You Get What You Pay For
A Tony Cassella Mystery
Larry Beinhart
For Anne Beinhart
she of great love and little faith
and Irving Beinhart
a very clear vision, but different
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between real persons, living or dead, or corporations and their corporate names is strictly coincidental.
There are some exceptions. This book is set in 1984. The convention of creating, for example, a President Donald Doogun (previously a pro-basketball player and sportscaster) seems as cumbersome as pretending that New York City’s three major newspapers are the NY Most, the Daily Ochs, and the World Herald Tribune & Sun.
Therefore, in this fictional universe, Mr. Reagan is President, his quotes are indeed his own and the policies of his administration depicted, we hope, accurately. Obviously his relation to fictional characters, such as Attorney General Gunderson, are fictional. Stories attributed to real publications about fictional people are fictional. Rock promoter Matt E. Silver appears with his permission. Mr. Meese’s brief appearance is strictly from the public record with a slight elision of the apparent date.
JEZEBEL, “Nashville” Katz, 1983 by permission of Memphiz Muzic, Inc., 400 W. 45 St., N.Y., N.Y. 10036
U.S.A. ALL THE WAY, The White Rapper/H. Stucker, 1982 by permission of Honky Tunes, Ltd., 111 Lexington Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10016
WHITE BOY DO IT 2, The White Rapper/H. Stucker, 1984 by permission of Honky Tunes, Ltd., 111 Lexington Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10016
CRACK-CRACK, The White Rapper/H. Stucker, 1983 by permission of Honky Tunes, Ltd., 111 Lexington Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10016
SAY NO, NO, NO, Mary Jo Parker, 1983 by permission of Gospel Faith Music Publishing, Inc., Faith, N.C.
OLYMPIC FEVER, The White Rapper/H. Stucker, 1984 by permission of Honky Tunes, Ltd., 111 Lexington Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10016
DECADES A GO GO, “Nashville” Katz, 1983 by permission of Pussykatz Muzic, 400 W. 45 St., N.Y., N.Y. 10036
CYRANO DE BERGERAC, Edmond Rostand, trans. Jean-Lauren du
Chien, 1988 by permission of William Morrow & Company, Inc.
CONTENTS
Prologue: January 1984
There Goes the Neighborhood
Part One: February 1984
1. Have You Seen a Bergman?
2. Frankly Ferns
3. A Polish Hypothesis
4. Bergmanesque
5. A Fate Worse Than Death
6. Foreplay
7. Rubbers
8. Scrupulous
9. Muggles
10. Par-lay Anglais?
11. Rock ’n’ Roll
12. I Confess
13. Miranda
Part Two: Spring-Summer 1984
14. Red Herring
15. The Other Mario Cuomo
16. The Strange Case of Philip Buono
17. Reaganomics
18. Game Plan
19. Santino Scorcese
20. Panty Hose
21. Confession
22. The Badlands
23. A Proposition
24. June
25. Men of the Cloth
26. Reggae
27. Santino Speaks
28. Conversion
29. Letter to the Times
30. Je Ne Regrette Rien
31. The Tortoise
32. Mortgage Payments
33. So Simple
34. Joseph P. D’Angelo
35. A Tacit Bargain
Part Three: Autumn 1984
36. Faith
37. Laying On of Hands
38. An Archangel
39. The Empire Strikes Back
40. Flawless
41. Shaggy Dog Story
42. The White Rapper
Epilogue
Preview: Foreign Exchange
A Biography of Larry Beinhart
PROLOGUE: JANUARY 1984
There Goes the Neighborhood
BRONX PARK IS JUST south of Woodlawn Cemetery. It contains the New York Botanical Gardens and the famous Bronx Zoo, where the tigers sometimes eat a keeper.
One way to get there is the Seventh Avenue/Broadway line. It runs underground in Manhattan, over the streets in the Bronx, and it’s called the El. It rattles along on seventy-year-old iron curves. Gutted buildings gape windowless at the passengers. Where kids once came running home to eat Momma’s liver and onions, four solid walls around them, there are rubbled lots.
