A Piece of the Action sm-5

by Stephen Solomita

  Moodrow shook his head in wonder. “You’re a devious bastard, Sarge. But what about the Playtex Burglar? What do I do if they ask me to make another ‘arrest’?”

  “Look, Stanley, as slow as you were, you oughta be able to figure it out for yourself. Give ground. Take some punishment. Hold on when you’re hurt. The closer you get to the wedding, the harder it’s gonna be for Cohan to get between you and Kate. The thing is, Stanley, that I always figured you for a tough guy, but I only saw you in the ring. What you want here is a quick answer. It’s only natural. But that isn’t gonna happen. You gotta keep your guard up and go the distance.”

  “All right, Sarge, I get the picture. Maybe I should’ve studied for the sergeant’s exam, instead of reaching out for the detectives. That’s what I was doing before you came along.”

  Epstein looked at his watch. “I gotta get out of here, Stanley. It’s almost eight o’clock. You goin’ into the house?”

  “Later. I’ll be in later. I’m supposed to meet with an ADA at nine-thirty.”

  “Banker’s hours. I guess being a big-shot detective isn’t all bad.”

  Moodrow ignored the comment. “There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about, Sarge. You remember a guy named Luis Melenguez?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “He got killed in a Pitt Street whorehouse the day after Christmas. A pimp.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember him. I responded to the scene. What makes you say he was a pimp?”

  “That’s what Pat Cohan told me. Melenguez was a friend of a friend. That kind of thing. I asked Patero about it, but it was Pat Cohan who told me it was a mob rubout.”

  “Pat Cohan told you bullshit. Melenguez was blown apart with a forty-five. I admit that the crime scene was pretty messed up by the time I got there-you can imagine what happens when a beat cop walks into a building with twenty half-naked women-but, from what I could make of it, Melenguez was standing in a doorway when he bought it. At the time, I figured he walked into the middle of a robbery. You know what I’m talking about, right? It was your basic wrong place/wrong time situation. We questioned the whores and the pimp who ran the place, but, naturally, nobody saw anything. The suits got there before we were finished and I turned it over to them. Standard procedure.”

  “Maybe that was the only chance the mob had to get him. Maybe they just saw an opportunity and took it.”

  “I can’t buy that, Stanley. The guy was dressed poor. Real poor. He looked like he just came off the boat. Besides, nobody uses a forty-five to make a hit. Not if they know what they’re doing. A forty-five sounds like a cannon when it goes off. Plus, when you’re putting one behind the ear from six inches away, you don’t need that much power. No, if Melenguez was a pimp, then I’m the Pope.”

  Moodrow sat back in his chair. “What I’m hearin’ is that somebody’s bullshitting me. And what I don’t understand is why they’re doin’ it.”

  “Stanley, the job runs on bullshit. Get used to it. As for why? Well, you’re a detective, right? You wanna find out the truth, go detect.”

  Twelve

  January 16

  For Antonio “steppy” Accacio, this was the best time of the day. He was in the bathroom of his ten-room Montclair, New Jersey, home and his wife, Angela, was shaving his face. He would have preferred to have his own barber, his personal barber, do the shaving, but the ungrateful bastard simply refused to make the trip from Mulberry Street to Montclair despite everything he, Steppy Accacio, had done for the man.

  But that was the way it was in life. You had to accept the bad with the good. Sure, you found some piece-of-shit swamp guinea and lent him the money to start his own business. Sure, you expected a little gratitude, something over and above the 20 % interest you were charging. That didn’t mean you’d get it.

  “Hey, no laugh. You laugh, I cut.”

  Steppy opened his eyes to look at his wife. She was leaning over him, patiently scraping away at his heavy beard. As usual, his eyes dropped to her breasts. Angie was ten years younger than he was and her jugs were still firm. He wanted to touch her, to feel her dark nipples pushing against the palm of his hand. But the last time he’d tried that move, she’d sliced him so bad, he ended up with four stitches in his right earlobe.

  “Almos’ finish,” Angela said.

  “Looks like I survived again. Right, Angie?”

  “No talk.”

