Casino Moon

by Peter Blauner

  “All right, I like them titties!!” he called out.

  She flipped him the finger and prayed for the day she could move out of this hellhole with her daughter. She entered her building, leaving the awful wavering heat of the afternoon outside. The elevator was broken again and she began to climb up through the steep, graffiti-smeared stairwell.

  It was all a matter of what you were willing to accept, she reminded herself. If you could turn tricks for your junkie husband and wrestle other women to support your daughter, what was the big deal about going for a ride with a mob guy’s son? After all, it wasn’t like Anthony was really a killer. Hadn’t he just got through telling her that? He was too gentle and solicitous to hurt anybody. The wild-man act last night was a fluke, she told herself. He was probably upset after hearing that someone else in his family had bumped off that chinless man.

  It wasn’t that she was one of these women who always made excuses for her man. She was just trying to get aheadand find a safe haven. She could do worse than to hitch her star to Anthony’s wagon, she reasoned. So what if he was already married and would never be serious about her? She was getting something out of it too. If he did make this boxing promotion come off, maybe there’d be a little money in it for her. Perhaps she could go back to school and get a teacher’s degree. Even if it was just to be a phys ed instructor, at least she could make a living with her clothes on. What was a little sacrifice and discomfort? It was all a matter of what you could endure to change your life.

  Anyway, she was in control. That’s what she reminded herself. Now all she had to do was ignore that flashing signal warning her that she’d always been attracted to men who were no good.

  She paused on the second-floor landing to massage her sore back and listen to the sound of children laughing down the hall. Through the grimy stairwell window, she could see the gleaming casino towers rising above the low-slung tenements and shacks.

  Someday all this would be a memory. And she’d be living out west with Kimmy. Somewhere like Seattle. She’d never been there, hadn’t even seen that many pictures of it, but she liked the sound. Seattle. It sounded like “settle.” She could picture herself in a quaint ranch-style house with Kimmy. With a Chrysler in the driveway and sprinklers and a wading pool in the backyard. And clean-scrubbed kindergarten classmates for Kimmy. Their mothers would invite Rosemary to after-school teas in bright solariums, where they’d sit and laugh and commiserate about the suffering the men in their lives put them through.

  And with time, she might even forget being here in A.C. A woman’s blue espadrille was lying sideways near the third-floor landing. A couple of steps up, there was a torn pair ofpanties and brownish-red splatter on the wall.

  Rosemary continued on to the fifth floor and took off the red shoes Anthony had given her the week before. They were not quite the right size. Her feet were cut and swollen. No one would ever use them in a J.C. Penney catalog now.

  She pulled open the steel door and walked down the long, narrow hallway to her apartment. Anthony. He was a funnymix. He could go from smooth to coarse in the time it took to strike a match. Last night had been an eye-opener. He’d started off drunk, but sweet and nice, the way he usually was. Sometimes he reminded her of a little boy who’d wandered off and gotten lost in the park. He haunted her. But then they went to bed and all of a sudden he caught fire. Not in a good way, either. There was something desperate and relentless about how he’d been making love. He could learn a thing or two from Terry, that fighter she’d slept with a month back. One of these days she’d have to sit Anthony down and tell him about that. She hoped he wouldn’t be too hurt.

  She put her key in the door and went into the apartment, feeling sweat mat down the front of her shirt. The TV was on in the living room. She peered around the corner and saw Kimmy sprawled out in front of the set with her butt in the air like a little hill. With the whitish drapes drawn, everything in the apartment looked old and broken. On the TV screen, a blond talk-show host was interviewing a panel of women who said they’d been sexually molested by ghosts. Four years old and she was watching this. Rosemary’s mother sat at the kitchen table in the background, wearing her formal white blouse with the high collar and her stiff dark skirt. She was sewing a shirt for Kimmy and looking stern, though she had contrived this scene herself to demonstrate Rosemary’s lack of fitness as a mother.

  Not that she had any ideas or any alternatives to Rosemary working the two jobs, at the club and at the diner out on Route 30.