That’s old news. The mayor has been on TV to tell us that the Bronx is coming back. Now or sooner or sometime. But come the ass end of January, you could empty the projects, apartment flats, tenements, brownstones, by offering a free ticket to anyplace warm. Nicaragua. Beirut.
Even Arthur Scorcese, rolling warm and easy through the ruins in his two-door white long-hood Lincoln Continental—knowing more often than not which buildings had been torched by the landlord and which by the tenants—might have gone for it. Though where Arthur wanted to go, and had been trying to go for three years, was Arizona. The Sunbelt. Warm, clean, and still reasonably well segregated.
The day had started with great expectations and positive ones. Arthur’s father, Santino “The Wrecker” Scorcese, was in Manhattan, a mere twenty-minute drive from Arthur’s Long Beach, Long Island, home. How the Feds loved to call Santino “The Wrecker,” they never missed a chance, they had the moniker right off the wiretaps, and never once did they point out, or did you see in the Daily News, that it was real literal, as Santino had a big finger in the tow-truck business and a couple of junkyards.
That was a real treat in that for the last three years, Santino’s residence had been the State Penitentiary in Dannemora, in the frozen wastes somewhere between nowhere, nowhere, and Canada. A sixteen-hour drive on the New York State Thruway, with rest stops where the coffee tasted like Styrofoam and they had discovered a method to make even the pepper you put on the cardboard-flavored food taste like cardboard: probably a refinement of the same process that decaffeinates. Or, almost as bad, all the way through the city, out the other side to People Express in Newark, to Burlington, Vermont, to Avis, then cross-country on two-laners skinned with ice and sprinkled with 35-mph logging trucks.
Santino was scheduled to stay there two more years. He’d been busted on a federal rap, but there was also a parole violation, which meant he had to do some state time. When he got out of Dannemora, he’d move to a federal pen, Danbury probably, for another five years of federal time.
Arthur himself was clean. Not like rice is white or the pope is holy, but clean as could reasonably be expected of someone in the construction business in the greater metropolitan area. Most of his business was in Nassau County, so he was a Republican besides.
Naturally, he had built the day around the visit to his dad, which was scheduled for nine in the morning. Then he was going up to the Bronx to meet a couple of guys who’d told him it was important to have a meet. That was good scheduling too. From there he would go check on some renovations he was doing, in case the mayor was right and the place had made a comeback while he wasn’t looking. He didn’t think so, since he had been there yesterday, and the Bronx was looking as bad as the Bronx can look, which is like shit.
From there, at least, he could head home over the Throgs Neck Bridge—pleasantly pondering what a throg could be—beat the traffic, and avoid the Long Island Expressway, a seventy-mile six-lane parking lot.
Naturally, the Feds had screwed everything up. They were petty and vindictive people. They rescheduled Santino and made the father-son meeting for the afternoon. Which Arthur ha
d to discover for himself when he arrived at the federal courthouse on Foley Square. After he had already paid to put the Lincoln in a lot. The Feds claimed they had tried to call him.
Arthur knew that that was a crock, because he had a brand-new pager. It was a Christmas present from his family—Angelina, his wife; Santino II, his five-year-old son; and Krystal, the two-year-old he doted on, never mind the dumb name Angelina had insisted on, from Dallas or Dynasty or maybe one of those daytime things she watched—he could never remember which. It was not your old-fashioned beeper. It was a miracle of modern microchippery. It had a digital readout across the top, in red, that told him the number from which the incoming call was being made, provided the dialer punched the right code. It required a little cooperation was all, and he had taken great pains to give the Feds their own code, at least for this little time that Santino was in town, because he knew they would pull this crap on him. Now everything was reversed, and he was going to end up on the LIE right at rush hour. They were petty and vindictive people.
There was a cheaper model, where the readout was green, but Angelina had gone for the best.
