“Me? Get outta here. Why would I do that? And I’m a jerk off anyway. Remember what you used to call me?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know about you now, the way you could imitate everybody, like for a sneaky reason or a joke or something.”
“How do you know I’m imitating everybody? Maybe it’s really them talking.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, it ain’t so bad being fucking dead. I’m still Charlie Fish.”
“Yeah, but Charlie Fish, pretty soon in the dirt and the worms. Wanna hit some harmony?”
Vinny Blond, Hit Man
Young Joseph Petrosino’s hook into the Detective Bureau was his name. Lieutenant Joe Petrosino, boss of the famous Italian Squad, was his uncle, his grandfather’s brother. The young Joseph Petrosino, tall and slim, light brown hair, ten years on the job, works in the Organized Crime Control Bureau. That’s where Mike Mazzi calls him.
“You’re calling about the Tonno homicide,” Joe says. “We just got your paperwork.”
“Yeah, but first I’m talking about Vinny Biondi. Vinny Blond. You know him.”
“Hit man.”
“You’re looking at him for a homicide?”
“A few homicides,” Joe said.
“Tommy Benalatto of them?”
“That’s not yours too, is it?”
“No, but it’s why Vinny called me.”
Mike says that Biondi hit Tommy Benalatto, but was supposed to hit Tommy’s brother, Lenny. With the guy who put out the hit looking for him, Vinny figures he’s gonna get whacked, doing time can’t be worse, maybe catch a break by turning on some people. They set up a meet.
***
Mike and Joe at the entrance to the DA’s office, Biondi’s late, must have changed his mind, or maybe he got clipped already. But he shows up in ironed jeans, a suede sport jacket, and a blond rug on his head. He’s slim, wiry and fidgety, and looks younger than fifty-three. The three shake hands. Mike gives Biondi a paper bag.
“What’s this?” Biondi asks.
“Lunch.”
They get to a file room on the fourth floor, Mike closes the door, kicks up dust. They sit around a three legged desk, and Biondi opens up like talk radio. About hits, who set up the contracts, where the guns, the silencers came from. Stuff they know, stuff they didn’t know. Like with Tommy Benalatto.
“Benalatto,” Mike says. “Run through that again.”
“You know this shit ain’t easy.”
“Yeah, you’re all choked up,” Mike says. “Me too.”
Biondi picks up his sandwich, stuffs his mouth, takes a minute. “What is this, horse cock?” He puts the sandwich in the bag it came in, sips soda.
“You still live in the neighborhood, Mike?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Still married?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Seen my wife lately?”
“No,” Mike says.
“You remember her?”
“Sure. From the projects. Nilda, Puerto Rican kid, real pretty.”
“Get a look at her now.”
“How many kids?”
“Four.”
“Well, what do you expect?”
Vinny Blond asks Joe: “You from the neighborhood?”
“Used to be, yeah.”
“You remember us singing?”
“In the schoolyard, in the hallway, on the corner. I was a kid.”
A half minute goes by, the three guys looking at one another.
“Your mother and father, the fruit stand,” Mike says to Biondi, “I don’t see anymore. They still with us?”
“My mother, yeah.”
“Who whacked Charlie Fish?”
“Smooth move, Mikey,” Vinny Blond says and laughs. “Nice try.”
Mike laughs. “Who whacked him?”
“I don’t give a fuck about Charlie Fish, and Koreans got the fruit store.”
“Dominic gonna do something about it?”
“The Koreans?”
“The hit.”
“I know, I’m breaking balls. I don’t hear nothing about that.”
“Tell us what happened with Tommy.”
“You knew him?”
“No,” Mike says.
Vinny Blond leans in his chair, says: “All right,” sips from the can of soda, sits back. “I go up the apartment, I got a box of pignoli cookies — they told me he likes them — and an envelope that I make sure he sees.”
“Where’d you get the cookies?”
“Up the Bronx, make it hard for you guys.”
