David Katz used to say he was the only cop in New York who looked scarier when he smiled. When you smile, Katz said, people always think you're going to eat them. It's better when you don't smile because then they think you're only going to crush their faces. How the hell did you get married, anyway? Did you do it all by mail? I mean, Donna's not a bad-looking lady. And how did you end up having a daughter like Susan, who is not only gorgeous but is also even smart and nice? You know what the answer is? The answer is your genes skipped a generation. That's a trick God pulls to keep the species going. Otherwise, who would ever take a chance on having another you? Some day some poor stiff is going to marry Susan thinking that because she's so nice-looking they have at least a chance of getting a human baby. But then this poor bastard is going to go to see his baby at the maternity ward and he's going to run screaming out of the hospital because there's your face again looking back at him. The nurse probably used tongs to carry you to the window.
"Yeah, well, fuck you," Lesko muttered.
He turned on the tap and rubbed cold water across his face. Look at this, he thought. I'm wide awake and I'm still talking to him. I'm listening to smartass words of wisdom from the world's only ghost who stops to pick up bagels first.
Lesko leaned closer to the mirror and grimaced. His teeth seemed to fill it. Ugly or not, mean face or not, he had good teeth. Perfect teeth. Not a single filling if you don't count the one from root canal. Susan inherited perfect teeth. Shows how much Katz knows about genes.
What's today?
Monday.
Susan got back last night from the Bahamas. Today he's supposed to call her to decide where they'll meet to go to the Knicks game Wednesday night. Then to dinner afterward at Gallagher's, which was Susan's idea, which probably means she wants to sit him down and nag him about not being such a hermit and how he should go find a nice mature lady for his autumn years.
Right. But it might be his last chance to spend any time Susan before she takes off next Friday. This time to go skiing. In Switzerland, no less.
The thought of it pleased Lesko. One thing Katz was right about was he did okay with Susan. Smart and pretty. Also a good person. How many cops' kids were practically straight-A students at a tough Jesuit school like Fordham?. How many had the hustle to get themselves jobs as reporters with a big-league newspaper like the New York Post. Being his daughter didn't hurt, because he was sort of famous, but mostly she did it herself. Twenty-four years old, and they're giving her bylines already. And how many cops' daughters go spend New Year's in the Bahamas, let alone go skiing in, Switzerland.
That's class.
The kid's got class.
CHAPTER 2
Susan watched with pleasure as her father made his way back from the washroom at Gallagher's Steak House. A man at one table stopped him and pumped his hand. Another looked up as he passed and then whispered something about him to the woman he was with. Whatever he said caused the woman's mouth to drop open as she turned and stared. Susan smiled. It seemed as if half the people in New York had a favorite Raymond Lesko story. Now two more men were calling him over. And one of the owners had sent over a round of drinks as soon as they were seated.
She was glad, for her father's sake, that some things hadn't changed since he turned in his badge. For most cops the glad-hands and the free drinks ended with retirement. But Gallagher's, at least, was different. He was considered family here. So was his father before him. Lieutenant Joe Lesko. When he was killed, it was the year before Susan was born, they clipped his picture from the paper and gave it a permanent place on the wall next to the bar. It was still there. Right next to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Susan had always heard that her grandfather had died a hero. The people who said that were almost always men. The women, she felt sure, thought that his death was tragic and stupid although they knew better than to say so. The men needed their heroes. The way it happened, a minor hoodlum had been bullying a cab driver just outside the old Toots Shor's on 52nd Street. Slapping his face. The cabbie had refused to take the hoodlum and his girlfriend, both of them drunk, to Brooklyn that late at night. Joe Lesko came out, grabbed the hoodlum, slapped him twice as hard, and was stuffing him into a trash can when the girlfriend pulled a revolver from her purse and shot him three times in the back of the head. Her father was twenty-four at the time. Her age. He was already on the force himself and beginning to make a reputation of his own. She once heard one of the old-timers say that her father would have decked the woman first in order to give his undivided attention to the man. Susan found that hard to believe. Her father was really very gallant with women, in his way. She'd often thought he was afraid of them. But he wouldn't have turned his back on her. And he wouldn't have let himself get loaded at Toots Shor's.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart." Raymond Lesko slid heavily into his chair and took his first sip of Seagram's and water. He motioned toward another table with his thumb. "Couple of guys back there I haven't seen since you were a kid."
"No problem." She raised her wine glass. "It's good to see you getting out and mixing."
"And Buzz Donovan back there, you remember? He used to be a big United States Attorney. Anyway, he didn't recognize you and was giving me a lot of crap about robbing the cradle."
"Bet he thought I was a hooker."
Her father's face darkened fleetingly. "As a matter of fact," the expression softened, "he says you look a lot like your grandmother. She was a beautiful woman in her day. Men would pass her on the street and they'd walk into lampposts if they weren't careful." Lesko paused, pushing the ice around the rim of his glass. "You shouldn't say things like that, Susan."
"Oh come on, daddy. It was just a harmless dumb crack."
"Yeah, but you got too much class. You're a lady. And you're beautiful."
