by S. J. Rozan
The two young punks breezed through the door, now with ski masks securely in place. The Chrysler was almost adjacent to the storefront, and Sonny stared transfixed as the two men extended their arms, black automatic pistols at the ready in gloved hands.
Sonny had to crane his neck as the car cruised past the restaurant. He saw Frank stand, throw back his shoulders, and shake a fist at approaching death.
Sonny grabbed the driver’s shoulder. “Stop the car.”
“Here?” The driver was incredulous.
Anger flared in Sonny’s eyes. “Stop the fucking car!”
The Chrysler came to rest in the middle of Arthur Avenue, engine idling while Sonny watched an old soldier muster up a final bit of pride and face what he knew was his assassination. In those few seconds clarity returned; Frank was once again strong and would face death like a man.
Words that Sonny couldn’t hear were exchanged as the gunmen fired a barrage of rounds into Frank Bernardo. Patrons tossed Big Macs and shakes and planted themselves firmly on the greasy floor facedown. Sonny saw Frank mouth a torrent of words, though they were muffled by the thick glass and ringing shots. But Sonny knew what those word were.
Assassinato, assassinato.
As the bullets found their target, the old man got stronger. He pushed the table aside and lunged for the shooters, who retreated as they continued to fire.
“Jesus Christ,” Sonny said softly, “he’s gotta have ten slugs in him.”
Finally, Frank fell to his knees. One shooter stepped deftly around the old man, put the muzzle of the gun to the victim’s bald head, and fired one final round. Frank Bernardo toppled over like he was pulled down by a ship’s anchor. The two men spit on their motionless victim, dropped their guns, and ran to the door, flinging it open and slowing to a walk as they calmly made their way up the street to where Sonny’s car still idled. As they walked they high-fived each other like two adolescents congratulating themselves after winning a soccer game.
The driver threw the car in gear.
“Wait,” Sonny said, and clamped a hand on the driver’s arm. In the distance the muted sound of sirens pulsated.
The driver was visibly agitated. “Jesus Christ, Sonny! We gotta get outta here.”
“In a minute,” Sonny said, and stepped out of the car. He walked across the street and waited.
The two gunmen were laughing now and rapidly approaching Sonny. They smiled, seeing their boss and knowing that if this didn’t get them their buttons, nothing would.
Sonny let them get to within twenty feet before he pulled a nine-millimeter pistol and cut the two shooters down with one shot each to their torsos. Surprise and pain swept across the faces of the killers as they dropped to the ground and began crawling away. One made it under a parked car, but left no room for his partner.
Sonny, in a controlled anger, straddled the exposed shooter and put two rounds in his back. Blood pooled on the sidewalk as Sonny carefully stepped over the dead man, leaned under the car, and emptied his magazine into the remaining whimpering wounded hit man.
A crowd had gathered, and when Sonny stood up they turned their backs in unison and began scattering. Sonny jammed the gun in his waistband, walked quickly to the car, and got in. The sirens were louder now, easily within two blocks of the scene.
“What the fuck?” the driver said, as he forced himself not to leave twenty feet of rubber getting off the block.
“The old man deserved better than that. He was a caporegime, for Christ sake! Spit on a made man? Laugh? I don’t fucking think so.” Disrespect, Sonny hated it; he had learned all about respect from the late Frank Bernardo.
Sonny lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as the car drove onto the Major Deegan Expressway. If the cops could find anyone to admit being at the scene of the killings, they wouldn’t be able to remember a face, let alone an age or the race of the shooter.
This was, after all, Arthur Avenue.
YOU WANT I SHOULD WHACK MONKEY BOY?
BY THOMAS ADCOCK
Courthouse
The young guy sitting next to me at the bar looks like an escapee from one of those rectangular states where blond people live who wind up in Los Angeles where my own kid went to escape from me.
He’s wearing a cashmere turtleneck and matching tobacco-colored corduroys and a green suede jacket that would be a couple of months’ pay if my secretary had to buy it. He’s blond, of course, with California teeth and a hundred-dollar haircut.
