Father Divine's Bikes

by Steve Bassett

  “Elise Smith.”

  “Then you and Miss Smith will take a ride to the station.”

  The three of them went to the manager’s office, where the saleswoman filled out the form and signed the complaint. Gazzi then took the girl down to a seldom-used entrance on Bank Street to await the patrol car he summoned from the precinct. They were alone.

  Gazzi stood by the glass door, the girl beside him.

  “I got no time for this bullshit. Do you know what the fuck you’re doing? Who I work for?” the girl said.

  “But you steal, you get booked.”

  The girl’s expression softened as she looked at Gazzi. “Hey, ain’t there nothin’ I can do to get outta this?” she said, moving closer to him.

  Gazzi could smell her perfume. She was wearing a thin, low-cut linen dress and no bra. He could see her nipples. This was no innocent kid. She smiled, a bold smile, a full-toothed smile, a hard smile. Her eyes darted toward the door. The meaning was clear to Gazzi as he tried to focus on the sparse traffic outside.

  “Honey, there’s got to be somethin’…,” Cherry said. “You know what I do, and I do it real good.”

  The girl moved her right hand across Gazzi’s chest.

  Gazzi’s brain exploded, thoughts spilling out in all directions.

  “Come on,” she purred as her hand strayed lower to his crotch. “Ooo, you are a big, hard man.”

  He felt the zipper of his fly pull down. The girl put her hand inside his pants. Her cheek was against his shoulder.

  Gazzi was sweating. He was breathing heavily as her hand started to move. Geesh, it felt good. This girl was a pro.

  “Oh yeah, Baby. Oh yeah.” Her hand was moving faster. “You like it, don’cha?”

  Gazzi grit his teeth.

  Suddenly, the girl stopped. “I can make you happy, officer. Just let me go and I’ll give you a good time later.”

  Could he let her go? Would it be possible? They could arrange a meeting later. Yeah, that’s it. But would she keep her end of the bargain and keep her mouth shut?

  Suddenly, he heard the door open and high heels clicking on the stairs. Cherry backed off just as the salesgirl appeared. Gazzi zipped his fly.

  “Can we get this over with, officer? I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Uh…sure. The squad car should be here any minute, Miss.”

  A few minutes later, the squad car arrived.

  “What’s the beef, Gazzi?” the officer said.

  “Shoplifting at Bam’s. This lady will file the complaint.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Gazzi put the two women in the backseat with another officer. His job was not over until he completed his shift on the beat. He would fill out his report at the precinct later.

  “See ya later.” Gazzi shut the door and the car took off.

  He let loose a torrent of mea culpas. It was his second time dealing with a hooker. This time he had nearly compromised his duty because of that little Nigger slut. He could have lost his job. He’d know better next time. He’d just handcuff the bitch and be done with it.

  The next day, he reported in and his friend, Tony Gordo, now a captain and head of the entire uniform division, caught him in the locker room.

  “Frankie, you’re at it again. What the fuck is going on with you?”

  “Good morning to you too, Tony.”

  “I heard you made an arrest at Bam’s yesterday.”

  “Yeah, some Nigger whore, she was just a kid. She wasn’t working the street, just shoplifting.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Cherry. Probably fake.”

  ”It’s been a long time and I thought you learned your lesson,” Gordo said. “First, you fucked up with one of Longy’s whores, and now it’s Richie the Boot’s bimbo. You could have let her go. You know the territory and that your beat includes Boiardo’s stable.”

  “And you?”

  “Don’t go there, Francis.”

  Gazzi turned pale. He knew about all the cops on the take. It had slapped him in the face all those years ago when he arrested Sublime Golpe at the Paradise Club. And now his friend Tony Gordo.

  “You need to wise up. It don’t look good for me—or you.”

  “Won’t happen again.”

  “You got that right.”

  The following week, Gordo broke the news to Gazzi.

  “It wasn’t so easy this time, Francis.” Gordo said from behind his desk at headquarters. “Had to make three phone calls to set it straight. They wanted to can your ass. I’m doing this as much for Maria as you, families count. You still have a job, that’s the good news. The bad news is that you’ll be doing your walking in the Third Ward.”

