“Henry used to be a fighter before he took up heroin, so he naturally belted the cop out. In fact, Lopez knocked the cop down the stairs in front of the building, but he was too stoned to even want to do anything else. Lopez says he was shocked out of his underwear when Lekowski got up with a pistol in one hand and a badge in the other.
“Then Haluka stops and, me, I’m so into the story, I don’t make a sound. Imagine a middle-aged lady lawyer saying shit like ‘a cunt as big as the Holland Tunnel’? Without laughing behind her hand or something? How many women you know would say that?”
Tilley, still intensely curious, answered the question seriously. “I know some lady cops who wouldn’t blink. I think Rose could say it.”
“To a stranger?”
“She might,” Tilley insisted.
“All right, but Rose is a lot younger and she knows about the street. I can tell from Betty’s voice that I ain’t talking to a member of the younger generation. This woman comes from a time when ladies didn’t talk like that.”
“Fine,” Tilley agreed with a wave of his hand. “Go on with the story.”
“So, for a minute, neither of us speak. Then Betty says, “ ‘I think I know what’s bothering you.’ ”
“ ‘What’s that?’ ” I ask her.
“She says, ‘You’re thinking Henry Lopez is probably a scumbag and he deserves to go to jail.’
“And you’re saying that he isn’t?
“ ‘Look, Mr. Moodrow,’ she says, ‘I know Henry’s a junkie. He’s got six arrests for misdemeanor possession of heroin with four convictions, plus one arrest and conviction for burglary. But Henry Lopez is not a violent man and he doesn’t deserve to face twenty years in jail for the crime of pleading not guilty. Because that’s really blackmail. If he forces the State to undergo the expense of a trial and gets convicted, they’ll fry his ass for the next two decades. The man’s only twenty-five. He’s got a family and most of the time he works. I can show you letters from former employers. Who gains from putting him in jail, especially for a crime he didn’t commit?’
“Normally I wouldn’t even listen to bullshit like this, because, personally, I think most of the people who get busted are guilty. It’s very rare that someone gets popped who ain’t a criminal of some kind. But if I gotta work with criminals and the law, if it’s really in my fucking blood, then it’s better to work with people who’re at least innocent of the crime they got charged with. The difference between Betty Haluka and the other lawyers is Betty didn’t ask me to get Lopez off the hook. She just wanted me to find out if he was really innocent.
“Of course, at the time, I didn’t know exactly what she wanted, so I asked her what she expected me to do and I told her if I found out Lopez was a real asshole, I wouldn’t have anything to do with his defense, even if he was innocent.
“She said she didn’t have a problem with that and what she wanted was simple. At a preliminary hearing, the cop claimed that he didn’t know a single word of Spanish. If she could impeach Lekowski by proving that he could speak the language, it would blow the case wide open. Lekowski was the only witness against Lopez. Of course, I mentioned that Legal Aid has its own investigators, but she said the investigators’ unit is so small they can only work on major cases. If I don’t check out Lekowski, nobody else will.”
Moodrow, now seated on edge of the bed, stared into his former partner’s eyes just as if the story was finished. Tilley, who knew his friend too well to show his annoyance, simply asked, “What happened?”
“Shit, Jim, I wanted to ask her out right then and there, but I didn’t have the guts. I figured she’d think I was muscling her for the date…”
“I’m talking about with Lekowski and Lopez,” Tilley said mildly. In the course of their friendship, he’d grown to relish the long conversations with Moodrow. Most of the time, when they were partners, they’d begun their working day in Moodrow’s apartment. The intimacy was addicting, especially as Tilley’s most recent partner was a burnout with the unfortunate habit of withholding information in order to take sole credit for the collars they made together.
“There wasn’t that much to it once I got going,” Moodrow said. “I gave a twenty-dollar bill to the Records Clerk in Lekowski’s precinct and got a look at his package. There was a notation that he went to Queens College for three years before he came into the job, so I went out to Queens College and spent another twenty for a look at his transcript. Five semesters of conversational Spanish with nothing lower than a B+. Betty took it to the Assistant DA handling the case and they dropped all the charges. Now I’m getting calls from every Legal Aid lawyer in Manhattan. Like I was a miracle man.”