Two minutes ago he walked in and looks around the place like he knows everybody. Which he doesn’t. Then he walked over my way and took a load off.
How this guy found his way to a dive like the Palomino Club, let alone the Bronx, I am about to find out.
So who am I, sitting next to this Jack Armstrong type and doing my bit to be one-half of an odd couple? And what’s this bar about?
The Palomino Club is neutral territory for a bunch of us who depend on one another to keep the criminal justice system of the Bronx a going concern. Meaning the cops and the crooks and guys like me, since all roads lead to lawyers.
Over the bar right where I’m sitting, there’s a creased photograph of a curly-haired squirt with his ears folded under a cowboy hat and he’s sitting up on a big cream-colored horse with a flowing white mane. At the bottom of the picture it says, Camp Hiawatha 1953.
That’s me in the saddle, by the way. I always sit near the picture of my youth.
I am now a grown-up man of five-foot-six, if you can call that grown. I am sort of round and practically bald-headed. I have lived on the Concourse since my days in short pants. The fact I now get my suits made by a tailor with liver spots over on Grant Avenue who claims he sewed for Tony Curtis after he stopped being Bernie Schwartz from Hunts Point doesn’t fool anybody. So says my kid.
My kid says I’m so Bronx haimish there’s no way my name could be anything besides Stanley, which it is.
So imagine how curious I am about this tall, sun-kissed, golden-haired guy—goy—who took stool next to me when he could have sat down in a lot of other spots.
The guy orders a cosmopolitan. Nate the bartender cuts me a look that says, Nu?
Naturally, I am wondering myself. So I start chatting up Jack Armstrong.
“Look at these,” I tell him, holding up both hands so he can see my pink palms. “Soft, hey? Nice?”
“For crying out loud, Stanley—”
This is from Nate, who is rolling his eyeballs like Jerry Colonna used to do on The Ed Sullivan Show. I am not currently speaking to Nate on account of he encouraged my kid to break up the firm of Katz & Katz.
Yeah, I get your point, he says to my kid. You got to be your own person, he says to her. You have to find your own space. Feh! Since when is Nathan Blum talking hippie?
“—Not with the schtick already, Stanley.”
I think about telling Nate, Life is schtick, numb nuts. But instead I keep him on my list of people to ice, which I hope irritates him like a nail in the neck. He picks up another Hamilton from the little pile of cash on the wet mahogany in front of me and pads off, knowing to bring back another Grey Goose marty, the hump.
I get back to business.
“No kidding, Jack,” I tell the golden boy. “Look at these hands.”
“It’s Blake, actually.” He smiles, which blinds me. “Blake Lewis. I’m in from the coast.”
Who says this?
Well, what did I tell my kid about Hollywood guys with the teeth she thinks are so freaking fabulous? Phony-baloneys, all of them. No parents in the history of the world ever gave the name of Blake to their innocent little boy, not even to Jack Armstrong here.
“So, Blake, feel the hands.”
He touches one palm, then the other one.
“Soft,” he says. “Nice.”
“Smooth like a baby’s pilkes.”
“You must be terribly proud of those hands,” says Blake Lewis with the suede and cashmere. He sounds terribly like somebody who doesn’t w
ant you to know he grew up in a splitlevel eating casserole and Jell-O. “You didn’t have to work hard—like your father did.”
This golden boy, he knows?
“My old man painted houses,” I tell him, playing it casual, like maybe Lewis here hit on a lucky guess. “He had hands rough as shingles. Me, I don’t paint.”
“I heard that. I heard you’re an attorney.”
“Not an attorney. I’m a lawyer.”
Lewis smiles and swivels on his barstool to scope out the place again. The usual suspects I mentioned are here.
Three fat capos by the names of Peter “the Pipe” Guastafaro and Charlie the Pencil Man and Nutsy Nunzio are eating bloody steaks in a corner booth. The steaks are so big they’re going to have meat breath for the next couple of days.