  She wiped his face with the hot towel she’d used to soak his beard, then slapped on the aftershave. Steppy inhaled the fragrance of Roma Brava. It was sweeter than Aqua-Velva. More in keeping with the old country, which was where it came from. Which was where his wife came from. Steppy had no particular love for Italy. He’d never been there and had no desire to go, but these little touches impressed the ‘mustache Petes’ who still clung to the reins of power. Who needed to be impressed as much as they needed the millions of dollars pouring into the pockets of their six-hundred-dollar suits.

  Steppy got off the chair and shrugged into the silk dressing gown his wife held out to him.

  “We’re havin’ company,” he announced. “Three, four guys. Make sure you got enough coffee and pastries.” He threw her a hard look. Like most Sicilian women, she had a sharp tongue. He’d been trying to break her of the habit, but had yet to come up with a method that didn’t require breaking her body as well.

  “You tell me this lassa night. Why you gotta repeat? I’m no stupido.”

  What you are, Steppy thought, is halfway to being a fuckin’ nigger. It was funny how her cousins’ descriptions had left that little fact out. Olive was how they’d described her complexion. Well, there were two kinds of olives, green and black, and Angela was a lot closer to the black kind. Not that she really looked like one of them. Not that she had a flat nose and big lips. Not that anyone would actually say anything about her complexion. But, still, the cousins should have told him.

  He watched her butt twitch as she walked through their bedroom, then turned to admire his own complexion in the mirror. The simple fact that his parents were not from Sicily stared back at him. Blond hair, blue eyes, milky skin that burned in the sun. One thing for sure, his ancestors hailed from the highlands of Tuscany, not the mountains of Sicily, a fact which (at least according to the prevailing mythology) meant he couldn’t rise much beyond his present station.

  “Let ’em keep their secret fuckin’ society,” Steppy muttered, patting his blond hair into place. “I know where I’m goin’, even if they don’t.”

  He left the bathroom, crossing his bedroom and going downstairs to the den. The journey didn’t take very long. How could it? The small frame house wasn’t exactly a mansion in Upper Saddle River. On the other hand, it was a long way from the roach-infested tenements of lower Manhattan.

  The deep chimes of the doorbell interrupted his reverie and he quickly took a seat in the leather chair behind his desk. He loved making his workers come all the way to New Jersey for business meetings. He loved it as much as they obviously hated it.

  “Ya company’s here,” Angie yelled from the living room.

  “Send ’em in,” Steppy called back, his face reddening with anger. The bitch was supposed to usher his guests into his presence, not scream like a vendor in the Fulton Fish Market.

  “Steppy,” Joe Faci said, walking into the room, “sorry we’re late. The snow held us up. How are ya doin’ this morning?”

  “That depends, Joe.” Steppy rose to offer his hand to Joe and his companion, Santo Silesi. “It depends on what you’re gonna tell me. Siddown.”

  Before they could begin talking, Angie Accacio appeared, pushing an oak serving cart. A small pot of steaming coffee, a creamer and sugar bowl, three small cups and saucers, and a plate of small pastries were carefully arranged on its polished surface.

  “Would yiz serve, Angie?” Steppy kept his voice even, despite the fact that it wasn’t a request. He waited patiently as she filled the cups and handed them, first to the guests and then to him. Until
she walked out, closing the door behind her.

  “All right, enough with the bullshit,” he snapped. “The Hebe’ll be here in a few minutes. Let’s get to it. How’d ya make out, Sandy?”

  “What they did to Rocco? I didn’t see any of it. The Jew wouldn’t let me near it.”

  “This I already know. Joe told me.”

  “Then you also know that he’s got me standing around in project playgrounds with fifty bags of heroin.”

  Steppy Accacio smiled indulgently. Santo Silesi was his oldest sister’s firstborn, a Tuscan on both sides. That was one thing the Sicilians had right. That bit about the family. It wasn’t a foolproof protection against treachery, but it was as close as you could get.

  “Just be a little patient, Sandy,” Accacio said. “I’ll pull ya outta there as soon as possible. Meanwhile, ya should watch everything goin’ on with the Jew. Where he lives. Where he goes. Who he hangs out with. When the time comes, I wanna be able to find him.”