“Anybody with you?” Joe asks Vinny. “Nobody.”
“No driver?”
“Alone.”
“Go ahead.”
“He answers the door, he’s in a bathrobe. He looks like he don’t know me, because he don’t, and he says, ‘Yeah’ and I say, ‘It’s me, Vinny. They told me to bring you something.’ Who told you, he wants to know, then he sees the envelope — looked like he wasn’t expecting it — which now I know was for the brother, but he takes it and sticks it in a pocket of the bathrobe. I put the cookies on the kitchen table, he starts making black coffee, tells me get the anisette from a shelf.”
Biondi’s eyes look flat and black, but it looks like he’s gonna laugh. He shifts in his chair.
“He’s drinking, I’m drinking the coffee, I get up like to go take a leak, look around, make sure nobody else is there. I go back in the kitchen, he’s sitting at the table, counting the bills from the envelope. All hundreds. I’m looking at his back, I take out the gun. Twenty-two.”
“Revolver? Automatic?” Joe asks.
“Revolver. You know that.”
“Silencer?”
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead.”
“I put one behind his ear. He falls over on the table, coffee and anisette all over the fucking place. Hundred dollar bills from the envelope. But he ain’t dead. This fucking guy ain’t dead. He’s sitting, gasping like, looking at me, like. Ah, fuck.”
Vinny lifts himself off the chair, gets into a stoop, falls back in the chair like he’s tired.
“I don’t wanna shoot again, I shouldn’t even be there now. But the silencer is shit, a noisy fucking thing. I go pee for real, come back, he ain’t dead. What am I gonna do? I make more coffee. I’m eating pignoli cookies and drinking coffee and now he’s dead, and that’s that.”
“Go on,” Joe says.
Vinny shrugs. “I felt bad, I mean, I didn’t want him to suffer, I didn’t even want to hit the fucking guy. He never did nothing to me. Lenny, who I’m thinking this is, never did nothing to me either.” Shrug. “Fucking shitty silencer. I wonder ...”
“You wonder what?” Mike says.
“If he knew the cookies weren’t for him either.”
A minute of quiet, nobody talks, Vinny coughs a few times.
“Why’d they want him hit?” Joe asks.
“Not for me to know,” Vinny Blond says.
“Why the envelope?”
“Far as I know, to give me a reason to be there. I was supposed to leave it, make sure you guys know it wasn’t a stick up. I took it. A grand, what the fuck? Throw it away?”
“Who clipped Charlie Fish?” Mike asks.
“I don’t know. But this guy you should clip.”
“What guy?” Mike asks.
“The guy that gave you this fucking sandwich. Where’d you get this fucking thing?”
“The neighborhood.”
“In the old days he woulda caught a beating with a sandwich like this. You know, the old days, when we ran things.”
“Who runs things now?” Joe asks.
“Dominic makes a good boss for the newspapers and for the FBI when they gotta get in the newspapers. All bullshit now, cause there’s nothing to run when you got a neighborhood choking, like on its last breath.”
Mike says: “You still with that?”
“The end of the neighborhood?”
“Yeah.”
“I was ri
ght when we were kids, and I’m more right now. If you guys look you could see that we’re on a deathbed. Just look.” He looks at Joe. “People used to pay to get into this neighborhood. Think they would now? Been to the feast? Everybody but Italians selling sausages and cotton candy and all that. This free hole mayor we got brings them in. Ever get a fucking arab calzone? Go to the club, Gennaro in the window. Poor guy cries when there’s the feast.”
Biondi grabs his sandwich bag, tosses it in a waste basket.
“Used to be good, Joe. Mikey knows. Fucking shame. All the things everybody did to keep it good. This fucking thing that I don’t know how you could even call it a neighborhood. You know what I’m saying, Mikey. Same thing Lina’s been saying for who knows how many years.”
“You seen her?” Joe asks.
“You know her?” Vinny Blond asks. “I know who she is.”