Down the middle of back dining room is a long table full of potato-faced Irish detectives in shiny suits. They’re drinking champagne to celebrate a take-down that’s going to earn everybody commendations, and making eyes at the bling-bling brown-skinned girls the latest gold-toothed hip-hop prince on his way to bankruptcy court brought along with him.
The local Chamber of Commerce boys are here, with long-legged women they’re not married to. One of them decides to showboat. He hands over an intriguing wad of cash to a crewcut desk sergeant from the 44th Precinct and says, “Take care of the other guys too.” He has not yet learned that sending money by cop is like sending lettuce by rabbit.
Hanging around the bar to either side of me are solid-built guys keeping a quiet eye on one another, along with some tabloid guys, including Slattery from the Post.
Slattery came with the detectives from his tribe, but now feels the need to drink something that’s not bubbly. He’s got buck teeth and a mustache from the ’70s he ought to get rid of.
The solid-built guys are nursing seltzer. Their fingers on the glasses are as thick as rolled quarters. They’ve got enough firepower concealed under polyester suit jackets to hold off an invasion.
Down at the end of the bar, the D.A. himself is getting a bang out of showing a gaggle of Wall Street attorneys the other side of the tracks. And working the room, of course, are my comrades of the Bronx criminal defense bar. They’re handing out business cards.
Lewis turns back to me and says, “I hear you’re a lawyer who knows how to motivate certain types of people.”
He says this with no sense of irony or amusement. I notice I’m still sitting here with my pink palms up in the air, like I’m about to get mugged by a guy who’s prettier than anything I ever saw walk out of a Jerome Avenue beauty salon.
This good-looking mugger, he glances up at the memento from Camp Hiawatha a long time ago and says, “You’re Stanley Katz, aren’t you?”
Then he sticks out a hand that’s smoother than mine and I shake it because what else am I supposed to do.
It takes me a long minute, but I am now recovered. Because now I figure what’s with the golden boy.
“You know my kid out in Los Angeles.” I don’t say this like it’s a question.
“I do indeed. Wendy said I’d find you here. She says your office is nearby.” Lewis nods his expensive haircut in the right direction while he’s saying this. Then he says, “According to Wendy, they call you Consigliere.”
“Nobody named Stanley was ever a consigliere. Except for me,” I tell him. “But that’s mostly for laughs.”
“But not strictly.”
He’s got me there.
“Counselor, I could use your help,” says Lewis.
“For what?”
He tells me.
“You want I should whack Monkey Boy?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Later, when I’m home after listening to this disturbing proposition, which I admit has got a certain appeal, I get Wendy on the horn. It’s around midnight in the Bronx, which I know is only 9 o’clock in California.
“Your boy Lewis, he clocked me at the Palomino.”
I inform her of this right in the middle of when she’s answering “Hello” into the phone.
Even though Wendy is my flesh and blood, I can’t help being impatient with her since she’s out there with the phonybaloneys now. Which I know all about from reading the unpleasant memoir of a New York writer who went to Hollywood once. The title of this memoir, it’s Hello, He Lied.
Six months ago—before she started up with her my-own-person business—I gave Wendy the loan of this book, figuring it would disgust her enough to keep her home where she belongs, namely in the Bronx with me. I figured wrong.
We had the knock-down-drag-out.
“How can you bust up Katz & Katz?” I asked her, again in my impatient way. “We got a nice long-standing clientele of decent New York criminals.”
“It’s not like it’s fatal,” she said. “Partners split up all the time.” She was cool, like she had the questions and answers doped out ahead of time. Like I taught her.
“Right here in New York, kiddo, you got a big future.”
“As what? Daughter of the great Stanley Katz who doesn’t paint houses? The consigliere? I’m already Stanley Katz’s kid. It’s not a skill. I have to be my own person, find my own space.”
Oy vey.
“In Los Angeles? What’s out there for a lawyer?”
“Entertainment law. Like I told you a hundred times.”
