Christie stared at her report, reached over and pulled the papers from her machine, squashing them into a ball which she tossed at the wastebasket. It bounced against the wall and onto the floor. Whispering to herself, she bent down and dropped the papers into the basket, pulled open the drawer and prepared another set of papers and carbons.
Stoney’s voice, beside her, was musical and pleasant but something made her stop and listen closely to him. “You type up a nice report for that man, Christie. Oh, I know you’re steaming a little from the pressure cooking he gave you, but I want to tell you something. Casey Reardon spent about forty-five pretty hot minutes himself, upstairs.” Stoney’s thumb jerked toward the ceiling, indicating the “top floor” where the District Attorney of New York County held domain. Stoney’s black eyes caught her surprise at his next words. “Defending you. Yeah, that’s right, defending Detective Christie Opara, who is a member of this here Squad. You see, the Great Master of Us All up there on that top floor, he wasn’t too interested in anything except that the case didn’t come off today. And he wanted to know who? and why? but mostly who and then why the who wasn’t removed from the Squad—forthwith.” Stoney flexed his shoulders, straightening his spine, and sighed. “Now, Mr. Reardon never tells who to the fella up there, and as to the why”—he smiled—“well, Mr. Reardon has a pretty good backlog of convenient whys that he can draw on, so we still have the investigation and the wind-up has just been put off, temporarily. So if he was a little rough on you, you might feel, under the circumstances, that the Man was entitled, no?”
Christie took a long, deep, grateful breath, nodded wordlessly at Stoney, who winked and moved back to his own desk. Taking her papers with her, she crossed the room, to stand alongside of him. “Stoney, can I use your typewriter? I’ll make it fast. The Royal does a better job”—she grinned—“and I want to give Mr. Reardon a mistake-free, hole-free report, no?”
Stoner Martin groaned wearily. “Ah, my words always can be turned against my own best interests. Make it quick, Christie, I don’t want to spend the rest of my days and nights here, lend-leasing my typewriter.”
She was nearly finished with her report when Bill Ferranti approached her. She turned quickly, catching some wild hand signals from Marty Ginsburg.
Detective Ferranti was a slender, neatly dressed man who wore dark horn-rimmed glasses. His face had a mild, pink-skinned, owlish appearance, and he had thinning, pure white hair. He was always immaculately groomed. “Christie,” did you have your first go-round with Mr. Reardon today?” His voice was friendly and concerned.
“Yes, but it wasn’t too bad. Bill, I’m sorry about this morning. I hope ...”
Ferranti waved his hand in the air. “So we waited a while; the cafeteria was nice and cool and the coffee is very good. No damage, as long as you got off the hook with Mr. Reardon. He can be very rough, but he’s fair.”
Christie grinned and in a loud voice said, “Well, your partner back there”—turning, she discovered Marty had disappeared from sight—“I think he’s hiding under the desk. Bill, you better have a long talk with him. He’s been spreading some pretty awful stories about you!”
Ginsburg make groaning sounds, and his hand emerged from under the desk, grasped at a pretzel, then disappeared. The wisecracks began to crisscross the room, from O’Hanlon, who held his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone, from Christie, between Bill and Marty. Finally, Stoney called for order. “Let’s hold it down in here! Let’s try to act like professional law enforcement officers, gentlemen. And you too, Christie. Let’s have a little decorum if it isn’t too much to ask. After all, we are a rather select little group, though we do, some of us anyway, appear a little motley today, like the Man said.”
Christie finished her report without a mistake: the margins neatly lined up, the paragraphs properly indented. Handing the report to Stoner Martin she felt, for the first time since she had been assigned to the District Attorney’s Squad, that she was, in fact, a member.
5
DAVID ROGOFF, A PALE MAN of forty, pressed his forehead into his hands, which clung to the steering wheel of his 1965 coffee-colored Dodge Dart. He could feel the streams of sweat running under his arms, along the sides of his body, down his chest, making the Dacron shirt cling to his body like a thin layer of clammy paste.