  “You are late,” her mother sighed.

  Rosemary recognized the world-weary tone and the slowly raised eyebrows. Her mother glorying in her suffering again. Rosemary was starting to do it herself these days.

  “So I’m late. So what else is new?”

  Her whole life she’d either been too early or too late. When she’d developed tits two years too soon at Catholic school, the nuns acted as if puberty was God’s swift and terrible judgment; she was destined to be a whore. After graduation, she’d traveled out to San Francisco ten years too late for the Summer of Love and hung around just long enough to miss most of the good entry-level jobs at the casinos back in Atlantic City.

  “Your father, rest his soul, would take a belt to you if he saw how you were running around,” Rosemary’s mother said.

  “Then I’m glad he’s not here.”

  His timing was less than wonderful also. He’d come down from Brooklyn and worked like a dog for twenty years to open his own dress shop on Pacific Avenue. Two months later, Caesar’s opened a shop in its hotel lobby across the street and wiped him out. He died two and a half years later, a month after his insurance ran out.

  “There’s no food in the house,” her mother scolded her. “Your daughter is starving.”

  “I left a twenty for you in the petty-cash drawer.” Rosemary stopped and rubbed her thigh, noticing there was a little bit less of it than there used to be. Maybe the Slim-Fast was helping. “You could’ve just taken Kimmy to the market around the corner.”

  “You know how I hate to leave the house in the morning.”

  Or the afternoon, or the evening, Rosemary thought. It was another one of those arguments. The kind that always started because there wasn’t enough money. To buy new shoes for Kimmy. Or an air conditioner. Or more to the point, a hair appointment for her mother. Her mother was used to the finer things. She still saw herself as part of some distant pre-Castro Cuban aristocracy, entitled to rights and privileges not granted to the common people. She refused to recognize that all of them had slipped down life’s greasy pole and there was no easy way up.

  “Ma, I cannot do everything,” Rosemary began to complain.

  But before she could go any further, Kimmy ran up from behind her and threw a bear hug around her knees. Rosemary looked down and saw the little brown eyes shining and pleading with her not to leave again. She was turning into a clingy child, afraid to go to sleep with the lights off. And it was getting harder and harder to leave her at home with her mother. Rosemary had been having nightmares about the other baby lately. Melissa—a little, fragile, feminine name. Not strong enough to survive in this world. The name Kimmy sounded more compact, more robust.

  “I waited all morning for you,” Kimmy said in a practiced heartbreaker’s voice. “You told me you would take me to see Lucy the elephant today.”

  Lucy was a rotting sixty-five-foot-tall plastic replica just to the south of the casinos. Who knew what a little girl saw in it? Maybe the elephant made her feel secure. Which was probably more than Rosemary did for her sometimes.

  “I know I told you, sweetheart. But I have to go to work.”

  “But you promised.”

  Rosemary heard her mother clucking her tongue in disapproval. This was what she wanted. For Rosemary to see her own inadequacies in the cold light of day.

  “I heard you didn’t have breakfast yet,” Rosemary said brightly, trying to change the subject.

  Kimmy stuck out her lip and rubbed her
stomach. “I’m hungry,” she said, forgetting about the elephant.

  Sometimes distraction was two-thirds of parenthood, Rosemary thought. “Maybe we can make two eggs in a special way. With the onions and peppers we have in the refrigerator.

  Rosemary saw her mother flinch and knew she had not even noticed the egg carton on the side door. As a daughter of the aristocracy, her mother considered the task of actually cooking something to be beneath her. Cooking was for servants. No wonder they were always hungry.

  “Come on,” said Rosemary, hoisting her daughter onto a chair by the counter. “You can help me break the eggs.”

  “Yeeeaaa!” Kimmy threw her head back and gave Rosemary another of those helpless little gap-toothed smiles that made it seem worthwhile going on with the day.

  As Rosemary turned to get the eggs from the refrigerator, she happened to glance out the window and see Anthony’s station wagon still idling outside. He looked lost in thought behind the wheel, but from this high up it was hard to tell. Something had definitely been bothering him all morning. Strange boy.