“A hundred times I still don’t get it. What do they know from murder in Hollywood?”
This could have been the stupidest thing I ever said. So I tried to brighten up the moment with a blast from the past.
“Say, kiddo, what’s the best thing about a murder trial?”
Wendy didn’t give me the setup like years ago when she was a little girl all excited about the game of Papa’s punch line.
So I answered me: “One less witness.”
“That is so ancient, Daddy.”
“You’re breaking my heart. Don’t leave me. I’m lonely.”
“It’s a lonely world, Daddy.”
“Which makes it a shame to be lonely all alone. You look like your mother. I miss your mother.”
“Me too, Daddy. But she’s gone. You know.”
Then Wendy and the blue suitcases her mother and I bought her for college walked out of my life.
“California is not out of your life,” she tells me whenever I call these days and start up with the you-walked-out-of-my-life business. Wendy informs me, “They’ve got airplanes now.”
Okay, I should fly out and visit.
But right now, I need to talk.
“You hear me? Your boy found his way to the Palomino Club.”
“Oh—hi, Daddy.”
“This guy, Lewis, he’s for real?”
What am I saying?
“You can bank on Blake Lewis,” says Wendy. “He’s a legitimate television producer. He’s big-time.”
“For me, all he’ll produce is a visit from the feds.”
“Like they’ve never been to your office.” Wendy says this with a sigh, like when she was a teenager complaining how I embarrassed her in front of her friends. Then she laughs and says, “Don’t you want to be on TV, Daddy?”
Is my own kid in on this proposition I got last night?
“Why me?”
“Blake’s looking for consultants. It’s what he does for his kind of shows.”
“What’s he calling this one?”
“Unofficially, it’s called The Assassination Show. Keep it hush-hush, okay? Blake only told me because he had to ask about—well, technical advisors, let’s say.”
I’m thinking over a number of things I don’t want to say to Wendy until I think them over. This seems to make her nervous.
“Well, so, naturally, I sent Blake to you.” Naturally.
“Ideas get stolen in the television business, Daddy. So hush-hush.”
“Television’s for cabbage-heads.”
“Speaking of cabbage, did you talk money?”
“Money I don’t care about.”<
br />
“I do. I’m only just getting off the ground here. I did a couple of five-percent series contracts, but you know how that goes.”
“Yeah, you sent me copies of your work, kiddo.”
“It’s mostly boilerplate according to the unions and the producers’ association. About a hundred ifs in there between a lousy ten grand, which doesn’t even pay the rent, and the sky.”
“But when you get up there, it’s dizzy time. When are you coming home?”
“I kind of want to, Daddy, but what I need right now is a real show-runner client like Blake Lewis. A big fish who can pay me a big commission. I need you to help me reel him in.”
“You should have called me, Wendy.”
“Where would that have got me? You would have blown me off, right?”
“Not necessarily.”
As soon as I say this, I know she’s got her foot in the door. And I know she knows that I know.
“Listen, Daddy, this is a good piece of business. It gets me in solid with the biggest thing going out here.”
“What’s that?”
“Reality TV.”
“There’s an oxymoron for you.”
I have got many things on my mind this morning in the November drizzle that’s making my shoes squeak. Not only that, I accidentally step on a liverwurst sandwich somebody dropped on the sidewalk. So this is not a good omen.
I am on the way from my place on the Concourse over to the office on 161st Street around the corner from the marble glory of the Bronx State Supreme Court. This is where it’s my calling to help little people through the meat grinder of their lives and take from the big people what the market will bear.
When it looks to me like they can hack the payments, the working stiffs pay me with their little credit cards. Or else I take IOUs, which I almost never collect on. The big people—your old-fashioned wiseguys, your rap music moguls, your disgraced politicians—they pay cash, and lots of it.
In case you hadn’t noticed about the times we are living through, weirdness and rudeness is rampant. And it’s not just up there at the top, either, it’s now trickled down to the bottom of the food chain. Never mind, for me business is brisk.