It was totally silent in the cavernous parking lot, two levels below the street. The trip in from Manhasset had been unreal: a mechanical maneuvering of the car along the Expressway, the sudden realization that he was hitting nearly seventy, the jamming on of the brakes, the anger of some indignant housewife, her hair flapping wildly in her convertible behind him as she simultaneously braked and honked to keep herself from racking up on him and to let him know what she thought of him. The sudden maze of lower Manhattan traffic, which hadn’t been sudden at all; actually, a slow, steady, continuous building up of traffic and side streets, but David had noticed all of it at once, as though he had been miraculously transported from the cool, dark, understated, elegant showroom of “Tastefully Yours” in the shopping center to the inexplicable commotion and heavy heat of Canal Street. Consciously fighting traffic, consciously forcing his way through the narrow, congested streets, he had found this municipal garage, had accepted the small pink ticket from the uniformed man in the little glass booth, had followed the endless series of arrows that kept pointing: around, around, lower and lower, to this final depth of white-marked rectangles. Somehow, not scraping either the large gray cement pillar to his right nor the carelessly parked Cadillac to his left, he had brought the Dart to a halt, turned off the motor and sat now in the silent deadness of his car, trying to pull himself together.
David Rogoff rubbed his forehead, trying to erase the panic that had been building from the instant of that fantastic phone call: that hard unfamiliar, unsurprised, unconcerned voice telling him that Murray had been arrested.
He took a long and steadying breath, recalling hard-won conclusions, certainties, drawing on them after so many years, trying to form them into a shield around himself:
Murray is not my fault. What happened to Murray is not my fault. Murray is what he is because of what he is: what he had been before the accident and because he could not cope with the thing that happened to him. And there wasn’t even real medical proof that the accident initiated Murray’s strange, progressively rapid, complete hairlessness. None of the experts could pinpoint it; none of them had pointed a definite finger at the cause. There was no proof. Was there? Murray is Murray’s own fault. The irony was that he, David, had undertaken long years of therapy when it was Murray who should have learned to accept himself: not David. It wasn’t David who needed the help it was Murray.
David Rogoff bit down on his index finger, trying to let the pressure of his teeth biting into the bone keep him here, now, in the moment, but the scene was before him, before his eyes, which he kept locked tightly behind his horn-rimmed glasses. It had been an accident, for who in this world could possibly have imagined that David Rogoff could have caused irreparable physical damage to his young giant of a brother? It came back to him again, as it had come back to him time and again through the last seventeen years, as it would come back to him periodically through all the years of his life.
Murray, sixteen years old, tall, his great height absorbed by the power of his body. His shoulders like carved stone yet flexible as wire, his chest, broad and massive, outlined by the narrow shirt which fitted into his tight pants without a break in the smooth line of his body. Standing outside the Loew’s Delancey movie house that hot July night, surrounded by his usual crowd of adolescent worshipers. Murray, running his large hand through his thick mop of yellow hair: the golden boy. That’s what Mama always called him: my great golden boy, and Murray’s golden glow protected him from all the responsibilities, all the requirements which he, David, small and narrow in the mold of his father, had to meet, but Murray’s splendor, stared at and admired by family and neighbors and even by total strangers
, passing him on the street, glancing at him, then turning to gaze at him openly, as though he were some natural wonder. Murray didn’t have to worry about how he could finish N.Y.U. at night, working as an accountant during the day; about how to pass that lousy C.P.A. exam; about how to plan and scrounge and get the money together so that one day he could have a business of his own. Murray worried about nothing but Murray.
He didn’t have to worry about Edna and her tricks. If only Edna hadn’t led him on that night. David Rogoff let his body relax, loosened the grip on the steering wheel, let it run through him, let it play itself out.
