Whitson brushed his shoulder.
“Excellent. Top drawer. Really, I’m well pleased.”
Beneath the navy cashmere coat, Leinau wore an Irish tweed jacket with soft shoulders, wool gabardine slacks with sharp creases, a lamb-suède vest, a cotton broadcloth shirt and a knit tie. There wasn’t an unnatural fiber on his entire body that day.
“Well, here I go,” Leinau said. “The final touch.”
Leinau used both hands to place Whitson’s homburg just so, cocked at the distinctive angle. Whitson handed him the cane—a light maple with dark veins and a huge brass wolf’s head.
“Wish me luck,” Leinau said.
Whitson saluted and put on his own headgear for the duration of the play. “Easy does it.”
Leinau opened the door and stepped out of the car. Then he walked jauntily across the avenue and into the coffee shop, was shown to a table and sat down, wired for sound. He didn’t remove his hat and placed the cane on the table in front of him.
Keenan had things figured out.
Sure, Dory Smith was pregnant. And she was right, no doubt. He was the father. At least he assumed she had no other lovers. She was as unskillful, as unsure of sex as he was.
But these days, as far as the world was concerned, how could a reasonably good-looking single woman on the Upper East Side of Manhattan be sleeping with only one man? Well, she could press for a paternity test in some lawsuit. But why?
As for Mairead, well, his wife was completely dependent on him, wasn’t she? Even more so, now that the baby was only a month away. How would a girl like Mairead make it in the world without him?
Dory could have an abortion, any time between now and the next forty days or so, and it wouldn’t do her a bit of damage, now would it?
Sometimes, when things seem their darkest, the sun comes out. Isn’t that the truth?
Well, a body could talk himself into such things.
Keenan had done so. And then he’d talked to the inspector and managed to get himself off the ignoble bow-and-arrow squad. He was back at it, in uniform and on general patrol, his gun back on his hip where it belonged.
And he swore he’d never so much as look at another woman. Mairead was plenty for him, and since he’d been paying a bit of attention to her lately, she was doing what she could to prompt genuine interest beyond his charitable considerations.
This morning he’d left the house early and driven first to Dory’s building. He rang her apartment and she came to meet him in the lobby. He handed over an envelope containing six hundred-dollar bills.
“For the operation, I suppose?” Dory asked.
“Are you going to refuse?”
She looked like she might spit in his face. “No, I’m going to take it.” She did, turned on him and marched back up the stairway to her apartment.
A bit wobbly in the legs, Keenan left her building, got into his car and drove to his regular parking space. He felt clean and detached, in control. He thanked his lucky stars.
Inside the muster room, Keenan dialed from the pay phone and reached his pal, a cop in the Times Square precinct who could get house tickets to all the Broadway shows. Keenan arranged a pair on the aisle to Dreamgirls, a very hot ticket. Mairead would like that. Then he dialed Mama Leone’s restaurant and made dinner reservations for two.
Minnie Margoles, seventy-one years old, spent the war years on the Upper East Side watching pasty-faced young men who didn’t amount to much march around Yorkville with swastika armbands, which they wore right out in the streets, until the attack on Pearl Harbor anyway and the entry of her beloved United States into the fighting.
“It’s an amazing thing about America,” she used to say when she told stories about the war years, “how the hatred was paraded around on the streets, openly. And yet this is the safest country in the world.”
Her husband joined the Army and died somewhere in France for his troubles.
Then after the war, Minnie went to Europe in search of her parents, who ignored her importunings for so many years. They would stay in Germany. “Why not?” her mother asked in letters. “We were born here. We should come to America, to your New York? Here in Germany, we have read newspapers of Nazis in New York, too.”
It had been an easy matter finding her father, or record of him. The Germans kept excellent records when they wished. Nathan Margoles had been among the first to die at Bergen-Belsen, of a heart attack. It probably meant that he had not known a fraction of the terror and the torture that his fellow inmates at the concentration camp knew. She was able to believe this. Her father had a long history of heart trouble.
But it took four months to find her mother. Four months of mystery, until Minnie herself suggested that perhaps her mother was classified under her father’s name rather than her husband’s.
Finally, Minnie found her, in a sanitorium in the village near Buchenwald. Minnie wished she had died, as her father had; she wished her mother was at peace. Instead, the woman lived in some hideously private, all-encompassing panic, her visions so monstrous they robbed her of the ability to free herself by telling her tale. She could not speak, could not sleep with her eyes shut, could not control her bodily functions. She could not die. The woman who scoffed at the notion of leaving Germany for America—“a civilized nation we have here, not some place where gangsters shoot each other in the streets just to sell some beer”—was now taken to New York, where her daughter would take care of her until her death.
Minnie worked two jobs, one in a bakery and one in a millinery at night, in order to make ends meet. Her mother’s care was expensive. Minnie’s friends used to tell her that she didn’t have to work herself like a horse for her mother, that there were fine homes where her mother would be made comfortable, places that would cost so much less, where she might even get some government help in the expenses.
“No,” Minnie said, “I’ll take care of her. I should have brought her here. I should have. Now I’ll take care.”