  When he finally pulled away, a blue Toyota was following him. She hoped he wasn’t in any real trouble. She was just starting to really like him.

  25

  TEDDY AND VIN WENT for a walk around the block with Richie Amato that afternoon.

  “You done good,” said Teddy, keeping to the outside part of the sidewalk.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Richie mumbled, drawing his collar up over the scratches and gouges left by Nick’s grandmother.

  It was turning into an ash-gray day with threatening clouds overhead. Salt-corroded cars lined both sides of the street.

  “Today might be a day you’ll remember as maybe the greatest day of your life,” said Teddy, swinging his right foot over the curb. “Because today, we can talk about bringing you officially into this thing of ours, that’s been going for hundreds of years. You earned your button last night and I’m proud of you.”

  He squeezed one of Richie’s shoulders. It was as hard as a coconut shell and as big as a football. But his face couldn’t handle a smile.

  “So tell me,” said Teddy, “what was his last words?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whaddya mean, you don’t know? You pushed the button on him, didn’t you?”

  Richie didn’t dare look him in the eye. “Well if you wanna get like specific, Anthony did that part. I was tied up with the old bitch.”

  Vin began to cackle. “What’d I tell you, Ted? What’d I tell you? The kid’s got stones.”

  A white Atlantic City Police Department car rolled by slowly and Teddy hushed both of them into silence. He stared after the car and wouldn’t allow the others to speak until it was out of sight.

  “You mean you let that mutt pull the trigger?” He glared at Richie.

  “Either he was gonna do it or it wouldn’t get done.”

  “Hey, Ted, you wanted Anthony to do a piece of work,” Vin interrupted. “Why you getting upset about it?”

  “I just want to make sure he’ll keep his mouth shut.” Teddy softened his tone. “We gotta be extra, extra, extra cautious from now on. There’s gonna be surveillance all the time now. They do that whenever they got two in a row dead, like this Larry and Nicky, and nobody locked up for it.”

  “He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Vin assured him.

  Teddy eyed the unmarked blue Chrysler across the street and turned his residual wrath on Richie. “Anthony get rid of the gun he used?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Think so isn’t good enough,” said Teddy. “It’s the little details that can fuck you up .. . Where’d you put the clothes from the last time?”

  “Clothes?” Richie looked at Vin, like he needed an interpreter.

  “Larry’s clothes, you moron,” Teddy said emphatically. “You got rid of them. Right? I don’t want anybody finding any fucking carpet fibers from the club.”

  “Hey, what’d I tell you about calling me a moron, Ted?”

  “You said you didn’t like it. So I hope you’re not still driving around with them clothes. There’s a lot of guys got picked up for driving with an expired license and ended up doing time for murder.”

  “Well, my license ain’t expired,” said Richie as they turned the corner and came up on the Baltimore Grill, an elegant old restaurant with a red-and-white sign out front.

  “Fine,” said Teddy, patting his abdomen nervously, “then we ain’t got nothing to worry about.”

  26

  PATROLMAN WENDELL LONG never wanted to be part of a modern urban police department. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself as a Clint Eastwood–style state trooper, with mirrored shades, knee-high boots, and a spotless uniform, riding up and down the curving highways of Southern California on his motorcycle. He imagined profiling typical offenders, pulling over young male blacks driving expensive European sports cars. He yearned to use a command voice and tell people to assume the position against their vehicles, so he could search and humiliate them. While others talked about how horrible the Rodney King videotape was, he secretly burned with envy for the LAPD.

  Yet every day, he found himself touring the drab province of Atlantic City, looking for some hint of excitement and adventure. On this bleak Tuesday afternoon, he had to settle for pulling over the bull-necked, shaggy-haired Italian-American male driving a navy Impala with a broken taillight down Indiana Avenue.

  “What was I? Speeding?” said the Italian-American, who had a monobrow and the body of a steroid addict.

