A Piece of the Action

freckles and the long, honey-blonde hair and she seemed as insubstantial (and as sexy) as the fairy on a bottle of White Rock ginger ale. But underneath that schoolgirl uniform, she wasn’t insubstantial at all. She was heavy-boned and solid and believed in herself as much as she believed in her God. Or her father.

Ignoring the sharp twinge in his shoulder, Moodrow put his arms around Kathleen and pulled her in close. He kissed her on the lips and felt her mouth open beneath his. He wanted to slide his hand down over her buttocks, but the door was open and there was always a chance one of the assembled cops would look up from his drink at the wrong time. Besides, she was undoubtedly wearing a girdle-she almost always wore a girdle under her dresses and skirts because it gave her that “smooth line.” Girdles, in Moodrow’s estimation, were the modern equivalent of the medieval chastity belt. You couldn’t seduce a woman wearing a girdle. You couldn’t slide a girdle over a woman’s hips. It took so long to get it off, the act had to be deliberate, had to be premeditated. It couldn’t just happen.

But maybe that was all to the good. More than a few of Moodrow’s peers had gotten their girlfriends pregnant despite the conscientious use of Trojans. Almost all those peers had done the right thing, but he knew of one girl who’d gone uptown for an abortion and come back home on a slab. The suits had tracked down the doctor who’d implicated the boyfriend who was now doing eight to twelve in Sing-Sing. Moodrow, having listened carefully to Pat Cohan’s warnings, would rather do the time than confess that he’d gotten the Inspector’s daughter pregnant. Pat Cohan was president of the NYPD Holy Name Society. He was an officer in the Knights of Columbus and a patron of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He would neither be understanding nor forgiving.

Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t times when they’d worked up enough heat to scorch the plastic cover on Inspector Pat Cohan’s living-room couch. Times when darlin’ Kathleen had pressed Moodrow’s face into her breasts, not even bothering with the ritual “no,” not protesting even when his lips and tongue ran over the smooth skin of her belly. Times when she’d opened her legs to allow his fingers to work their way under her slacks, her white cotton underpants.

“Doesn’t this hurt?” Kathleen asked, pulling back.

Moodrow touched his fingers to his puffy lips. “It does, now that you mention it.”

She reached out and took his left hand, bringing it to her cheek. “I have to go back inside.”

“Why? Your father’s in his glory. He wouldn’t care if you stayed out here until tomorrow morning. He probably wouldn’t even notice.”

“Stanley, it’s freezing. I don’t have a coat on.” She took a step back, but continued to hold onto his hand. “I won’t see you for three days.”

“Unless you visit me.” Moodrow had three days’ vacation coming to him and he intended to pass them going from his bed to a hot bath to the kitchen table. He was scheduled to report to the lieutenant at the 7th on Tuesday morning and he didn’t want to walk into the squadroom a cripple.

“I can’t, Stanley.” She dropped his hand and looked down at her shoes. “Daddy …”

“I can understand ‘old-fashioned.’ Your father wants to protect you and I guess that’s all to the good. But you’re not sixteen years old. You’re a college graduate, a working woman. And we’re engaged, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain.”

Moodrow put his hands on Kathleen’s waist-he wanted to put them on her shoulders, but he couldn’t raise his hands that high-and looked directly into her eyes. “If you wanna wait until you’re married to become a woman, that’s okay with me. And I’m not talking about sex, either. But once the priest says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ you’ve gotta stop being ‘darlin’ Kathleen’ and start being Katie Moodrow. What scares me is that I don’t think you have any idea who Katie Moodrow is. I can see the woman in you, but you can’t. Or won’t.”

“You can be very hateful, Stanley.”

“I don’t wanna marry your daddy.”

“He needs me, too.”

“Katie, your mother spends half the day in church and the other half in her room with a rosary. It’s sad, but it’s not your fault. Just tell Pat that you’re coming to see me and let that be the end of it. You’re twenty-two years old and you’re engaged to be married. That entitles you to come to my apartment when I’m too sore to get up and come to you.”

She didn’t want him to leave like that. Didn’t want him to walk out carrying the same argument they’d been having for months. This was 1958. He was right about that. She should be able to do as she pleased, guided by her own conscience and not her father’s.

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’m not promising, but I’ll try.”

“Good,” Moodrow grunted, “because as soon as I get you inside, I’m gonna lock the door, rip off your clothes and force you to do ten or fifteen obscene acts I learned from all the prostitutes I was forced to arrest in the course of doing my duty.”

“Stanley, you’re impossible.” She was grinning up at him, happy again. He had a way of making things better, of easing their arguments. As if he knew it would be all right, even if she didn’t.

“Not impossible, Katie. Just very, very unlikely.”

Four

January 4

Jake Leibowitz was sitting at the far end of his mother’s kitchen table, the end closest to the living room. He had two reasons for doing this. First, it was as far as he could get from his mother, Sarah, who was cooking breakfast, and, second, he could see the open closet by the door leading out of the apartment. The closet held his “reward for a job well done.” Jake always treated himself to a reward when a job came off successfully.

Of course, there were some people, like his mother, who thought it was stupid to spend two hundred on a reward when you only took in three hundred, but Jake had to disagree. He wasn’t throwing his money away. Nor was he trying to play the big shot in front of his associates. He was conditioning himself for success.

Jake, as far as he could remember, had never liked to read. He tended to see letters upside down and words in reverse order. Not that he couldn’t read. It was just that extracting the information locked up in those letters was closer to an all-out siege than a leisurely pastime. Still, there were lots of empty hours in prison, hours when time seemed to reach out to the edge of a very flat earth. Jake, like the majority of his prison peers, spent most of those hours lost in common, if complex, sexual daydreams. But he couldn’t spend all the hours dreaming-there were just too many-so, somewhere in his fifth year of incarceration, he began to read Life magazine. He chose Life for two reasons. First, because it was on the warden’s list of approved periodicals and, second, because it only came once a week. Jake needed a week to get through an issue. A week was an absolute necessity when you had to work on the words a letter at a time.

Jake was in his ninth year at Leavenworth when he came on the article in Life that changed his life. It was the missing link in Jake Leibowitz’s formula for success. The article was on a Soviet psychology experiment which was called “conditioning.” It was mostly about a man named Pavlov who did an experiment with his dog. He rang a bell each time he fed his dog and after a while the dog started drooling every time he heard a bell, even if there wasn’t any food. At first, Jake thought this was pretty funny. He imagined Pavlov walking his dog down the street. Whenever the dog hears a fire bell or a church bell, it starts dribbling away. Like on some old broad’s hightop shoes.

But the article stuck to Jake, despite its clownish aspects. The way he understood it, the commies were saying that you could make something happen by getting someone to expect it to happen. Maybe that was why he kept screwing up in life. He was always kicking himself when he made a bad move, always putting himself down. What he should be doing, he figured, is rewarding himself when he