When her mother finally died, Minnie began losing her health and began to know a fear generally ignored by the young and then suddenly known in the dark of some night when the firm, strong grip of a desperate young man cuts off their breathing, when their arms are twisted and they fall to the street, when their money is stolen, when they are shoved into their apartments and forced to lie helplessly on the floor while their precious things are thrown about in the barbaric search for cash, jewelry, anything valuable and portable.
It had happened to Minnie once, a year after her mother had gone. The short man with the scraggly beard, the blue eyes and the friendly smile was not the delivery man she thought he was. She stepped off the elevator to her floor and walked down the corridor. She’d pushed her key into her door when she heard his footsteps. He hadn’t let the elevator door close. He’d waited for her to open her door.
He rushed her, hit her in the neck, knocking her to the floor. He made off with forty dollars in cash, a brass samovar that had been a wedding gift from her husband’s parents and a black and white television set badly in need of repair.
It was seven weeks before Minnie lost the pain, then another two weeks before she worked up the courage to leave her apartment.
A friend told her that now it was over. She had been a statistic and the odds against it happening again, especially now that her building had become such a fancy place, were slim.
She believed it, until the day she saw the boy with the swastika on a chain around his neck.
Minnie was returning to her apartment, at York Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street, from grocery shopping. The boy, one of those “punks” with his hair dyed a greasy black, looked at her handbag, then looked behind him.
Minnie trembled and clutched her bag close to her body. There was no one near her, no one but this boy looking at an old lady’s handbag. She couldn’t take her eyes off the swastika. She tried screaming, but, like her mother, she could not speak.
The boy with the swastika began running toward Minnie.<
br />
A young man named Eddie at that very moment came around a corner, just behind Minnie Margoles, a tenant in the building where he worked as a doorman. He didn’t plan on making the job a career, not by any means. Eddie’s father had been a New York City police officer and Eddie was bound and determined to follow in his footsteps.
Eddie had a cup of steaming coffee in one gloved hand and a slice of pizza in the other. He tossed both on the street when he saw the boy grab Mrs. Margoles’ bag.
Eddie made a lunge at the boy as he ran past him, leaving Mrs. Margoles spinning about a little on her feet. Somehow, she found her voice and called to Eddie, “I’m all right.”
Then Eddie took flight, screaming loudly at the fleeing boy about a block in front. “Stop him! Stop him, everybody! He mugged an old lady!”
A taxicab driver stepped out of his yellow vehicle and stood in the boy’s path, landing a heavy body block that wobbled him, but not enough to stop him. Eddie gained a half block.
“Stop him! Everybody, stop him!”
The boy tossed the handbag.
A Korean greengrocer threw apples at the boy. Two women, waiting for a bus, screamed at him. A man in a suit picked up a brick and threw it at the boy, missing him.
Eddie was gaining. And along with Eddie, four men and a teenage girl were in pursuit of the boy who robbed Mrs. Margoles.
“Stop him! Stop him!” An entire block full of people were shouting.
The boy stumbled and fell.
Eddie was all over him. He picked him up by his jacket and, with one hand and an entire body full of rage, heaved him against a storefront steel grate, opening a big wound in the boy’s temple.
Someone shouted, “I’ll call the cops. Hold him!”
Eddie pulled the boy’s arms behind his back and bent them upward. One of the men who’d joined Eddie’s chase started kicking the boy’s face. Another man kicked him in the ribs several times.
“Get back, get back!” Eddie yelled. “We don’t want him to get off because of what we do.”
He managed to persuade the men who were kicking the boy. People in the street behind them pulled the men away.
“Okay, we’ll just wait now,” Eddie said. “You going to be any trouble?”
The boy shook his head.
In less than a minute, a squad car pulled up at York Avenue and Eighty-second Street. The boy looked at the uniformed officers like they were saviors. He collapsed into their arms, was tossed into the back seat and manacled.
Eddie had taken the police civil service test once before and just missed being hired. He would take it the next time it was offered.
Leinau looked at his watch again. Fifteen minutes past the meeting time.
He looked out the avenue window. The headlights of his car were still off. Whitson would turn them on when he saw it come down.
Another fifteen minutes, Leinau decided. No more. He would rather scrub a meeting than risk being made. Another meeting was a very easy matter when a potential of one million dollars was involved.
“Sir?” the red-jacketed waiter asked him.
“Another coffee.”
“I’ll have to charge you extra for it, sir. We have a one refill policy here.”
“Cheap fucking place. All right, go ahead and gouge me.”
The waiter rolled his eyes and went for the service station.
Whitson, waiting in the car and picking up the conversation on the radio receiver, chuckled.
An imposing black man approached Leinau’s table.
“The man in the homburg?” he said. “With the cane.” His eyes fell to the cane across the table.
Leinau motioned him to sit.
“Would your friend like anything?” the waiter asked when he arrived with Leinau’s coffee.
“My friend wants a very great deal,” Leinau said. “But he won’t be wanting any breakfast.” Leinau asked the black man, “Isn’t that right, LeRoy?”