That August night, Edna had been up to form with her usual teasing and light touching. It was her idea of innocence, to express shock and anger when one careless, unguarded slip of her hand, one playful quick darting of her tongue against his teeth, aroused him. They had quarreled and he had left her in tears and professed confusion and he had sat swaying in the dirty heat of the “D” train all the way from the Bronx with all those needs and hungers tensing up inside of him. He had gotten off two stations before Delancey Street, needing to run a little, to walk it off, because he knew, as she did, that if it killed him, she wouldn’t let him have her until after the wedding in September.
But the jogging walk through the August streets of the lower East Side hadn’t helped. The stoops were lined with Puerto Ricans, twining arms and legs around each other easily, rubbing, touching, nuzzling. The sidewalks were filled with Italians, the men patting their women, the women warning, that the children would see but smiling when the men shrugged: so what? Then, coming upon Murray and his cronies; the kid all flushed and smug, running his fingers inside his opened shirt, playing lightly over the golden strong curls of his chest, sliding his fingers along the fly of his trousers and then, telling—telling and all his pals, their eyes narrowed and excited, picturing what Murray was saying: that he had laid those little spic sisters, Maria and Dolores Gonzalez, twice each in the period of two hours and mockingly had asked them to pay him and they, seriously, said they would be glad to because Murray was a great, golden god, a gift to them on a hot, languid, uneasy July night. David had tried to shake free of his brother’s grasp. He didn’t want to hear about Murray’s filth. He had pulled away from Murray, warning him, but Murray was too caught up in his story and all his pimply, snotty friends, gleaming their lewd interest, prodded him on.
Then, Murray, the small golden hairs along his cheeks and chin glittering in the flashing lights of the movie marquee, had reached down, grabbing at David playfully, disregarding David’s anger, David’s warning, and Murray, in surprise, let out an obscene howl of delight, had made some stupid, lewd, taunting, crude accusation about David’s condition and then about Edna. And David had pushed him.
That was all he had done, his 140 pounds of anger (but had it been deeper than anger? had it been some cumulative force of unknown rage?) had shoved at the massive chest and Murray slid on the slippery smoothness of the pseudo-marble floor under the marquee of the Loew’s Delancey and he went into a coma caused by an unanticipated, uncalculated, unimagined crashing of the back of his skull on the curbstone and Murray had remained in a coma, still and lifeless on the flat white bed at Bellevue Hospital for three days and three nights.
David Rogoff stared through the windshield of his car, not seeing the concrete wall directly before him: seeing the image of his brother, Murray, flatly huge beneath the white sheet, breathing fitfully, the bottles arranged about his bed, sending fluids into his body through transparent tubes.
David had talked and talked and talked with Dr. Aronowitz: for four and a half years, digging up all the hidden thoughts, all the unknown resentments of the eleven-year-old boy with white skin and sharp elbows and bony legs who was told over and over again, “Like a little god he is, David, your baby brother! Like Uncle Moishe in the old country, a wonderful great giant!” While he, David, having heard the wondrous stones of the great, unbelievable Uncle Moishe, whose legends ruled his mother’s heart, stared at the rapidly growing, powerful child who at seven could easily knock him down.
He had denied the unsuspected words: he hadn’t hated Murray. He hadn’t. That was what Aronowitz had wanted him to say. God, hadn’t he taken the kid everywhere with him? Hadn’t he lied for him, time and. again, when he got into wild scrapes with the neighborhood hooligans? Stealing, pinching things from the candy store, even lifting coins from the register in Papa’s fish store, and David, covering it up, making good the coins so that Mama would never know the reincarnation of the legendary Uncle Moishe was just a common little crook. (But Mama would have said she told Murray he could have some loose change: that’s what she would have said.) And he had said, “Stealing from your own parents, Murray—from your own parents.” But the light tan eyes regarded him in that special way, the golden lashes blinking up and down, the mouth, ready with a quick, pleading smile, the face so innocently sorry.
Of course I loved Murray. Everyone loved Murray.