  Gordo’s words were a hard punch in the gut. Gazzi realized that any attempt to explain or protest would be useless. He knew they, whoever “they” were, had made up their minds, and Gordo was merely their mouthpiece, and that he had taken a big chance speaking up for him.

  Gazzi knew this would be his final warning.

  “Geez, Tony.”

  “Shut the fuck up. That was the best I could do. Just watch your ass. Don’t be a hero. Maybe someday you’ll get another chance to dig yourself out.” Gordo said.

  So for Gazzi, it was this shithole of a beat dealing with niggers, lowlifes, old Jews blocking traffic with their pushcarts, and voodoo fakes offering a sure thing to numbers players and God knows what else.

  He steered clear of any criminal activity. Zwillman’s numbers drops were everywhere, but Gordo had clued him in to ignore them if he wanted to keep his job. So until a few weeks ago, he put in his eight hours and went home. That’s when he started hearing that Richie the Boot might be moving into the Ward. Twice he did what he thought was his duty, only to be kicked in the ass and put out to pasture. This time, if he worked it right, a Zwillman/Boiardo vendetta could be his ticket out.

  Sgt. McClosky knew Nick well enough to see that he was close to boiling over, and when he exploded somebody would pay for it. They had made the rounds of the Tenderloin’s jazz clubs with no success. The Piccadilly, the Alcazar and the Nest were favorite haunts of pimps picking the deep pockets of servicemen on leave and defense workers with money to burn.

  The two detectives were staked out in their car on Waverly a half-block from the Alcazar and well into their second cigarette when McClosky said, “You know, Nick, we’re not really sure it was the whore and her pimp.”

  “I’m sure,” Cisco said.

  “Let’s look at what we’ve got,” McClosky said. “Everyone’s buttoned up, no witnesses, nothing. Only that a slut named Ruby West and her high-fashion pimp, if in fact he was her pimp, worked the neighborhood.”

  “Just getting started,” Cisco’s irritation was evident as he took a final deep drag, and without looking flicked his cigarette out to the sidewalk. It bounced off the highly-polished shoe of a black pedestrian.

  “Jesus Christ, man, watch what the fuck you’re doing,” a thin and wiry man about forty, who was obviously dressed to kill for a night in the Tenderloin, spun around to confront Cisco. He quickly sized up the two men in the car and pulled up short. “Just flew off, that’s all. Didn’t mean nothin’, no offense.”

  “No offense taken,” Cisco said. “Don’t go off mad, but first tell me if the name Ruby West rings a bell? Ruby’s in no trouble, just want to talk to her.”

  “Ruby West? Nope don’t know no Ruby West.”

  “Ever hear her name anywhere? You know, here at the Alcazar or at the Nest?”

  “No sir, never,” the man was smiling now, “and Amos Slack is ready and willin’ to help the police whenever he can. You can bet on that.”

  “Nice to know,” Cisco said. “We’ll be seeing you around.”

  They watched the Negro dandy stroll casually in the direction of the Alcazar, stop briefly to chat with two well-dressed young ladies, then changed direction and crossed Waverly on his way to the Piccadilly.

  “Okay, back to where we were,” Cisco
said. “I figure Ruby and her pimp are new in town. Don’t belong to either Richie the Boot’s or Longy’s stables. We should get a fix on when they got into town when we see the uniforms’ report in the morning.”

  “Freelancers don’t last long in Newark,” McClosky said.

  “They’ve got to know that, and if they don’t, they’re pretty damn dumb.”

  “They’ve already proved that, or why else would they ice pick a trick in broad daylight. With reformers breathing down their necks, Boiardo and Zwillman can’t afford to have any casual corpses laying around.”

  “We’ve got to get twenty-four hour surveillance,” Cisco said.

  “How about Gazzi? The poor son of a bitch is aching to get involved.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. It’s part of his beat, so why not. He may be the dullest, most sanctimonious cop on the force, but he’s honest. I’ll talk to his shift sergeant, shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Sanctimonious? Sounds like you really know the guy. Fill me in.”