"I am not beautiful. What I am is okay."
She was, she supposed, maybe a notch better than okay. She did inherit her grandmother's figure, and her auburn hair and hazel eyes. But most of the compliments she'd received in her life were more like expressions of amazement that she was her father's daughter.
Susan glanced around the restaurant in search of way to change the subject. She caught a man at the bar staring in her direction. He lowered his face toward his drink, revealing a balding scalp. Something familiar about him. Then her eyes drifted on, over walls crammed with fading photos of old sports heroes.
"How long have you been coming here?" she asked Lesko.
"First time was my fourteenth birthday. My father brought me. Same as I brought you."
"Oh, right." She remembered him talking about it. Except on his birthday he was taken to a Jake LaMotta fight at the Garden, and she had to settle for the Ice Capades. "That's when Jake LaMotta came back here after the fight and your father got him to give you a boxing lesson."
"Yeah." Lesko smiled at the memory. "What made it great was Rocky Graziano was here that night, too. He comes over and says if I listen to LaMotta I'll spend the whole next year getting knocked on my ass, excuse me, because what LaMotta knows about defense he could fit in his jock. LaMotta gets very insulted at this and these two look like they're going to go at it, but it's all an act for my benefit. Then LaMotta shows me how to counter a right lead. I decide not to mention that my father already taught me to either kick the guy in the crotch or come in under it, spin the guy, and put a choke hold on him until his lights go out.
"Anyway, LaMotta and Graziano are still arguing so LaMotta asks the crowd for a vote on which one of them spent the most time on his ass and another one on which one of them is less ugly. LaMotta wins both times." Lesko turned toward the table he'd sat at that night, his eyes darting around as he spoke as if he could see it all happening again. "I still got the menu they both signed for me that night. Also Johnny Mize of the Giants who was in here too. It's probably up in your mother's attic."
"Want me to look next time I see her?"
He hesitated, then shook his head. "It's no big deal."
"I got to meet a skating clown for my fourteenth biirthday." She pretended to pout, as if cheated. "It's one of my treasured memories. Right up there with museum trips and rides on the Staten Island ferry."
"Yeah, well, they were your mother's idea mostly. Anyway, it's not like I didn't take you to fights and ball games after you got older."
"After you were divorced, you mean."
"Same thing." He waved off the subject with his hand. "Listen, can you handle a steak or do you want a veal chop?"
"I'd like us to have a talk first."
"We haven't been talking?"
"Not about you, we haven’t. Things like how you are, what you've been doing, do you have a lady friend .. I mean, this is only about the third time we've talked in almost two years."
"What do you mean? I call you at least a couple of times a month and we've been to, like, ten ballgames."
"Yes, and about half of those calls were to break dates. It was like pulling teeth even to get you over on Christmas. And I think you deliberately take me to ballgames because it's hard to sit and talk at them."
Lesko dropped his eyes. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I guess I haven't been much of a father."
"Oh, now there's a good move," Susan arched. "Play to Susan's sympathy and maybe she'll drop the subject of her father ducking her."
"I have not been ducking you."
“Liar.”
Lesko looked around the room as if for help. "What is it about women?" he asked. "You all ask questions whose answers you already know in order to get the guy to answer out loud just so you can stomp all over him."
"It's because of the trouble you were in. All the newspaper stories. You didn't want it rubbing off, on me."
Basically, yeah."
"Well, that's ridiculous."
"I rest my case."
She ignored the sarcasm. "Daddy, I work for a newspaper, remember? When you work for a newspaper, none of the other media try to hound you for interviews. And the Post has been very good about not pressing me for information about you. I get all the protection I need."
Lesko said nothing.
"Secondly, you don't say to your daughter, 'I might be in trouble. Pretend you don't know me until I tell you differently,' and expect me to go merrily on with my life as if you don't exist. Or worse, as if I'm ashamed of you."
"Look, I give up." He raised his hands in surrender. "Anyway, it's old news. Nobody cares anymore."
At least not the newspapers, he thought. Not the TV reporters, not even the cops. And maybe not Elena or her crazy Bolivians, either. If they were going to have him whacked they've had almost two years to do it. They would have done it in the first few months. Probably Susan first, then him. Another object lesson. Not that he really thought Elena would try. In a funny way they understood each other.
But it might not be her choice if she wants to keep doing business with the greaseballs. And Lesko had never known them to let something like this pass. The other greaseballs would call them women. They'd send them ladies' underwear in the mail. Which brings up something else. Little Elena must be one hell of a tough broad for those guys to do business with a woman. Either that or she has a hell of a lot of clout behind her. Big money. New York or Swiss money, which is almost the same thing these days.
The old days were simpler. Twenty-five years ago if you were talking about drugs you were talking about musicians, about the niggers up in Harlem, and about the dago mob everywhere else. Then one day some dago wiseguy says what are we doing laying out our own money? What we do instead is we go see some of these Harvard and Yale guys down on Wall Street who think they're really screwing somebody if they make a lousy 40 percent on their money. We say, how would you like to make 100, maybe 200 percent with no risk? There's no risk because only one shipment out of fifty ever gets busted so all you do is spread your money over several runs and that way the only question is whether you double it or triple it.