If eyes were bullets, the blackmailer sitting across from Leinau would have shot him dead.
“Nothing for me,” the black man said to the waiter, who left.
“I want a show, like you said,” the black man said.
Leinau reached into the breast pocket of his jacket.
“How much you got in there?” the black man asked.
“Enough for a hell of a show,” Leinau said. He pulled out an inch-high stack of hundred-dollar bills and fanned them, then returned them to his pocket. “I’ve got another pocket. Want to see what’s in that one?”
“I have a plan for delivery,” the black man said.
“Look here, LeRoy, you’re not dealing with a fool. I’m willing to pay off, all right. But not unless I have a guarantee that whatever it is you have becomes mine in its entirety. And I just don’t see how in hell you can possibly guarantee that.”
“Look here, man. We got video tapes, man. We’re selling you video tapes and you’ll get it. We could take chump change on this, but you’re not dealing with fools, either. Why the hell you think we’re asking for the million, man? You think we’d take a million and come back for more once we had a pile like that?”
“Who’s to say you won’t squirrel away a copy for insurance? Or just for kicks?”
“Look, man, don’t be fucking with me. You dip it in and you always take a chance, you know? Sometimes it don’t cost too much and sometimes it cost a lot. Always, it’s a risk. No telling what’s going to happen.”
Leinau looked out the avenue window. The lights were still off.
“Tell me something, how many others has it been?” he asked the black man.
“Oh, man, you don’t want to be knowing that sort of thing. What’s it matter?”
Leinau hung his head. “Believe it or not, I was in love. That’s what matters.”
“Oh, shit. I haven’t got time for this bullshit. Next thing, you’ll be tellin’ me you love your old lady, too.”
“Tildy?”
“That her name?”
“She’s a saint.”
“She’s a spooky lady, man. Nobody that cool when they bein’ robbed. Nobody but somebody spooky, that’s all.”
“She told me about it. She stood right up to you, right?”
The lights were still off on the car. Leinau didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. Maybe he’d just have to wrap it up here.
“I ain’t got any more time, man. Let’s get down to it.”
“To, what?”
“The delivery, man.”
“I’m still worried that I might not get all the material.”
“Let me tell you somethin’, chump. Can’t see my hands, can you?” The black man’s hands were under the table.
“No.”
“Inside’em, I got a little cannon trained on your gut. I told you, I don’t have any time. I told you before, we meant business. I told you we could touch you whenever we wanted, that’s why we busted into your place like we did. Teach you a lesson.
“Man, I know your every move. I could blow you open right now. Or one time someday when you never think it’s comin’, away you go.”
The lights went on. Leinau saw a tall, auburn-haired woman walk through the avenue door and sit down at a table across the room. He could see that she was watching his table.
“You’re not going to shoot me, LeRoy, and I’m going to tell you why. Now don’t get excited, but you’re busted, man.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
The black man turned, found the auburn-haired woman across the room and raised his hand to greet her. He placed his other hand on the table. There was no gun.
The auburn-haired woman rose and started for the door. She was stopped by a plainclothes officer from anticrime and invited to walk across the street to where Whitson was waiting.
“What’s comin’ down?” the black man asked.
“LeRoy, this is your lucky day. Your boss lady is busted and so are you. In a couple of minutes, just as long as it takes f
or the officer there accompanying your boss lady to our car to make a little call, we’re going to pick up your pal Mickey the super.”
“Shit. Why you tellin’ me this shit?” The black man stood and Leinau shook his head.
“No, no, LeRoy. I wouldn’t leave just yet. That would be called resisting arrest. Sit down, sucker.”
The black man sat down.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Leinau said. “Any statements you make may be used against you in a court of law—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Shut the fuck up while I’m talking, LeRoy.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Leinau finished the Miranda warning.
“Like I said, it’s your lucky day, LeRoy. I’m going to give you the opportunity to do the right thing. You’re going to tell me all about the boss lady and her business and you’re going to finger Mickey for me so I can wrap this case up all nice and neat and you’re going to tell me where your little helper is.”
“In return for what?”
“Hey, that’s not for me to decide.”
“Oh shit, man.”
“LeRoy, I haven’t got time now and you’re not the only creep in this I can sweat. Let’s go. Up easy on your feet. No commotion.”
The black man stood up. The waiter dropped a check on the table.
“Pay the man, LeRoy.”
“What?”
“Yeah, pay the check. You think the city’s got me on an expense account?”
The black man took out a billfold.
“Jesus, LeRoy, I’m just kidding.” Leinau left a ten-dollar bill on the table and walked outside with the black man.
The woman sat in the back of the squad car with the plainclothes officer, her arms behind her in cuffs.
Leinau cuffed the black man after frisking him, then opened the back door. He whispered into his ear, “LeRoy, it’s either you or Mickey. We got him and he’s going to get the same deal. I can help only one of you.”
Chapter 19
“Best thing you can do to keep yourself sharp to what’s going on is to keep your eye on everything and try to profile everything and everybody you see.”
Precinct 19 Page 29