  “Goes back to his first fuck-up with a mob whore. Orsini wanted his ass, but Gordo talked him out of it. Gazzi and I were rookies together in the Sixth before Gordo planted him in a police cruiser after only a year on the bricks. He was tough to be around. He let you know about him being family with the big shot wops downtown, and you can guess how the rest of us dagos felt about that.”

  “Pissed, probably wanted to strangle him.”

  “Yeah, and that goes for everybody, including the micks. He jumped over eight with more seniority. To be honest, I was glad to see him pull his holier-than-thou ass out of the Sixth.”

  “Here, take one.” McClosky tapped out an Old Gold from its pack and offered it to his partner. “You need it.”

  “Christ, it’s been years since I’ve given Gazzi a thought.” Nick took a deep drag and exhaled through his nose just as the first drops of rain hit the windshield. “Now the rain, just right for the luck we’ve been having.”

  Kevin warily eyed Nick who had pushed back in his seat, and was staring blankly into space. They had been partners for almost ten years, going back before their days on the robbery squad. Nick, at forty-three, was five years senior to Kevin, both in age and on the force. They made an odd couple. Their rise from robbery to homicide was made possible in 1943 when Mayor Vincent Murphy decided to make a run for governor. Reform of the notoriously corrupt police department would be his ticket to Trenton. The two detectives were just low-profile enough to survive the shake-up, despite time-after-time skirting the boundary between rogue and honest police work.

  Neither was connected. Nick was not Sicilian. His stevedore father and mother were born in Calabria, and arrived in steerage at the turn of the century. The McCloskys were third generation, having fled County Cork when Kevin’s great-grandparents were evicted from their Skibbereen home during the fourth year of the potato famine.

  Every cent of Angelo Cisco’s stevedore wages that could be spared went toward Nick’s tuition at Rutgers. An education cut short when Nick met, fell in love and married Constance Sophia Margotta. From the first day Nick joined the force, his father’s disappointment, although never expressed, was palpable. His father never questioned the eighteen credits in electives Nick had collected toward an art degree. He didn’t know that his son had grown to hate his job, knowing that his dream of a career as a museum curator or art critic had vanished.

  Victor and Rose McClosky were overjoyed when their son Kevin secured one of the few rookie spots to open up during the depression. He had briefly considered the military as a way out from behind the counter of his parents’ grocery store on Springfield Avenue. He saw how they worked from dawn to dusk to keep the doors open and wanted none of it. Turning in his uniform for mufti and a slot on the robbery squad, then getting sergeant stripes thanks to Mayor Murphy’s police clean-up, were cause for great family celebration. They never suspected that their son’s stripes helped fuel his obsession with the fight game, with its mob-controlled palukas, whores, bookies and even a few managers not willing to throw their pugs to the wolves for a quick pay-off. He had no trouble cashing in on a fixed fight.

  Victor and Rose never questioned where their son’s money came from, only too happy when he picked up most of the rent for a two-story house he shared with them on Hickory Street. His De Soto convertible, Botany 500 sports coat, and high-priced ladies he sometimes brought home for dinner were met with a wink and a nod from his dad and naïve shrugs from his mom.

  Kevin could see by Nick’s sullen expression that his partner was in one of his black moods, hopefully it could be assuaged before violence erupted. He had seen it all before. Today it was the discovery that a former Buffalo Soldier had been left to die on the sidewalk with an ice pick in his heart. Kevin could never forget that Friday night in the Ironbound, only their second call as a homicide team almost three years earlier.

  “All in the kitchen and bathroom,” a uniform sergeant said as they entered the third floor tenement through the front room door. “The coroner’s on his way. The guy’s in the kitchen, the wife and kid are in the bathroom. It ain’t pretty. His name is Wonski, Mike Wonski.”

  Wonski, a big muscular man with graying blond hair, sat sobbing at the kitchen table, his forehead resting on his right forearm, his bloody left hand dangling. His sleeveless undershirt was drenched in sweat. Dirty cord workpants, scruffy Army surplus boots, and an almost empty bottle of Imperial rye next to the sink completed the picture. Two uniforms stood behind him.

  “Mother of mercy, I don’t know why I did it,” Wonski said raising his left arm to inspect his bloody knuckles. “Never before, I swear to you on our Blessed Lady, never before I did this.”