He took it off his belt to admire it. Also to see if it had gone off and he had missed the beep and there was a number printed out for him to call. There wasn’t. Sitting as he was, deep in the big, soft Continental seat, it was awkward to put the thing back on his belt beneath the fold of his thickening belly, so he clipped it to the inside pocket of his jacket.
The closer he got to the park, the higher the quality of the habitations. On the last block before parkside, the change was so clear and linear it could have been lifted off a graph. Not that the top end was Fifth Avenue alongside Central Park, but it did reach a level where a self-respecting person would live, the supers mopped the halls, and the tenants didn’t remove the plumbing for resale.
Arthur turned and drove along the park until he found a space across from the 2400 block, Park East, between Waring and Mace.
He was early. He turned off the engine and put on the radio. An oldies station came up. Mick Jagger sang something about shelter just a shot away, while Arthur opened the Daily News from the back, the sports section. He was disgusted with the Knicks, who hadn’t even had the sense to get Mullin, who was going to be the next Larry Bird, out of St. John’s.
Ten minutes later, a slow-cruising Buick pulled up alongside and a little behind him. Little Louie Mangiafrino was driving. Frank Felacco, who Arthur knew as a sometime associate of his father, sat in the shotgun seat. Fat Freddy Ventana rode in back.
Arthur pushed the button that electronically popped the door locks. Fat Freddy got out of the Buick, then Felacco.
Fat Freddy was not of those invert names where some gorilla is named Tiny. Fat was fat, and it was with great effort that he bent, finally almost squatting on his haunches, to find the little lever that let the front seat flop forward. He wasn’t any more graceful with the contortions required to maneuver through the low trapezium of seat back, slanting roof, and doorframe, into the backseat. There was butter on his tie.
Frank, impatient and shivering in his cashmere overcoat, was a normal-shaped person, even on the lean side. He had to watch his diet because he was diabetic. At sixty-two, ten years older than Freddy, thirty more than Arthur, he moved slow but dignified.
Bob Dylan whined about other people getting kicks for you and chrome horses. Arthur shut the radio off. Freddy fell back with a grunt. Frank pushed the seat back to upright with an annoyed gesture, got in quickly, and closed the door behind him.
“Long time,” Frank said. “How you been?”
“OK. Yourself?”
“I take my shots, watch the sugar. You know. I’m alive. … Nice car, right, Freddy?”
“Yeah, nice car,” Freddy said.
“Thanks,” Arthur said.
“How’s Santino?”
“He’s all right. You know.”
“That’s a rough thing,” Frank said. “Ten years for using an interstate telephone for a felonious conspiracy.”
“Yeah,” Arthur said, “but they had—what?—eighteen felony counts. I guess that was the one that sounded the least bad. You know how Momma is about the neighbors, so if he was gonna plead, you know. … ”
“It was a good idea, though,” Frank said. “Synthetic cocaine. Fuck the fucking spies right where they live. Santino told me the Nazis, they invented it. You know, during World War Two.”
“But it was all over the papers anyway,” Arthur said. “Hundred million dollars. What a crock! You ever see a hundred million dollars’ worth of anything?”
“Nah,” Frank said. “Did you ever, Freddy?”
“Nah, I never,” Freddy said.
“The Feds, “ Frank said. “The Feds are like that. You know, they figure how it might be after it, you know, gets cut and cut and cut all the way to the bottom, like when it’s dimes in tinfoil down Avenue D or something. That’s how they make up those numbers; make ’em feel like heroes.”
“Every which way they can, they fuck me around,” Arthur said.
“Anyways,” Frank said, “it was a good idea. I had some money in it.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. A lot of us did. How ’bout you, Artie?”
“Ahh, you know I don’ get involved like that—you know that, Frank.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t just me, you understand, a lot of us had money with your father. Different things.”
“I don’t know much about his … financial arrangements.”
“No?” Frank said, indicating neither belief nor disbelief.
“All I know,” Arthur said, “is that everything is fucking tied up in this forfeiture-of-assets thing.”