“She’s getting out, you know,” Vinny Blond says.
“Where’s she going?” Mike asks.
“The next century or something like that. Fucking midget’s a mystery.”
“She’s already gone, I hear,” Joe says, and Mike looks at him.
“Figures,” Vinny Blond says. “And you know why?”
“I know what I hear, but you tell me,” Joe says.
Biondi looks to Mike, says: “What I been saying? The neighborhood goes, she goes.”
“Yeah, you been saying.”
“She wanted us to keep this neighborhood. She was almost crying to my mother. The way it used to be. Even with hits and broken legs, nobody caught a beating who didn’t have it coming. Taking care of ourselves. No locked doors, your mother, your grandmother, your sister were safe. Now its purse snatches, burglaries, piss on the streets. And if you kill one of these fucks,” he looked at Mike here, held a beat, “you guys look to lock us up. If Lina’s gone, I ain’t surprised, and I don’t fucking blame her.”
“What about you?” Mike asks. “You did nothing to make her go?”
“I did crimes, I did sins. But I did what I was put here to do. I went with it. Just like her, she knows that. Just like you guys.”
“How do you know you were put here to do hits?”
“It just happened, started years back with a guy with a red vest. Just happened. You know what I mean, Mikey.”
“I know, yeah. And Lina’s good with that?”
“She ain’t good with guys getting clipped. None of that shit. But she knew the story. She was like us, I mean you do what you were put here to do. Sometimes you don’t know what it is, till you’re in the middle of something. Take the good with the bad, and make no calls on it. Like we all got a purpose or something. Lina always said that. Even before.”
“Before what?”
“Before there was the neighborhood. Before the church, the stores, the buildings, before everything here.”
“How you know that?”
“She says. And my grandmother used to say too. Since before she knew my grandfather, when she was still a little girl, she knew Lina. You live that long and you ain’t a normal fucking midget, you know.”
Joe says to Mike: “My Uncle Joe talked with her about the Black Hand, the letters, the bombs, the kidnaps, the murder stable, all those stories.”
“Yeah, see?” Biondi says.
“She helped him find the bodies in the stable before the place burned down. He almost didn’t go to Palermo because of what she told him. If he listened to her ... But he told my father — like Vinny says — he had to do what he had to do, and told my father to take care of his wife while he was gone.”
“He knew he wasn’t coming back,” Vinny Blond says. “Lotta balls. A cop, but a lotta balls.”
Vinny Blond and the detectives made quick eye contacts.
“I don’t know what he knew, but he was worried,” Joe says. “But more worried not to do the right thing — the right thing for the neighborhood. He liked his picture in the paper, yeah, everybody knows, but he did the right thing for a lot of people.”
“And now forget about it. It’s all over,” Vinny Blond says, his hands thrown up. “Nothing to show for it.”
Cogootz to the Rescue
The guys called him Fat Cosmo and Butter Ass; the kids called him Waddle; the girls called him Animal. His father, in Downstate Prison, which was upstate, probably forgot his name. But, Emilia, the good woman who was his mother, called him Cosmo, or sweetheart, or mostly, my son.
She’d been praying for years, but she knew there was no way her son couldn’t go bad. For years he’d seen her catch beatings from her husband, a dock worker, built the same way as his son. Home after a few stops and a few snorts, he’d play a game with Cosmo, slapping Emilia around, making the fouryear-old — then the five- and six-year-old — help out with kicks and punches for rewards of ones, fives and tens.
She still called him my son, and she still worried for him when he left the neighborhood for months, even years at a time, no mail, no phone calls.
On a Sunday morning she dressed right up to her small brown hat with the short veil, and sat in the kitchen, a cup of espresso and a biscuit, and the Italian station on the radio.
When it got time to leave for Mass, she washed and dried the coffee cup, put it away, took her purse and, on the way out, near the front door, saw her son’s duffle bag.
