A Piece of the Action

and slightly hoarse. “This thing happens the day after Christmas. My boarder, Luis Melenguez, goes out for the evening and he don’ come back. For five days I don’ hear nothing. Then someone tell me he is killed in a house on Peet Street.”

“Peet Street?”

“She means, Pitt Street,” Greta interpreted.

“I’m sorry for my English is no too good. I try to learn, but it comes very slow.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Moodrow said. “Just tell your story.”

“When I’m hearing this about Luis, I go to the police station and talk to the officer at the desk. He is sending me to a man in a suit, Detective Maguire. Detective Maguire is telling me the investigation is … progressing. Tha’ is the word he use. Progressing. Then I ask him why nobody come to see me. I am Luis’s landlady. He live in my home. Why nobody come to as’ me who is his friends? Who is his enemies? Ayyy, Dios mio, Detective Maguire get so angry. He say I don’ know nothin’ about it, so why don’ I go home and mind my own business. I do like he say, but no is right thing. I don’ think so.”

Moodrow took a minute before he responded. He’d been in the final stages of training for his bout with Liam O’Grady on December 26 and knew less than nothing about the murder. But the fact that more than two weeks had gone by without an arrest meant that, statistically, at least, the murder was unlikely to be cleared.

“You say that nobody came to interview you. Nobody?”

“No, Senor. I never hear from nobody abou’ this thing. Luis Melenguez is only in this country six months. He leaves his wife and his children in Puerto Rico to come here. Luis never hurt nobody in his life. In his country, he is a … I don’ know the word for this.”

“A peasant, Stanley,” Greta said. “And believe me, from peasants I have experience.”

The Department, Moodrow knew, cleared a high percentage of homicides, usually within the first forty-eight hours. And the way they cleared them was by investigating the people closest to the victim. Of course, there might be any number of reasons why Maguire hadn’t followed standard operating procedure, not the least of which was the distinct possibility that Rosaura Pastoral was lying through her teeth. But even if Rosaura was telling the truth, even if Maguire had no good reason for sitting on his hands, there remained the question of what he, Stanley Moodrow, could do about it.

“You should understand something here,” he said, more to Greta Bloom than Rosaura Pastoral. “I’m not the commissioner. There’s not much I can do.”

“Stanley, please, no one expects you should go out and make miracles. But also you should remember that Rosaura is your neighbor. She comes to you for help, because there’s no other place for her to go. The machers at the police station don’t have no use for a pisher like Rosaura Pastoral. Let me tell you a story so you should understand what I’m trying to say.”

“Please,” Moodrow groaned. Greta’s stories had a way of extending themselves through several generations.

“Stanley, make me a promise you’ll listen close and I swear I won’t be too long.”

“Keep it short and I’ll repeat it word for word.”

“Huh,” she snorted, “always with the smart mouth. One day you’ll get in trouble with a mouth like that.”

“One day?”

“When I came to this country,” she said, ignoring his response, “I was already thirty years old, a married woman with two children. This was in 1920. All my life before that I lived in a shtetl in Poland. A shtetl is a small village. For me, a goy was one of two things. A goy was a peasant with a club or a Cossack with a sword. Believe me, Stanley, I’m not exaggerating even a little bit. I saw plenty growing up-Jews beaten, robbed, killed. It was an expected thing. So, when I found out that my husband, who came here before me, was living in an apartment with a goy next door, I was so crazy I couldn’t talk.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Little by little, I learned there were goyim in the world who didn’t hurt Jews just because they were Jews. There were goyim who were neighbors, who helped you out when you were in trouble. This maybe sounds to you like nothing, but, for me, it was a revelation like even the prophets didn’t know. It changed my life and all my thinking. Rosaura is like me when I first came to America. She don’t know a soul. She don’t know how things work. But she’s my neighbor and she’s your neighbor, too. Just like her boarder, Luis Melenguez. From my thinking, when a neighbor asks for a favor, you do what you can. That’s how we survived in 1920 and that’s how we survive today.”

“What’s the favor, Greta? What exactly does she want me to do?”

“Stanley, don’t be a schmuck. First you should find out what’s going on. Then you’ll think of something.”

Nine

January 12

Pat Cohan was near to tearing his mane right off the top of his head. He just couldn’t get it right. Just couldn’t. Whenever he patted the last feathery wisp into place, whenever he was about to turn away from the mirror and face the plague that’d fallen on him over the last few days, another white knot popped out and fell over his eyes like the fine lace veil his wife put on every time she left the house.

What it made him feel was incompetent, disheveled, out of control. Which, in his mind, was the same as old. Which was the same as retired. Which was the same as dead. Which …

The point was that he could remember a time when he took problems in stride, when he actually looked forward to problems. Because if there was anything the Department appreciated, it was a cop who could make problems disappear. Especially the kind of problems that embarrassed the NYPD.

He looked at himself in the mirror, fingers automatically fluttering over his mane. His face was bright red, which meant his pressure was up again.

“Ya look like a boozer, Pat,” he muttered to his reflection. “Ya look like a damned Irish drunk.”

What he felt like doing was covering his head with vaseline like some punk rock- and-roll singer. Or just shaving the whole mess off. Wear it military-style and to hell with his image. But what he did, finally, was fish a can of Clairol hairspray out of a bureau drawer and coat his mane until it was stiff as a board. Which he didn’t mind all that much. No, what really bothered him was the sweet perfumy smell. It would cling to him for the next hour, no matter what he did.

Sighing, he turned out the lights and headed downstairs to the den. Once there, once the door was closed and he felt safe, he intended to light the biggest cigar he could find and fill the small room with smoke. Unfortunately, in order to get to the den, he had to pass through the living room.

“What’s that smell?”

Pat Cohan turned to confront his daughter. She was sitting in a leather wing chair. His favorite chair. And she was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Isn’t there something you should be doing, Kathleen? Maybe your mother needs help.” Ordinarily, he enjoyed her teasing, actually encouraged it.

“Mother can pray the rosary without me, Daddy. But if you’d like to go up and ask her if she wants assistance …”

That was just what he needed. A visit to his wife’s private hell, to windows and doors draped in black velvet, to an agonized, bloody Jesus hanging on the cross. The endless drone of his wife’s prayers sounded more like the hum of a mindless insect than human speech. The dead mourning the dead.

“When Stanley shows up, I want to see him.”

“Okay, Daddy. Sal’s here, by the way.”

“Patero?”