Tilley settled back in the ancient overstuffed chair Moodrow ordinarily used as a hanger, shaking his head. Moodrow never ceased to amaze him. “Now tell me about Betty Haluka,” he commanded.
“She’s about forty-five, dark-haired, pretty good-looking, but with very strong features. Full mouth and nose. She was dressed for court the times I seen her and it’s hard to tell how she’s built. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s a little chunky, but I think there’s muscle under there. She’s been twenty years with Legal Aid and she’s not burned out. She claims she’s made enough peace with herself to be satisfied that she’s doing the best she can with a fucked-up system.” Pausing, he walked to the closet and took out his other suit, a plain navy blue that Tilley knew was too small for Moodrow’s massive frame.
“What kind of name is Haluka?” Tilley asked.
“Haluka’s a Turkish name. Betty’s grandfather was a Turk, but Betty thinks of herself as a Jew. She says her family hasn’t stopped traveling since the Romans threw them out of Israel. Turkey, Armenia, Spain, England, Hungary. Wherever they went, it got bad for them sooner or later, so the family adopted the ability to make quick exits as a survival tool. They came here from Berlin in 1934, early enough to get out with the bankroll.”
Moodrow stopped right in the middle of his narrative, holding both suits, the blue and the brown one, at arms length. He shook his head. “So whatta ya think, Jim? Which one?”
Tilley, who, at 28, was too young to appreciate the idea of “one last chance,” nevertheless understood that Betty Haluka was very important to Stanley Moodrow. He didn’t spend any time dwelling on the reason why, though he had a flash of one of Moodrow’s most recent girlfriends, a twenty-five-year-old waitress that he, Tilley, would have dated himself, had he been single. But the waitress’s youth had, obviously, meant little to his friend, while the chunky Betty Haluka had pulled Moodrow out of a longterm drunk. “You know something, Stanley,” Tilley said. “You’d do a lot better if you shopped at one of the specialty men’s stores. You’re too big to buy clothes off the rack. Even if you know the guy who makes the suits.”
Moodrow looked at Tilley sadly. Tilley was slim and muscular, actually elegant, in the jeans, flannel shirt, and Harris Tweed jacket he was wearing at the moment. Moodrow knew that even if he, Moodrow, coughed up a grand for a custom-made suit, he’d still look like a refrigerator in drag.
“Do you know how much those specialty shops charge? Besides, I’m on a culture trip.” He held up the suits again, inspecting them carefully.
“Put on the brown one and let’s see how it fits,” Tilley advised. “I hope you got a clean white shirt. And your overcoat is pressed.”
“Shit,” Moodrow said, heading for the closet, “I forgot all about the fucking coat.” He picked a lump of wrinkled wool off the floor and shook his head. “I’ll go without a coat.”
“Gimme the goddamn coat,” Tilley responded at once. “I’ll go out to Muhammad’s on First Avenue and get it pressed. Meanwhile, take a shower and look for a tie. The woman’s a lawyer, for Christ’s sake. You look like a slob and she’s gonna dump you.”
Moodrow thought about it for a second, then relaxed. “No way,” he said. “She’s seen me. She knows what she’s getting into.”
FOUR
January 17
&nbs
p; SYLVIA KAUFMAN, WORKING ON a third cup of tea, looked over the beginnings of the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association from the safety and comfort of an overstuffed chair in her living room. Not exactly the powder-puff brigade, she decided, but not Superman’s League of Justice, either. She smiled inwardly, recalling the hours sandwiched between grandson and grandaughter before the family moved out to Los Angeles. What with Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman, and the blond who swam like a speedboat, Aquaman, no problem ever defied the animated efforts of the Justice League.
Her oldest friend, Annie Bonnastello, had come, of course, arriving before the others for a cold supper. Though Annie refused to let her stroke “slow me down,” she’d crossed the lobby with the aid of a walker. The nights were always hard for Annie; her joints (or her spirits) seemed to tighten with the setting sun. Sylvia couldn’t imagine her friend, a widow for more than fifteen years, riding to the rescue, even in Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane. But Annie could still vote, could still sign a petition.