  Silesi raised his hands, palm up. “Whatever it takes, right? That’s the only way to look at it. By the way, sales were better than we expected. I moved three hundred bags yesterday.”

  “The take’s better,” Joe Faci interrupted, “but that might not be so good for us. The Hebe wants to buy in quantity. He claims he’s got the bucks to go for half an ounce. He’ll package himself.”

  Accacio bit into a cannoli. The crust was flaky, the filling moist and sweet. “I don’t mind so much that the Hebe’s ambitious. I mean where’s he gonna go? He can’t do nothin’ without we say so first. My problem is that I had a bitch of time gettin’ hold of the territory we got. Which, you mighta noticed, ain’t all that big. What I figured on doin’ was maximizing the profit. If I sell to the Jew wholesale, I’m gonna have to expand and I ain’t too sure I can get permission. Not right away.”

  “Why don’t we just shoot the mother-fucker,” Santo blurted out. “I mean every time I turn around the sheeny’s makin’ me eat shit.” He didn’t bother to add the simple fact that he was afraid of Jake Leibowitz.

  “Yeah,” Steppy said, “I heard about that. What you gotta do, Sandy, is keep ya self-control. Like I said, I’m gonna pull you outta there soon. And when I do, I’m gonna make the Hebe report directly to you. I’m gonna put you in charge.”

  “He ain’t gonna like that,” Joe Faci said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  All three were laughing when the doorbell sounded. They were still wiping the smirks off their faces when Angie led Jake Leibowitz into the room. “Jake,” Steppy Accacio said, rising to offer his hand, “we meet at last.”

  Stanley Moodrow spent most of the day thinking about what he was going to do. Thinking about whether he should do anything. Greta was already pissed off, whereas Sal Patero had stopped being pissed off. Pushing his nose into Patero’s business wouldn’t necessarily make Greta happy, but it was guaranteed to make Sal unhappy. It would be the same as calling Patero (and Pat Cohan) a liar. Of course, there was always the chance that Patero was a liar. Moodrow wasn’t sure he wanted to know that, either.

  But there was also the chance that Patero was right, that Allen Epstein was simply mistaken. Maybe the sergeant was confusing Melenguez with someone else. Maybe, despite all appearances, Melenguez’s death had been a mob hit. Maybe the detectives had concluded that Melenguez was a pimp on the basis of information from their informants.

  In the end, there were too many ‘maybes’ for a man as inherently curious as Stanley Moodrow. What he did was go down to the files and pull the paperwork. He didn’t expect anyone to notice and nobody did. Paperwork was Moodrow’s job.

  He went through the file systematically, beginning with the patrolman’s report and proceeding to Epstein’s observations, the preliminary reports of the two detectives and the forensic unit’s description of the crime scene. Melenguez had been gunned down from inside an office on the first floor, rear, of 800 Pitt Street with a.45 caliber pistol. There was no doubt about it. Melenguez had been hit four times and all four slugs had been recovered, two from the hallway behind the victim and two from the victim’s body.

  Moodrow turned to the Medical Examiner’s report. The M.E.’s description was gruesome enough-the first shot, the one that’d killed him, had blown away half his face; the next three had turned his abdominal cavity into tomato soup-but there was nothing in it to contradict the detectives’ preliminary assessments.

  The witness interviews came next. There were fourteen interviews with women and one with a man, a further indication, assuming 800 Pitt Street wasn’t a nunnery, that Melenguez had been gunned down inside a whorehouse. Moodrow scanned the interviews as quickly as possible, noting the name of the only man.

  Finishing, Moodrow realized that Epstein had been right about one thing: none of the witnesses, even though all had been isolated during the questioning, had been willing to admit they’d eyeballed the shooting. Which raised several questions. Melenguez had been standing in the doorway. The perpetrator had been standing inside the office. Epstein was of the opinion that Melenguez had wandered into a robbery in progress. But wasn’t it also possible that Melenguez had been the robber? According to the preliminary reports, no weapons of any kind had been found at the scene. If Melenguez had been armed, someone had taken the time to remove the weapon. Or maybe one of the whores had scooped it up with the intention of selling it on the street.

