece of it. Or whatever. You gotta make good for your father, plain and simple. You with me on this?”
“Am I with you?” I asked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, eh?”
“No. Really, no. I don’t know who you are, I never had anything to do with Big Mike, and I can’t imagine why you’d come to see me, all these years later.”
The way his eyes widened, I realized my answer had not made him happy.
“I don’t think you’re in any kind of a position to be a wise guy here.”
I looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “A wise guy?”
The older man intervened, saying, “Let’s take it easy, all right?” No one said anything for a few seconds, so I guess we were all taking it easy. “We got a job to do. We need to know if you got something from Blackie, which in turn would be something belongs to our friend, you understand?”
I can’t explain why I wasn’t afraid, but I wasn’t. At least not yet. Maybe it was all those years of hanging around with my father, meeting guys like this, feeling more comfortable than say, a normal Working Stiff would have felt in the same situation. Or maybe I figured if they were going to hurt me, they would have started off that way, just to set the tone. Or—and I know this may not sound logical—but if they were the ones who broke into my apartment and found nothing, then they had to be more confused than I was if they needed to come back the very next day.
Mainly, I found myself wondering how they heard anything new about my father in the first place. There was only one reasonable answer.
“What exactly did my cousin Frank tell you?”
They looked at each other, two guys without an ounce of subtlety between them, trying to make it seem this had nothing at all to do with Frank.
“Never mind,” I said. Then I turned to Blackie’s old chum. “Look, I really do not understand. So, is there anything else, or are we done here so I can take a shower and get to work?”
The younger man stood up. He appeared to be in his mid-forties and built like a linebacker. “You college boys always gotta have the last word.”
If I had not felt scared up to then, I was at least aware that he had not gotten up to shake my hand. I reflexively took a step back, but he reached out fast enough to grab a bunch of terrycloth robe and slam me against the wall.
“Hey, take it easy,” I said, hoping to sound more angry than afraid. I don’t think I succeeded.
“Yeah, take it easy, Silvio,” the other man agreed as he scrambled to his feet “We ain’t gonna get nowhere like this.”
Silvio stared into my eyes with a look that told me he would have no problem punching the hell out of me, whether or not it would get him anywhere. He let go of my robe and took a step back.
“Good guy, bad guy,” I said. Sometimes I just can’t keep quiet.
The older man stepped forward now, all efforts to evoke any friendly history with my father gone from his face. “Don’t misunderstand this situation, kid. You’re nothin’ to me, except I got a job to do. If I want Silvio should break your neck, believe me, you’re as good as dead. Now we don’t have to get nasty about this, do we?”
I didn’t see the need for things to get any nastier than a broken neck, so I shook my head.
“Good. Then just tell us, where’s the thing?”
I took a moment to rearrange my robe. Then I said, “I really have no idea what you’re talking about. If you tell me what you’re looking for, that might help.” Silvio made a slight move and I flinched. God, it pissed me off that I flinched, and now I really did get angry. “You can pull all the rough stuff you want, but it’s not going to get you anywhere. I told you, I have nothing to do with my father’s business.”
Silvio studied me carefully, none of us speaking as he looked me over from head to toe.
He said, “You tell us you got nothin’, we hear something else. What am I gonna do with that?”
“You mind if I ask you who told you, and what it is I’m supposed to have?”
Silvio was quick, I’ll give him that, because I never saw it coming. The back of his hand lashed out across the side of my face with enough force to knock me
off balance.
“What the fuck,” I said.
“Fuck this,” Silvio replied, holding a large fist up to my face.
“Knock it off,” the other man said calmly, then turned back to me. “You see, here’s the problem. You say you don’t know nothin’, you think we’re off base, and you’d be happy for us to just get the hell out of your place, right? But then you ask a question about who told us what, and you ask about this guy Frank, and all that makes us think, like, ‘Hey, maybe he does know something, or why would he ask.’ You see my problem?”
Keeping an eye on Silvio, I said, “Natural curiosity, okay?” They didn’t answer, they just kept staring at me. “I let you in here because you said you were friends of my father. Does that sound like I’ve got something to hide? No. So how about we forget the whole thing and you just go away.”
The older man smiled at me. “We’ll go away, but we’re gonna be talking again. You can count on that.”
He tapped Silvio on one of his broad shoulders and they made a move to leave. But Silvio turned back and took a swing at me, his bowling ball-sized fist stopping just short of my gut as I doubled over and put my hands up in a pathetic effort at self-defense.
Silvio laughed. “Some tough guy you are. Tough with your mouth is all, you fucken wimp.” And that’s how they made their exit, with Silvio laughing at me all the way out my front door.
It would have hurt less if he had punched me.
When I heard the door slam shut I fell into a chair and stared up at the ceiling. They had never mentioned the letter, not once. Which left me to wonder again, what the hell did they know and was it Frank who told them?
Then I started thinking about the look in Gerry Egidio’s eyes when he mentioned my father’s death, and the time Blackie got himself into trouble, the year he died. I knew a little of the story from Blackie, a bit more that Benny told me after the wake. I wondered about the connection that all of that might have to Gerry’s comments the previous morning and the visit I just had from those two goons.
Blackie was running a bookmaking operation for his boss, Big Mike, spending his afternoons with the rest of a small crew in an apartment off Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Well before personal computers and cell phones, they would work the landlines, confirming betting lines and booking action for local sports gamblers and horse players. After closing down for the day, they would set out on collections and payoffs, visiting neighborhood bars, restaurants, retail shops and the other haunts where their customers could be found. A couple of times a week, Blackie delivered a recap of the bets together with the profits—there were always profits—to the main office downtown. That’s where his boss raked off most of the take as payment for bankrolling the business, providing protection and for generally allowing them to do what they were doing. Which didn’t leave all that much for Blackie and his cohorts. Not a fair split, my father came to believe, which is when he decided to do a little past-posting.
