A Piece of the Action

“Ya don’t remember me?” Jake took off his hat and leaned forward. “I’m insulted.”

“Hey, mister, I see a lotta guys …” Then it hit him and he staggered back. “We’re payin’,” he said. “We’re payin’ everything. We’re payin’ on time.”

“Relax, Al, I ain’t here on business. I’m here on pleasure.”

“Yeah?” O’Neill took another step back, then his face brightened. “Yeah?”

“Everybody gotta get laid, right? If it wasn’t fa that, where would you be?”

O’Neill managed a laugh. “Can’t argue about that one. Now, whatta ya intrested in? Ya got anything special in mind?”

“Young and willin’, Al. That’s all that matters.”

Eight

January 9

Stanley Moodrow, sitting at his kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and the Daily News in the other, was more than annoyed. It wasn’t the events of the last few days that had him going. He’d become reconciled to making the rounds with Salvatore Patero. Not that he actually approved (or even that he was committed to the money), but there was nothing he could do about it. Not in the short term, at least. The cards had been dealt and now he had to play them. It was like the sky falling on Chicken Little. The smart thing was examine the pieces, then do what you had to do.

He’d learned that lesson the hard way. He’d been fifteen when his father died quickly, twenty-three when his mother died slowly. Whatever he’d meant to say to his father or been afraid to say to his mother was going to go forever unsaid. For a few minutes, at his mother’s wake, he’d thought he might die himself. Just stop where he was.

“If you can get through this, you can get through anything.” That’s what he told himself. And the truth was that compared to sitting on that folding chair by the coffin while friends and relatives murmured their condolences, his problems with Sal Patero and Pat Cohan were less than two piles of dogshit on the sidewalk. No, what bothered Stanley Moodrow as he dawdled over his breakfast was the weather.

It was cold and windy. Again. Looking out of his bedroom window as he’d dressed, Moodrow had followed the hunched backs of workingmen as they made their way to buses and subways. Checking the weather was a habit he’d picked up as a patrolman. It was funny, in a way. The newspapers wrote about cops all the time. Likewise the novelists. And while the reporters were mostly critical and the novelists full of bull, neither of them seemed to understand the physical aspects of the job.

On cold days, if you managed to keep moving, you’d stay warm from your neck to your ankles. Above and below, you froze no matter what you did. Your ears and feet would hurt for the first hour, then go numb and stay that way until you finished your tour. Which wasn’t so bad until you came back to the station house and thawed out. On really cold days, the pins and needles would have more than one cop dancing in front of his locker.

The summer wasn’t much better-you sweated all day and tended your rashes at night. By the time the dog days hit, your feet and armpits were permanently inflamed, the powder you put on in the morning was white greasy mud by noon, your balls were floating in a lake of sweat by ten o’clock. What got you through the discomfort was nothing more than dogged persistence. You learned to accept the discomfort like an ox accepting the yoke.

The telephone interrupted Moodrow’s daydreams and he left the kitchen to pick it up. He was expecting to hear Sal Patero’s voice, but found his fiancee on the line instead.

“Stanley,” she said, almost whispering, “I only have a minute, but I have to talk to you.”

“Are you at home?”

“No, I’m at Sacred Heart. I just went to confession.”

“And?” The next part wasn’t going to be any better than the weather and Moodrow knew it.

“What we did the other day, Stanley? It was beautiful, even if it was technically a sin.”

“Did you tell that to Father Grogan?”

“It was Father Ryan. And no, I didn’t. I told him that I knew I’d hurt Jesus and I was sorry for that. Which I am, Stanley. But the important thing is I had to promise not to do it again. You know that I had to.”

Moodrow did know it. In order to make a true confession, in order to receive forgiveness, you had to do two things. You had to be truly repentant and you had to believe that you wouldn’t go out and sin again. Moodrow had been all of fourteen when he’d realized that he was going to do certain things over and over again. No matter how many oaths he took in the confessional. He’d handled this insight by avoiding confession. Compounding the felony was what the lawyers called it.

“All right,” he muttered. “I admit it. But you’re also expected to avoid ‘the near occasions of sin.’ Does that mean we can’t see each other until the wedding?”

“You don’t have to be cruel, Stanley. You’re a Catholic, too.”

“I’m a phony Catholic, like ninety-nine percent of all the Catholics in the world.” He hesitated a moment. “Look, I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t want to attack your faith. The other day … well, if I gotta wait another six months, I’ll wait. That’s all there is to it.”

“Actually, there’s something else, Stanley. I probably shouldn’t have gone to Father Ryan. I should have gone to Father Grogan, because he’s a lot easier. Maybe I felt guilty. I don’t know, but it’s done now. Father Ryan wants me to tell my father. As part of the penance.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name, Stanley.”

As he made his way to the 7th Precinct, Moodrow was hoping against hope. He knew he was dealing with a fifty-fifty proposition at best. Maybe Kathleen wasn’t a religious fanatic, but she did believe in sin and the ritual of forgiveness. Which always included a penance. Most penances consisted of saying a rosary or lighting a candle, but apparently Father Ryan had considered Kate’s sin to be especially evil.

What Moodrow had managed to do, after much persuasion, was to make Kathleen agree to go back to Father Ryan and beg for mercy. At least that postponed the confrontation. Maybe, if he had a few days to think about it, he’d come up with a better plan. One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to take a lot of shit from Pat Cohan. A rabbi was one thing-every up-and-comer in the Department had a rabbi-but Moodrow didn’t figure he needed a master. He had no intention of playing the monster to Pat Cohan’s Doctor Frankenstein.

He nodded to several uniformed cops inside the 7th Precinct’s lobby, then quickly made his way to the detectives’ squad room. Once again, the detectives working at their desks ignored him altogether. Moodrow had already stopped hoping that the cold shoulder was some kind of ritual. The truth was they resented the hell out of him.

Patero’s door was open when Moodrow approached. There were two detectives sitting next to the Lieutenant’s desk. Moodrow stopped for a moment, not quite knowing his place.

“Stanley, come in.”

Patero was smiling, so, whatever was going on, it couldn’t be all bad. Moodrow walked through the door and nodded to the suits. “Morning,” he said.

“Stanley, this is Pete O’Brien.” Patero jerked his chin at a tall, beefy cop. “And this here is Mack Mitkowski.”

Mitkowski was small and wiry. His face was all flat planes except for a nose that seemed to jump out of his skull. He stared at Moodrow through dark blank eyes. “Whatta ya say, Stanley? How’s it hangin’?”

Patero interrupted before Moodrow could reply. “We’re gonna take a piece of slime off the streets today, Stanley. Ya know the guy they call the Playtex Burglar?”

“I know what he’s done, but we’ve never actually been introduced.”

The Playtex Burglar had been breaking into one or another of the small clothing stores clustered near Orchard and Delancey for the past six months. As far as Moodrow was concerned, he was strictly small-time, even if he was miraculously successful. What made him interesting to the cops (as well as a minor sensation in the newspapers) was the fact that in addition to a few decent suits and coats, he always grabbed several pieces of intimate lady’s