A Piece of the Action

what was about to happen and decided to run, Jake was determined to do what he’d come to do.

But Rocco Insalaco didn’t run. He held his ground, eyeing Jake coldly. “Do I know you?” he asked when Jake was still ten feet away.

“That depends,” Jake answered, pulling the.45 out of his pocket. “You know who Malakh- hamoves is?”

“Hey!” Rocco took a step back, then froze in his tracks. “I don’t know nobody named Malik.”

“I didn’t think so. I didn’t think a wop would be acquainted with the Angel of Death.”

“Whatta ya want? Whatta ya want?”

Jake watched the man tremble, watched Izzy approach from behind, watched the bat as it whooshed through the air and slammed into the back of Rocco Insalaco’s head.

“Ya must be losin’ ya touch, Izzy. Either that or Rocco’s got a skull like a nigger. Gimme a bat. We’ll take turns.”

They took their time about it. This was one body that wasn’t going to end up in a swamp. Tomorrow morning, when the junkies heard about Rocco’s fate, they’d have plenty of respect for the man who came to take his place. Santo Silesi wouldn’t be operating on his own. He’d have the fate of Rocco Insalaco covering his back.

Eleven

January 15

Stanley Moodrow sat at his kitchen table, a cup of coffee near his right hand and a bowl of untouched Cheerios in front of him. He’d already given up on the Daily News. In the first place, New York had been quiet on January 14th. There’d been no juicy murders, no subway wrecks, no crooked politicians to expose. The lead story concerned an unemployed chef who’d robbed a Queens bank with a non-existent bomb. The part about a “Queens bank” was the giveaway. The Daily News, not unlike New York City’s politicians, rarely paid any attention to the outer boroughs.

In the second place, Moodrow couldn’t stop thinking about his job and what it was doing to his plans for the future. He felt like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. If he fell, if the hurricane pushing at his back shoved him over the edge, nobody would ever put his career back together again.

What made it funny was all the daydreams he’d had before he got his appointment to the detectives. He’d spent the six weeks before his bout with the “Fightin’ Fireman” sitting in a training class at the Academy. Everyone else in the class had already been appointed, but the idea had been to give Moodrow regular hours while he prepared for the big fight. Moodrow found the classes easy, easy enough for him to dream about life as an NYPD detective. He’d imagined himself rising through the ranks, imagined his name and picture in the Daily News …

Well, he’d gotten this name and his picture in the papers. The Journal-American had printed a photo of Moodrow leading the Playtex Burglar through the side door of the 7th Precinct. The contrast between the small, slender burglar and the giant cop hadn’t been lost on the editor who’d written the caption. “Beauty and the Beast” was the way the paper had chosen to put it.

The notoriety hadn’t given Moodrow any satisfaction, but that couldn’t be said of the job he’d been doing for the last week. Sal Patero had been right about the cops in the 7th Precinct. They had an uncanny ability to mess up the paperwork. Maybe that was because the paperwork was irrelevant in all but a handful of cases.

Most of the felons on the Lower East Side couldn’t afford a lawyer. They copped out to the charges, because demanding a trial inevitably resulted in a longer sentence, usually in one of the harsher prisons like Dannemora. But there were trials. There were hardened ex-cons who laughed at the third degree, who were smart enough to use their ill-gotten gains to keep an attorney on retainer. There were also first-time criminals-husbands who’d gone berserk on their wives, friends who’d cut each other to pieces in a bar-who simply had the money to hire a lawyer. In these cases, the paperwork had to be right and it almost never was.

Which is why, once they’d determined his competence, the DA’s office had welcomed Stanley Moodrow like a conquering hero. Before he’d come upon the scene, they’d been cleaning up the mess by themselves. Now, they could put the burden on Moodrow. They could complain, order, cajole and, most importantly of all, blame someone else when cases fell apart due to sloppy policing.

Moodrow recalled a case that had had the prosecutors near to madness. Two patrolmen had arrested a man named Robert White for a double homicide. It should have been an open-and-shut deal, because even though the.25 caliber automatic they’d found on Mr. White hadn’t exactly been smoking, ballistics had matched it to the slugs taken out of the victims’ bodies. The only problem was that the gun couldn’t be matched to the perpetrator. The special Property Clerk’s Invoice used when firearms were confiscated was nowhere to be found.

The two patrolmen who’d made the arrest swore they’d done the paperwork. The detectives handling the follow-up thought otherwise.

“They oughta put them assholes in the Midtown Tunnel,” one had insisted.

“Didn’t you check the paperwork to make sure it was all there?”

“Hey, it wasn’t my case. All I did was interview a few drunks who overheard White braggin’ about the homicides.”

Moodrow had chosen to believe the two patrolmen. Which meant the paperwork had to be somewhere in the precinct. The search had taken the better part of a day, but he’d finally run down the missing form in the file of a sixty-year-old pornography dealer named Richard White. The prosecutors had taken him to lunch. Better yet, they’d called Patero and thanked him for sending them Stanley Moodrow.

So, Moodrow supposed, he was a hero, now, instead of a stubborn, uncooperative bum. Now Patero, as Moodrow drove him back and forth from the 7th Precinct to NYPD headquarters on Centre Street, chatted easily. Now, there was no further mention of “first loyalties” or “acceptable statistics.”

Moodrow had the distinct impression that he was being given a second chance, by Sal Patero if not Pat Cohan. Sooner or later, he was going to be invited to make another arrest, to pile on more charges. The only thing was that Stanley Moodrow wasn’t sure he wanted a second chance. He’d taken a stand-at least, he thought he had-and stands were supposed to be final. Now, he wasn’t sure what he’d do if faced with another Playtex Burglar. He even wasn’t sure what he should do. That was why he’d invited his old trainer, Allen Epstein, to stop over for coffee. It was also why he answered the doorbell in his underwear.

“Oh, shit,” he moaned, slamming the door on Greta Bloom, Rosaura Pastoral and a young woman he didn’t recognize.

“I have to put something on, Greta,” he shouted through the door. “I’ll be back in a second.” He ran into the bedroom, reached for a robe, then changed his mind.

“Lemme get this right,” he muttered, tossing a clean white shirt and a pair of pants onto the bed. He threw on the shirt, buttoned it wrong, re-buttoned it, jumped into his trousers, fumbled in his drawer for a pair of socks without a hole in the toe, dug his slippers out from under the bed, ran a comb through his short hair. By the time he got back to the door, he was breathing hard.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he explained. “I was expecting someone else.”

“But I called last night,” Greta said, pushing past him into the apartment. “Remember? You said you asked about Luis.”

“Yeah, Greta, but you didn’t say you were coming over at seven o’clock in the morning.”

“So, when should I come? You work all day and at night you go out to Queens to see your girlfriend.” She sat down on the couch. “You remember Rosaura, right? And this is Nenita Melenguez, Luis’s wife. She came to New York to make arrangements.”

“Mrs. Melenguez,” Moodrow nodded. “Please, everybody sit down. Would anyone like coffee?”

“You are expecting the company,” Rosaura Pastoral said, “so we should no be stayin’ too long.”

“Are you sure?” Moodrow was stalling for time. The slight figure perched on the edge of his couch looked like