  Patrolman Long was prepared to write a routine traffic summons. But when he asked for a driver’s license and registration, the Italian-American first hesitated and then handed over two conflicting pieces of identification.

  “Ah shit,” said Richie Amato, making his second mistake of the day so far. “Gimme those papers back. I gave you the wrong ones.”

  “Would you get out of the car, please, sir?” asked Patrolman Long.

  Stupidly, Richie tried to shove the unregistered .45 semiautomatic further under his seat. He only succeeded in giving the cop probable cause to search the car. Patrolman Long found not only the gun, but the trunkful of bloody clothes in back.

  “All right,” said Richie, trying to sound flip even as he swallowed hard and began sweating. “What would it take to make you forget what you just found?”

  “Go ahead,” said Patrolman Long, smiling and finally getting to use a phrase he’d only uttered in dreams. “Make my day.”

  Richie was brought down to the dungeon-like police holding facility, under the old Masonic Temple on Ventnor Avenue. Flies buzzed past dank stone walls, and the exposed pipes knocked overhead. He was put in a cell and handcuffed to a bench, facing a white alcoholic wife-beater and a ragged black man in a Malcolm X T-shirt. After a few minutes, the black man took out his penis and began to urinate on Richie’s brand-new Tony Lama snakeskin boots.

  “Hey! Hey!” Richie strained at his handcuffs and cried out to the guards at the nearby officers’ station. “This guy’s pissing on me!”

  The black man finished soaking Richie’s pant cuffs and put his penis away. “Not anymore I ain’t.”

  The guards laughed and several hours passed while Richie waited for the paperwork to be filled out so he could call his lawyer. The trouble ahead of him seemed endless, sickening. The cops were sure to find the two outstanding warrants he had for armed robberies, and soon they would realize the bloody clothes in the back of his car belonged to Larry DiGregorio.

  If by some chance he did manage to get out, Teddy would have him killed for sheer sloppiness.

  A new pair of guards came on duty and for the next two hours they steadily ignored his requests to go to the bathroom. He felt his urinary tract backing up and his liver catching fire from the steroids. If it wasn’t for the pain, he wouldn’t even know where his liver was. At four o’clock, the black prisoner’s penis appeared in his fly again, like the bird coming out of a cuckoo clock, and began to spray R
ichie’s pants, as though part of a normal routine.

  “Oh God!!!” Richie shouted. “Please help me!!”

  P.F. walked by a few minutes later.

  “Detective,” Richie called out to him. “Can you get me out of here? I need to call my lawyer.”

  “Not my case.” P.F. shrugged and started to stroll away.

  He’d almost forgotten the conversation he’d had with Sadowsky the F.B.I. agent. Fat chance he was going to implicate himself by volunteering information about Teddy. But here was Richie, begging him to stop and talk. “Wait a sec, wait, wait.”

  P.F. paused and half turned toward him.

  “How long are they gonna keep me waiting?”

  “I don’t know,” P.F. said out of the side of his mouth. “What are you in for?”

  When Richie didn’t respond, P.F. went by the officers’ station to check the arrest report. The details about the gun and the bloody clothes brought an immediate smile to his face.

  “Beautiful,” he said, coming back to face Richie through the bars. “You must be very proud of yourself.”

  “I gotta talk to my lawyer,” Richie insisted. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

  “Well now, see, you’re in a situation,” said P.F.

  “Whaddyamean?”

  “You’re a known O.C. associate with outstanding warrants, and you’re driving around with that shit in your car. Brilliant. It must take you an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.”

  “Fuck you,” said Richie. “Get me my lawyer.”

  “And my lawyer too!” said the black prisoner, whom P.F. recognized as Stevie Ray Banks.

  P.F. put his hands in his pockets and started to walk away again. “I’m sure they’ll give you a call as soon as they get done with all the paperwork.”

  Stevie Ray took out his penis again.

  “Love to Ted,” P.F. said.

  “Come on, come on!” said Richie, jiggling slightly. “Help me out here.”