Past-posting is more creative than mere theft. The idea is to bet on horse races that have just finished, which is a fairly reliable way of ensuring a result. The bookmaker starts by inventing an imaginary customer, giving him a name, then booking some bets and reporting them to the downtown office. In the beginning, you make mostly losing bets and you cover the losses, just to show this imaginary gambler is a good payer. Then a few of the picks run in the money, which is easy enough to arrange, since the horse race is done by the time you record the wager. Timing is important, of course. You have to set up the paperwork in advance, picking a few different horses, then using the slip for the horse that won, looking over your shoulder at the other guys you work with, to be sure no one sees what you’re up to. As I say, this was long before online betting and off-shore accounts, where everything is recorded and time stamped. If you were very careful and not too greedy, you might skim a few dollars from the home office and no one is any the wiser. Or so you hoped.
Unfortunately, someone always gets wiser.
When my father got called downtown for a private meeting, he suspected it was not an invitation to lunch, and he prepared himself for the interrogation.
“Impossible,” he said to his boss. “We’re being past-posted?”
They were seated at a small round table in the private club off Grand Street where Mike held court. The club was a dark, wood paneled room with dim lights and an espresso machine. I was there once or twice, although never allowed in the back where the Really Serious Men sat.
Blackie’s boss, who I met a few times, was a squat, beefy man with blunt, pugnacious features and a piece of stone for a head. His manner was gruff, his speech unfriendly, and his eyes had all the life contained in a pair of dull pebbles.
“That’s right,” Mike told him. “One of your men thinks you got a customer sending in horse bets too close to race time.”
“No shit,” my father replied with a shake of his head, undoubtedly wondering who the rat in his small group might be. “How could that happen?”
His boss shrugged his broad shoulders, indicating he could not possibly care less how it happened. He said simply, “You gotta cover.”
As the man responsible for the operation, Blackie had to pay for any losses caused by cheating or stealing or past-posting, regardless of the how or the who or the why. When it comes to problems, the mob isn’t interested in the story, it’s all about the money.
Later on they go after the guys who were in on the scam.
Since there was no actual customer for my father to get the money from, and since he’d already spent the thousands he’d been raking in over the past several months, there was no way for him to clean up the mess without some help. That’s when he went to his brother.
He was too embarrassed to admit to Vincent what he’d done. He thought it should be enough to tell his brother he was in trouble and needed the money.
It wasn’t.
Uncle Vincent said he had his own obligations. Mortgage payments on the house in Rockland. New carpeting he was having installed. A diamond ring he bought my aunt for their anniversary that he was still paying off. He couldn’t come up with any real dough on the spot, not like that.
My father didn’t explain why he needed the cash. He also didn’t mention any of the money he’d loaned Vincent over the years when my uncle was down and out—money Vincent had never thought about repaying while he was laying in carpet and buying his wife a ring. It wasn’t Blackie’s style to bring it up. He just turned away from the best goddamned brother in the whole world and went off to look for another way to solve the problem the best way he could.
Looking back at things that morning, I began to guess at how it all worked out in the end.
***
I FINALLY GOT MYSELF OUT OF THE CHAIR, showered and dressed, then sat down again to make a couple of calls, the first to my younger sister, Kelly.
“I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” she said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that Mom told me about the goodies she gave you. When do I get a peek?”
“Any time.”
“Okay. Now tell me about the letter.”
“Mom told you there was a letter?”
“Of course. She claims she never opened it. Amazing, huh?”
“I believe her.”
“I do too. Now tell me what it said.”
I did. I also recounted my visits with Frank and Gerry Egidio, and described my trip to Las Vegas to see Benny.
“You went to Las Vegas and didn’t tell me?”
“It was no big deal, just an overnight thing. It was good to see Benny.”
“And?”
I gave her a brief rendition of what Benny had to say, which was easy enough because what he said was so disappointingly brief. Even so, Kelly made me go over it twice, not allowing me to leave out a single detail.
When I was
done, she asked, “What else?”
“What do you mean?
“Come on, what else?”
I took a deep breath, then described the break-in the day before and the visit I just had from Blackie’s old pal and his sidekick, Silvio.
“My God. This isn’t funny.”
“You hear somebody laughing?”
“Have you called the police?”
“No, and I’m not going to.”
“You have to.”
“Think about it. This letter is about something a little less than legal, right? Do I want the police involved?”
“You’re being threatened.”
“Not yet I’m not, not really. And what would the police do anyway?”
“All right,” she sighed, “but you know who dad was. Whatever this is, it can’t be good. Don’t be foolish.”
I figured I was already being foolish, but said, “I’ll be fine.”
She paused. “What else?”
“That’s it.”
“Are you sure?”
“On the plus side of the ledger,” I said, “I met a girl.”
“Tell me.”
I did.
When I got done with that, there was absolute silence on the line.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Let me get this straight,” Kelly began. “In the middle of all this, you just happened to meet a girl on the flight back from Vegas who just happened to go to dinner with you and now, you should pardon the simplicity of this summary, just happens to be willing to get on a plane and fly off with you to France. Who, by the way, seems to know about Dad’s letter even though you don’t think you ever mentioned it to her. Have I got all this right?”
I almost laughed. “Not exactly.”
“Tell me, please, tell me what I’ve missed.”
“Well for starters, she didn’t just happen to go to dinner with me.”
“No?”
“I asked her.”
“You asked her. Well good, that’s very good.”
Fool's Errand Page 13