“Oh, look, I didn’t even hear him come in,” she mumbled, a smile in her chest. She tiptoed to his room, cracked open the door, saw him sleeping, and took a container of frozen sauce out of the freezer.
She was at Mass when the cops knocked on her door, rang the bell, heard nothing but a macaroni commercial on the Italian station. One of the cops walked around the house talking to the radio in his hand.
“Sector Eddie to Central.”
“Go ahead, Eddie.”
“Got a caller on that DOA?”
“Anonymous male caller is all we got.”
“Ten-four.”
At the back of the house the cop looked through an open window, saw a fat man in a bed under a sheet, a gun on the floor just inside the window.
***
Mike Mazzi filled out the form in the Ballistics Unit: Smith and Wesson, Military and Police, .38; holster wear, bluing off the barrel. He had called the Records Section with the serial number.
“Got an owner,” the cop at Records said.
“Go ahead.”
“Ernest Baci, Police Officer, retired from the Three-One Precinct in nineteen-seventy-two. Deceased.”
“Got a date on the death?”
“Call Pensions.”
“Address?”
“Best get that from Pensions too.”
The Ballistics detective held the gun. “Cop’s gun, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“He the shooter?”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
***
Back in the squad room, Mike got a call.
“Mazzi.”
“Yeah, Mike, I was at the club last night.”
“Yeah, Cogootz.”
“They were saying that Cosmo killed Fish.”
“I thought they been saying that all along.”
“Yeah, but now they’re whispering and shit like that. You know what I mean.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“What did you hear?”
“Saying things like the cops’ll be all over the neighborhood because of this fat fuck.”
“Did they say his name?”
“No. They always call him fat fuck.”
“Hear anything else?”
“No.”
“Where are you now?”
“Home.”
“Anything else?”
“You know what I found?”
“No, what?”
“A whole bunch of tapes. The Cleftones, The Ravens, The Harptones, The Heartbeats. I’ll let you hear them sometimes if you want. The Eldorados, The Flamingos. I mean you could come here, or I’ll lend them to you if you want.”
“But you gotta be careful with them. And you know what else?”
“What?”
“Remember we used to practice in my music room up the stairs?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s tapes of that too. Of us. We were good, man.”
“Hear about anything else today?”
“No.”
“About Cosmo?”
“No, what?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead? Where’s he dead?”
“In his bed. During the night, shot while he was sleeping.”
“Holy shit. When, today?”
“During the night.”
“Holy shit. See, I told you he killed Charlie.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Hey, Mike.”
“Yeah.”
“Did he still have that fifty-seven Chevy?”
***
The Pension Section gave Mike a phone and an address for retired cop Ernest Baci in a north Bronx neighborhood. Jim Conroy called, set up a visit.
A short, trim woman with soft white hair and thick glasses answered the door.
“Mrs. Baci?” Conroy asked.
“Yes, come in.” The woman’s voice was light, patient. She yawned. “Oh, excuse me. We got in at two this morning from a wedding. I didn’t even go to church. Come and sit.”
Walking into the kitchen, Conroy said: “You’re tired, we won’t be long.”
“We’re sorry about your husband,” Mike said.
“Thank you. He was a smoker. I threw out all the ash trays. I hope you men don’t smoke.”
“No, we don’t smoke.”
They sat at the kitchen table.
“These weddings,” Mrs. Baci said, “music so loud, you can’t even talk. Next time I’ll send an envelope and stay home. Do you have time for coffee?”
“No thank you, we need to get back,” Mike said. “We’re interested in your husband’s service gun.”
“Oh yes?”
“As far as we know, he only had that one gun. He sold another one when he retired.”
“His off duty he sold, I think, because the gun he kept was the gun he carried every day for thirty-four years and wouldn’t feel right without it.”
“Do you know where it is now?” Mike asked.
“Well, I hope so. He wanted it buried with him.”
“Buried with him? In the coffin?”
The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 20