But not now. No more. David eased his body from beneath the steering wheel, struggling into his lightweight suit jacket, the sleeves sticking against the dampness of his shirt. Murray was Murray’s fault. He wasn’t blind or crippled or disabled. He had refused to wear the dark blond hairpiece which David had bought for him years ago: for three hundred and twenty dollars. He ruined every decent suit David had bought him; walked off every job David had schemed and begged to get him; had antagonized every doctor David had taken him to with the same reaction: bullshit. Now, Murray was on his own. I will go bail for him and get him out of this and then I am finished with him. This time: finished.
David carefully checked the front door to make sure he had locked the car, then tested the rear doors. He glanced at his watch. It was three P.M. Murray had been arrested, the policeman’s voice had said, at about nine fifteen. Well, he couldn’t have gotten into the city any earlier. He had had to sit and think, after the call, what to do: whom to contact. How he had remembered Frankie Santino was still a mystery to him. How he had even vaguely recalled that Frankie Santino, that skinny, sleazy little Italian kid who worked part-time in his parents’ pizza joint on Sheriff Street, was now a lawyer, was one of those peculiar little bits of information he had absorbed somehow. When the secretary had said, in a cool, unsurprised way, “I’ll see if Mr. Santino is in, just a moment please,” he had sat there in his office, watching through the lush artificial rubber plant so that his partner, Jerry, wouldn’t see him. He could not picture Frankie Santino, a lawyer now.
He couldn’t have called their attorney, Sam Gerstein. My God, what could he have said to Sam: what would he know about a brother who got arrested on a subway train for being a degenerate?
Frankie had said he would meet him outside of Felony Court, like that was under the Statue of Liberty: anyone would know where.
David stood immobilized in the center of the square lobby of the Criminal Courts Building, his eyes seeking some direction, some sign. People were moving, quickly, slowly, lingeringly, hurriedly, like ants from one side of the lobby to the other, arms around shoulders, voices urgent. Breathing with a slight wheezing sound (that’s all I need, an asthma attack), feeling the beginning light-headedness of nausea, David emitted a startled gasp at the unexpected clutching of a hand at his shoulder. Turning around, he regarded the man before him without recognition.
He was a short, stocky man with a thick neck emerging from a tightly buttoned white-on-white shirt worn beneath a shiny black Italian silk suit. An inch of pure white emerged at each sleeve and the hand, which reached for David’s, had a large, grayish-blue star sapphire ring turned outward on the pinky. David squinted, trying to see Frankie Santino somewhere in the face which was nearly strangled by the silvery white silk tie at the neck. It was a broad, blunt, dark face with black eyes which danced all over David, and the thick, curly black hair was now a heavy fringed semi-circle accenting the swarthy skull.
“Davey Rogoff! You haven’t changed, you haven’t changed,” t
he unfamiliar voice informed him loudly. The skinny, blotchy kid with the greasy curls had had a shrill, tough little voice. “A little filled out maybe, but then aren’t we all?” The laugh was unpleasant.
“Mr. Santino?” he asked uncertainly.
“Hell, what is this ‘Mr. Santino’ crap?” the lawyer bellowed at him, seeming delighted to see David. “I’m still Frankie, Frankie,” he said expansively. “My God, Davey, you look great.” Stepping back, he surveyed David shrewdly, noting that David’s dark gray suit fitted a small but compact body which had not succumbed to the years. The dark tie was neatly correct against the expensive shirt. The horn-rimmed glasses added a certain polish and refinement to David’s face. The dark brown hair, Santino noted, had been razor cut: the sonuvabitch took good care of himself. Probably went to a health club and took sauna baths.
“Davey-boy, you look real Long Island suburbs. Manhasset? You said the furniture business? You got your own place?”
Carefully, David said, “Not really my own—I have a partner. We have a small showroom in Manhasset. My home is in Great Neck.”
Santino shook one hand lightly—the hand with the ring—letting it dangle from his wrist. “Hey! The million-dollar mile—Manhasset!”
The Bait Page 6