  Kevin followed Nick into the bathroom. A little blond girl, no more than four years old, was face down in a pool of blood near the sink. Her mother was in the bathtub, her head under a faucet that dripped water on her badly bruised and puffy face. She was barefoot and clad in a brassiere and slip.

  “I swear on the newborn Jesus, it was not me, but the devil,” Wonski’s mumbled entreaty was punctuated with sobs from the kitchen.

  “That’s a fucking bunch of bullshit,” the sergeant, who had followed the detectives into the bathroom, said. “We’ve been here before, so has the social worker. He’s been beating up on his wife and kid since he lost his job. She never signed a complaint so our hands were tied.”

  Kevin recalled how he came close to puking. It was nothing like their first homicide, a white drunk sliced ear-to-ear during an argument outside a Market Street saloon. He settled himself against the door jamb while Cisco bent first to inspect the little girl, and then turned to the bathtub and tightened the faucet that had been dripping water on the mother’s face. The medical examiner arrived a few minutes later, did his business as pictures were taken, and gave the okay for the bodies of Sheila Wonski and little Anna to be carted away. Kevin looked at his partner who returned his gaze. He had wanted to say something, but remained silent in the face of unadulterated hatred.

  “We’ll take it from here,” Nick told the sergeant. “Wait downstairs, first I want to have a few words with this piece of shit,” he said as he strode over to the now handcuffed Wonski.

  “How many times did you hit them, six, seven, eight.” Nick pulled Wonski from his chair, kicked his feet out from under him, dragged him into the bathroom, and pushed his face into the bloody floor. “Did you kick them, too? Or was it the devil?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s it, the devil,” Wonski lifted his head from the floor. His right cheek covered with his daughter’s blood.

  “And the whiskey, that’s also the devil at work?”

  Before Wonski could answer Nick kicked him in the face. He coughed out three front teeth and a mouthful of blood. “Don’t say another word, you son of a bitch, and I’ll show you how the devil really works.”

  Damn, Kevin thought, it’s never going away that night in the Ironbound. Looking at his partner as they sat in the car with the rain outs
ide, and the gloom inside, Kevin hoped his premonition was groundless. He relived the helplessness he felt that night and feared that it would be coming around again. It would always be with him, in bloody color.

  “Jesus Christ, Nick, that’s enough!” he had shouted that night.

  “Stay where you are, Kevin. You’re not part of this,” Nick held up his hand and pointed toward the door. “Best you stay outside.”

  “No fucking way I stay outside. I’m your partner, god damn it. There’s no way I’m going to let you kill this bastard.” Just as quickly as Nick’s paroxysm of hatred and revenge had erupted, it ended with a crooked smile.

  “Yeah, you’re right, but first we have to clean up this piece of shit. And there’s only one way to do that,” he said as he dragged Wonski over to the toilet, pushed his head into the bowl and flushed it.

  For Kevin, that first time watching Nick working over Wonski was the worst. How many other self-righteous flare-ups were there over the years, three or maybe four, it didn’t matter they were all ugly. He couldn’t help wondering if it was a coincidence that Nick’s violent mood swings started shortly after he began bedding down Grace DeMarco after almost fifteen years of his childless marriage to Connie. They never discussed it, but he would have to be blind not to see that Grace had become an obsession that Nick no longer attempted to hide. Sitting there in the Tenderloin with his partner, Kevin watched the whores, pimps and assorted “good time Charlies” scamper from door-to-door to avoid the rain.

  With the windows closed, the combination of cigarette smoke and humidity had turned the detectives’ car into a sweat bath. “Getting hard to breath, and I’m soaking wet,” Kevin said. “I say we call it a day.”

  “I agree, drop me off at headquarters. It’s still early enough to call Gazzi’s boss and line him up for surveillance at that tenement first thing in the morning.”

  Frank Gazzi’s early elation that he had been pulled off the street to be included in a murder investigation turned to depression when he realized that the rain clouds were here to stay. He knew his state of depression, at its lowest point, would border on the irrational. After a few minutes at the call box, Gazzi took up his surveillance position in the hall of a tenement across the street from Ruby West’s apartment.