  Moodrow turned to the follow-ups, the DD5’s. The two detectives handling the case, John Samuelson and Paul Maguire, had interviewed Melenguez’s employer, a trucker named Levy, as well as several co-workers. The portrait that emerged was of a hard-working, ambitious immigrant. Melenguez had been in New York for slightly less than six months. He’d shown up for work every day. He had no friends outside of his fellow workers and spent his nights listening to the radio and writing letters home.

  Moodrow recalled the picture Nenita Melenguez had shown him. He tried to imagine the tiny man with the jug ears packing a rod, pulling it on the pimp who ran the whorehouse. He couldn’t even come close.

  The obvious next step was to speak to the suits who’d handled the case before it was farmed out of the precinct. As it happened, Moodrow knew Paul Maguire fairly well. Maguire had still been in uniform when Moodrow came onto the job and for a short time before Maguire’s appointment to the detectives, the two of them had walked overlapping beats.

  That was on the plus side. There was a minus side as well. Moodrow knew he could return the file with no one the wiser. He could still put it back and forget the whole thing. But once he started talking to other cops, he had no way to predict who might whisper what message into Sal Patero’s ear. Paul Maguire had always been friendly, but how was Moodrow to know where Maguire’s loyalties lay? Ordinarily, jobs were given out to any detective foolish enough to be loitering in the squad room when a call came into the precinct. On the other hand, Patero might have personally assigned the case to Maguire because he knew Maguire could be trusted to do what he was told.

  Moodrow went back to the filing cabinets and replaced the paperwork, then strolled over to the squad room and poured himself a cup of coffee. Samuelson and Maguire had back-to-back desks in a far corner of the room. Moodrow looked over, hoping they were out in the field, but found both men pounding away on their respective Underwoods. He recalled what Epstein had told him about going the distance, using time to his own advantage.

  What I oughta do, he thought, is forget about this bullshit. What I oughta do is stay close to Kate and brown-nose her old man until after the wedding. What I oughta do is find an apartment in Flushing and move out of the Lower East Side. What I oughta do …

  Sound advice, he couldn’t deny it, but his long legs kept moving across the squad room. Kept moving until he was standing next to Paul Maguire’s desk.

  “How ya doin’, fellas?”

  Maguire and Samuelson looked up in surprise. Just as if they hadn’t seen him coming.

  “What’s goin’ on, Stanley?” Maguir
e said.

  “You know the Melenguez case?” Moodrow paused, but neither man spoke. “Well, I was looking over the paperwork.”

  “Somethin’ missing?” Samuelson asked. “Not that it matters, because the case is goin’ away from us. In fact, it’s already gone.”

  “No, that’s not it. Nothing’s missing.” Now that he was in the middle of it, Moodrow couldn’t decide what he wanted to ask. The two detectives weren’t any help. They continued to stare at him with blank expressions. “All right, there’s a couple of things bothering me. If Melenguez was shot from inside the office, either the pimp or someone the pimp knows had to be the shooter. How else would the perpetrator get in there? Sal thinks Melenguez was hit by a professional. But that doesn’t make sense, either. Why would anybody want to rub out Luis Melenguez?”

  “Wait a second, Stanley,” Maguire interrupted. “Are you saying the lieutenant’s not happy with the work we did?”

  “Just the opposite. Sal’s already signed off on the case. What I’m doing here is personal. Rosaura Pastoral, Melenguez’s landlady, happens to live in my building. She asked me to check it out.”

  As far as Moodrow could tell, his explanation had exactly no effect on the two detectives. Their faces remained blank. They didn’t even look at each other.

  “Everything’s in the file,” Samuelson finally said. “Whatever we found out, that’s where it is. We got nothing to add.”

  Moodrow remembered to thank the men before walking away. He felt like an idiot, but the feeling didn’t make him unhappy. No more bullshit, he told himself. No more Sherlock Holmes. Mind your own goddamned business before you do something to put your ass in a permanent sling.

  He went back to his own desk and began to review a case the ADAs had sent over in the morning. There were two statements missing, one from the complainant and one from the accused. The defendant’s lawyer was demanding both and the prosecutor intended to drop the indictment if they couldn’t be located.