“Is that right?” Frankie said.
“Yeah. Yeah. RICO and Continuing Criminal Enterprise crap. You want to hear something. Listen to this. See, I got fucked by it too. They got nothing on me, ’cause there is nothing to get, and they still got every nickel I got tied up.”
“Howzat? You so clean?”
“When I started my thing, my construction thing,” Arthur said, “Santino, he loans me ten, you know, to get things off of the ground. Well, the Feds claim that that money, it comes from ‘racketeering’ and a ‘continuing criminal enterprise,’ which means, according to them, that what I make by busting my ass is part of his thing. You ever hear shit like that? My house—I’m working my tail off paying the fucking mortgage. The Feds, they got a first lien on it.”
“That’s rough,” Frank said. “Isn’t that rough, Freddy?”
“Yeah, that’s rough.”
“I heard even worse,” Frank said. “Some Colombian spic, down in Lauderdale, I think it was, he bought a raffle ticket. Two-dollar ticket, like at the church or something. And he wins this Cadillac. I don’ know, coulda been a Seville, coulda been a Coupe de Ville. Well, you know these spies—first thing they do, they always buy some foreign car, so probably he already has himself a Mercedes and a Porsche, so he don’t need the Caddie. So he gives it to his father. Which, I personally think, is a nice gesture, what with how kids are today.
“So they come at this kid with the RICO thing, like with you, and they claim that this two dollars he put on the raffle, it was money from peddling nose candy—like he couldn’ta picked up two bucks in the street, even—and they take his father’s Cadillac away. Do you believe that?”
“Yeah, I believe that,” Arthur said ardently. “With me they didn’t even prove anything. With me they know they can’t prove anything. But until I can prove they can’t prove anything, which I have been trying to do going on like two years now, everything I got, it is either escrowed or liened. If there are pay toilets, I got to ask the judge for permission to use a dime.”
“You got any idea,” Frank said, “what kind of bread your father, he owes us?”
“I told you—”
“Counting all the various things he was into.”
“—his business was his, not mine.”
“Two of the very large,” Frank said. “You know, six zeros. Give or take a couple of hundred thousand.”
“That’s a lot of money,” Arthur said, impressed and intimidated.
“Yeah, it is. Isn’t that a lot of money, Freddy?”
“A lot of money,” Freddy said. “It is.”
“See that—Freddy thinks it’s a lot of money,” Frank said.
The redundancy hung there for several otherwise silent moments. “Are you,” Arthur finally said, “asking me to do something about it?”
“Nah,” Frank said, shaking his head. “We know you don’t have that kinda numbers.”
“And like I said—”
“Like you said,” Frank said, looking straight ahead. “Though the Feds, they think different. You told me yourself, he laid ten on you for starters. I think that sounds modest, you know, for a man of your father’s standing. And generosity. I know if I had a kid, and I had your father’s business connections … But you say it, I believe it.”
“What are you saying? You want ten grand from me?”
“Nah, nah—” Frank began.
“Hey, that’s all right,” Arthur said, “You go down Foley Square, you get the Feds to cut my money loose, you can have it. I think it’s a little fucked, but you want it … ”
“Slow down, kid. I’m talking here about two million. You think I wanna drive around the fucking Bronx in January for shit like ten thousand? Hey! … What you think, Freddy?”
“The fucking Bronx in January,” Freddy said.
Across the street, Carlos Ortiz, el super, came out to chip the ice from the sidewalk. He noticed the two cars because the Lincoln was parked behind his Honda Civic, his first brand-new car ever, only four years, six months left to pay.
“They got your father down for this grand jury, special prosecutor—what’s his name? Jew lawyer … Freddy?”
“I don’ know,” Freddy said. “Jew lawyer.”
“Fenderman. Stanley Fenderman,” Frank said. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Arthur said.
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. Why is that?” Arthur said.
“Well,” Frank said, “do you think he’s maybe tired, living up there, up Dannemora, practically fucking Canada. You think that’s it?”
You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 1