The Harvards look at this and they say, Hey, here's a commodity trade that beats the shit out of pork bellies and they jump in with both feet. Million-dollar investments double five times over in a month. All of a sudden you see these corporate raiders. Guys with companies that hardly ever did more than break even are out gobbling up other companies twice their size. Whole airlines and oil companies are being taken over with cocaine money. Half the new high rises going up in this country, even half the movies being made, are financed on either coke or smack.
Drugs are better than gold. Better than oil. The Arabs, who don't know from drugs and who'll cut your hand off for smoking a joint, still think it's petrodollars that make the the world go 'round. They don't know what hit them. In another fifteen years they'll be back playing in sandpiles and fucking their goats.
The other ones who don't know from drugs are economists. Economists look at the budget deficit and the balance of payments and the national debt and they say this is crazy, we should be in a depression. All their figures say so. But their figures don't show drug money and it's drug money that keeps this country afloat.
Besides the Arabs, the other ones who don't know what hit them are the dagos. Show me a mob guy who knows as much about skimming and laundering as a Wall Street investment banker. Show me a mob cooker who can mix a batch of quality shit faster and better than any first-year chemical engineer at Dow or du Pont could do practically on his lunch break.
It isn't simple anymore, Lesko thought. And I don't care anymore. I'm out of it.
"I care," Susan said softly.
"What?" Lesko blinked. "About what?"
"You said nobody cares anymore. I care about you. Very much."
"Yeah," he nodded. "Me, too."
He looked at her. Those first few months, after Katz and after the barbershop, he'd spent every spare hour watching her apartment, following her to work on the subway and home again at night. He'd get other cops who owed him favors to spell him while he was being grilled by Internal Affairs, the District Attorney and the federal Narcs. All this in case he was wrong about Elena, or he was right about her not being able to control the Bolivians. A couple of times he even listened at Susan's door when a guy took her home and didn't leave right away. He shouldn't have done that. It was when he learned the hard way that Susan was grown-up and had a private life.
"If we care about each other so much," Susan said gently, "you'd think we'd be able to talk."
"You keep saying that," Lesko made a show of holding his fingertips to his temples, "and I keep trying to remember when we've shut up for two minutes all night."
"Right." She twisted her lips, a mannerism she inherited from him. "And it's all been really good father- and-daughter stuff, too. Like, the Knicks haven't had anyone under the boards since Willis Reed retired; like Jerry Cooney could have taken Larry Holmes if he crowded him early and went to the body; and like the beer at Shea Stadium these days tastes like someone pissed in it. Oh, and you also asked your usual twenty questions about who I'm seeing and how serious it is."
"That last part is father and daughter stuff. And as usual you ducked it."
"That's different."
"What's different? Two minutes ago you asked if I had a lady friend."
"Okay, but if you said yes and told me her name I wouldn't get someone to run a check on her back-
ground."
I only did that once."
"Is that so?"
"Maybe twice."
"But never again. Promise?"
Lesko made an ambiguous gesture that he hoped would pass for agreement. Susan reached for his hand and dug her nails into it.
"Repeat after me. Never again."
Lesko winced. "Never again."
"Show me your other hand. I bet your fingers are crossed."
Lesko pulled free and slid his chair out of reach. "This is a wonderful conversation. If I don't get stomped on, I get stabbed."
“You know why we're like this, don't you." Susan kept her eyes on her plate as she trimmed the fat off her veal chop.
<
br /> "Like what?"
"So secretive."
"Are you sure we're so different from any other father and daughter?"
"Fathers who are cops are different. You almost never talked about your job unless something funny happened or you met a celebrity. Never any of the bad things."
"If I worked in a slaughterhouse, you wouldn't expect me to describe my day at the dinner table."
"If itt bothered you, yes. If you needed to talk about it"
"Cops who bring their jobs home get divorced a lot quicker than I did."
"I don't believe that. I think sharing more of yourself would have helped."
Lesko laid down his fork. "Susan, listen to me. Alll a cop sees is people, even decent people, when they're at their worst. We see and sometimes do some very sickening things. Police departments know this. That's why they alll have programs setup to help cops deal with the bad side of being cops. But mostly cops talk to each other because there just isn't anyone outside the job who would understand. This is not just true of cops, either. Guys who were in combat, hospital nurses, they have the same problem."
"I suppose."
"What worked for me was to keep my home and my job as separate as I could. That's why we didn't socialize with other cop families. Not even my own partner."
Susan saw a peculiar pause at the reference to David Katz. She let it pass.
"Daddy?"
"Um?"
"When a policeman shoots somebody, kills somebody ... is it something you ever get over?"
"Sweetheart, what do you say we talk about something nicer."
"Because I want us to learn to be more open. Maybe that's a bad place to start but I've had a whole lifetime of you never opening up to me. I've also had a whole lifetime of mom telling me never to bother you with my problems and never to say anything that might worry you."
The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series) Page 3