Yong Park, on the other hand, short and muscular, his features composed and suitably inscrutable, looked perfectly capable of dispatching an army of evil prostitutes. But Yong Park worked a sixteen-hour day—from five in the morning, when he drove out to the Hunts Point produce market to personally choose the fruits and vegetables for his small grocery, until nine in the evening, when he, his wife and three of their four children closed shop. Park hadn’t wanted to come to the meeting; it meant leaving his business two hours early, but when Sylvia told him that Al Rosenkrantz, Precision Management’s Project Supervisor, would be on hand to hear their complaints and accept their petition, he agreed to attend.
Unfortunately, it was almost eight thirty, a half hour past the time for starting, Rosenkrantz hadn’t shown and, though Yong Park’s face was still expressionless, Pat Sheehan looked very uncomfortable. Sylvia had long ago recognized Pat’s roommate, Louis, as a gay man and she supposed that made Pat a homosexual, too, though he didn’t look particularly feminine. Sylvia’s friends in the building often made jokes about the strange couple sharing three and a half rooms on the fourth floor.
But Sylvia never found the jokes funny, though she kept her opinions to herself. Louis was very ill; he looked as thin and frail as Sylvia’s own husband toward the end of his illness. Of course, it was cancer that took Bennie Kaufman, and Pat’s lover probably had AIDS, but they looked almost the same. Pat Sheehan wasn’t really one of those close friends Sergeant Dunlap had told her to invite, but Pat was always friendly in the supermarket or the laundry room. Sylvia had asked him on impulse and been surprised when he accepted.
“This Rosenkrantz guy gonna come, Sylvia? Cause if he ain’t even gonna come…” Inez Almeyda folded her arms across her chest. Twenty-eight years old, she was inevitably angry about something. Sylvia had come upon Inez a few weeks after the Almeyda family moved into their fourth floor apartment and been assaulted with the inadequacies of the world surrounding them. All of it, except for her husband and whomever she happened to be talking to.
“In my country, we get rid of these women without signing no petitions,” Inez continued. That was her second theme. In my country. As if, Sylvia thought, Cuba was paradise. Inez’s husband, whenever he mentioned Cuba, made it sound like the bowels of hell.
Andre Almeyda interrupted his wife, asserting his authority along with his opinion. “We’re jus’ gonna wait,” he said firmly, shutting Inez down as no one else could. “No matter if this guy from the management come or no, we gotta do something. We cannot have our kids seein’ them putas in the hallway.” He made a motion, as if to spit on the rug and Sylvias eyes widened until she realized that the gesture was only a gesture. The Cuban Almeyda family were born-again Christians, Evangelistas, and attended prayer meetings twice a week. Their oldest, an eight year old, went to the church school instead of P.S. 78, right around the corner.
“Did anyone see what happened to the front door? Did anyone happen to notice the lock don’t work? The key don’t go in the door? The tong thing don’t snap back in the goddamn hole? We got no security whatsoever. Did anyone happen to notice?” Mike Birnbaum glared at them before answering his own question. “Hoodlums. Drug addicts. Whores. When Morris Katz owned these buildings, he ran them like palaces. Now we got new management we don’t even know who it is. How can a company be an owner? We should have bought our apartments when we had the chance. Then we decide who lives here.”
Mike Birnbaum, reversing form by outliving his wife, was eighty-one years old and even angrier than Inez Almeyda. Angrier than in his youth when he’d won prize after prize fighting Christians in YMCA boxing rings and liked to refer to himself as a “belligerent Jew.” Long retired, he subsisted on a pension from the Department of Health and was chronically broke.
The conversation, as the group gave up on the arrival of Al Rosenkrantz, Project Supervisor for Precision Management, began to pick up. Sylvia, who busied herself with coffee and wedges of spice cake (her best, with the lemon icing), noted that only one of her coconspirators was minimizing the danger to their way of life. Predictably, it was Myron Gold. Like Mike, Annie, and herself, Myron was one of the old-timers.
“So what’s the big deal?” he asked, spreading his hands to show his amazement. He’d been raised in the building, then gotten married and divorced, before returning to 2B after his father’s death. His mother, Shirley Gold, recovering from surgery to remove a tumor from her jaw, only left the apartment for biweekly chemotherapy treatments at Physician’s Hospital, a few blocks away. “You remember two years ago we had those people in 3F?” Myron waited patiently for them to recall the unofficial chapter of the Iron Horsemen, a motorcycle gang dedicated to speed, alcohol, and heavy metal. They’d moved in, en masse, with a mousy blond secretary who’d lived in 3F for a year before developing a taste for group sex and Harley Hogs. “All right, so it took a little time. Who can expect speed when you’re dealing with city hall? But, can anyone deny the fact Morris got ’em out of there? These creatures in 1F may not be pleasant to look at, but they’re only a nuisance. Not a cause to make a whole association. I mean some of us are talking about lawyers and housing inspectors. Gimme a break, already.”
“Then what about the superintendent?” Mike Birnbaum stared at Myron Gold with barely disguised contempt. Myron was a “get-along” Jew, an assimilationist. The kind Mike and his old man had always hated. The kind that moved back in with mommy when things got tough. “No super anymore and last night I froze my ass off. Pardon my French.” He nodded to the women. “I’m eighty-one and I gotta carry down my own garbage. Since Morris left, the whole joint is a piece of…” Noting the look of dismay on Andre Almeyda’s face, he pulled himself up just in time.
“What of the other buildings?” Muhammad Assiz, a Pakistani and a Moslem, had only been a resident of the Jackson Arms for ten months. Sylvia didn’t know him very well and she hadn’t invited him. She did want some of the Asians to attend and she’d spoken to an older gentleman in front of the mailboxes. His name was Aftab and, while he couldn’t come himself, he wanted to send a younger man. “As an observer. So we can be seeing what it is before we are signing anything. The management is already after us. You see many empty apartments where formerly we were living and things are very dangerous for us right now. But we will send one young man to observe. Muhammad Assiz, who is very intelligent, a doctor in our country, a technician in yours.”
Sylvia, tuned to the immaculate politeness and the wide smile, didn’t register Aftab’s anger until later, but, angry or not, there were twelve Pakistani families in the Jackson Arms and she’d need all of them if things got worse.
“Why in the other buildings is there nothing happening like this?” Muhammad Assiz, a polite smile gracing his smooth, brown skin, allowed his musical voice to express the very essence of reason. “There are many Pakistanis living in these other buildings and there is no problem there.”
That was the big question, Sylvia thought. And nobody has an answer. Morr
is owned three buildings. Two of them were running along with no changes. With the same supers, the same tenants, the same basic services. As if Morris Katz was still in charge.
“Exactly right.” Myron Gold seized Muhammad’s idea without registering the suspicions troubling the Pakistani. “There’s no reason to believe that just because a drunken super gets tossed on his butt like he deserves, the Nazis have invaded Jackson Heights.” He let his voice rise on the final phrase, ending his statement with a question mark, then tossed Mike Birnbaum his most significant look. Myron Gold wasn’t about to be bullied by an eighty-one-year-old man.
“But you don’t know, right?” Mike Birnbaum couldn’t let Myron have the last word. They would carry him out in a sheet before he let a putz like Myron make him look bad. “Two days ago, I phone up these gonifs who call themselves Precision Management. I tell ’em, ‘Look, from you I don’t wanna hear word one. I want you should refer me to the landlord. I wanna talk to the landlord direct.’ You know what the shiksa done to me? She hung up. Don’t even tell me to mind my own business. Bang. She hangs up.”
“What’s the point?” Myron asked, looking at the others for support. “What is the damn point?” He hated coming down to the old man’s level, but the bastard was so infuriating, so blindly stubborn.
“The point,” Mike Birnbaum continued, a long bony finger cocked nearly in Myron’s face, “is it could be Hitler owning our homes and you don’t got no way to prove me wrong. Also tell me this—if the gontser machers ain’t up to no good, why they gotta hide?”
Mike’s question, like that of Muhammad Assiz, hung in the air, and Sylvia Kaufman, with no notion of how to run a meeting, how to keep the focus of conversation on a particular goal, was allowing the evening to degenerate into a personal debate that excluded the very people, the Almeydas, the Parks, the Assizes, who formed the majority of tenants. She had an instinctive understanding of where the evening was headed, but no idea how to bring it back to its original purpose.
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