A Piece of the Action

starched white sheets.

“Well, whatta ya gonna do?” Jake asked. “Whatta ya gonna do?” He strolled down the short hallway to the bathroom and stepped inside. The single opaque window was shoulder height, exactly the way he wanted it. Jake raised the window a few inches, then drew Little Richard from his belt and aimed him at the neighboring rooftop forty feet away. The foot-high ledge wouldn’t offer much protection unless you were lying right against it. Which was also the way he wanted it.

Jake took a moment to imagine the rooftop covered with fat New York City cops. He imagined shooting them down. Bing! Bing! Bing! Like ducks in a shooting gallery. By the time the flatfoots zeroed in on his location, there’d be enough bodies to make it worthwhile. And that’s what it was all about. Because once Jake Leibowitz set Little Richard to singing his song, there was no turning back. Cop killers weren’t taken alive. That’s one of the reasons they became neighborhood legends.

Jake grabbed a couple of towels off the rack and tossed them over his shoulder. Later on, if they fired tear gas into the bedrooms, he’d stuff the towels under the doors. On a whim, he wedged Aunt Golda’s spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and peered at his mustache in the mirror.

“Not bad,” he decided. “Not perfect, but not bad.”

He strolled into the bedroom and yanked his aunt’s box spring off its metal frame, revealing five wooden cross-slats. He grabbed two of them and headed back to the living room where he knelt and jammed them under the doorknob.

“Maybe they’ll blow out the lock,” he said, “and try to bust through the door. How many could I get before they figure it out? Two? Three?”

He aimed Little Richard at the door, imagining the cops’ fear, imagining his.45 blasting away. Imagining the screams.

There hadn’t been any screams when he’d done poor Abe Weinberg. When he’d done his fucking buddy. Maybe that’s was the real reason he hadn’t gone out to Los Angeles like Steppy told him. The wops had asked him to sacrifice Abe and he’d done it. It was like a promise they’d made to him, a promise they didn’t bother to keep.

“Joe Faci told me that Abe would be the end of it.”

They could’ve skipped town right after they’d done the spic. All of them-Jake, Izzy and Abe. But Joe Faci said, “Take care of Abe. He’s got a screw loose somewhere. Y’understand? Take care of Abe and we’ll take care of you.”

Jake walked across the living room and opened an end table drawer. He took out his second gun and slipped it beneath his belt. Six spare clips, all full, lay in plain view on a small pile of old magazines. Sighing, he scooped them up and slipped three into each pocket of his jacket. Despite the fact that he knew they’d make his pockets bulge. That he’d look like a Jew pedlar from the old days instead of a successful gangster.

“Whatta ya gonna do?” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Whatta ya gonna fuckin’ do?”

As he and Fred Stone climbed toward the sixth floor, Stanley Moodrow found himself looking for Jake Leibowitz at every turning of the stairs. He recalled his earliest fights and the way his heart had punched at his ribs as he waited for the opening bell. What had he been afraid of back then? A broken nose? A swollen lip? It seemed like a joke, now. A joke in comparison with facing a Colt.45. Talk about a punch in the ribs. A.45 would turn your ribs into dominoes.

Moodrow pulled his.38 and slid it into the pocket of his overcoat. His already thin mouth tightened into a bloodless white line. For a moment, as they approached the door to the sixth-floor corridor, Moodrow felt something near to panic. His legs seemed to belong to someone else. They barely lifted him from one step to the next.

“Hold it a second, Fred.” Moodrow became aware of his hoarse whisper only after he’d spoken. “What we’re gonna do is prop the door open so you can stay here and still cover the apartment. Now, look, there’s only one way out of there. If he decides to use it, don’t shoot me.”

“C’mon, Stanley,” Stone said, smiling his sunniest, little-brother smile. “It’s just a tip. Besides, he can’t shoot through the wall, can he?”.

“Not through these walls,” Moodrow admitted. The Vladeck Houses, completed in 1940, had one thing in common with the most modern skyscrapers. They had steel fire-shields in the walls between apartments and the walls running along the common corridor. There were no fire escapes on the outside of the buildings, because the whole idea was to seal yourself in your apartment in case of fire. Unless, of course, the fire was in your apartment. Then, you ran like hell.

The net effect was to turn every apartment into a little fortress. If Jake refused to surrender, there was no easy way to get to him. In the tenements, a few blows with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer would bust through any wall. Here, you’d need a welder’s torch.

“I think you oughta take this seriously,” Moodrow said, surprised to find his voice much stronger. The simple fact was that he only had a few minutes before Epstein showed up and became the ranking officer on the scene. The captain would follow Epstein, along with several lieutenants. If the siege took any kind of time, the inspectors and the deputy chiefs would arrive with the reporters. By then, Stanley Moodrow would be little more than an innocent bystander.

“I am taking it seriously,” Stone insisted. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.” He twirled his.38 on his index finger, still grinning madly.

Moodrow turned away in disgust. The trick, he knew, was to turn the fear into power, to aim the wasted energy at your opponent. He’d promised Greta that he’d try to talk Jake Leibowitz into surrendering. That didn’t mean he was obliged to go crashing through the door. It didn’t, as far as he was concerned, mean that he was obliged to take any risk at all. He was going to give Jake a chance at life, but if Jake refused, Mama Leibowitz would get her trip to the morgue after all.

He walked past the door to apartment 678 and stationed himself alongside it. Fred Stone, across the hall and twenty feet away, held his thumb up and winked.

“Go get him, Stanley. And don’t forget to jab.”

Moodrow shook his head. “After we take Mr. Leibowitz, I think I’m gonna celebrate by slapping your ass from here to Central Park.”

Moodrow pounded the door with the side of his fist, then quickly yanked his hand away. A second later, Jake Leibowitz emptied half a clip through the door. Moodrow watched five small mushrooms appear, one at a time, on the door’s steel sheath. He saw the mushrooms burst, saw tiny sharp points blossom on the ruptured metal, saw five clouds of plaster explode from the opposite wall.

He saw all of it before he heard the sound of the shots. Or rather, the sound of the shot. Because what he heard was a single sharp crack, like the sound of Mickey Mantle’s bat hitting a Don Newcombe fastball. The echo was surprisingly short, but the emptiness that followed seemed to last forever.

Moodrow looked over at Freddy Stone. The young cop wasn’t smiling anymore. His mouth was agape, his eyes so wide his lashes merged with his eyebrows. The sight was comical, but Moodrow didn’t bother to smile.

“Hey, Jake,” he shouted through the door. “Does this mean you’re not gonna surrender?”

“Why don’t ya come in and find out for yourself? I was just settin’ up for tea and crumpets.”

Moodrow reached out, carefully twisted the doorknob, then gave a gentle push. The door was locked.

“I can’t join you unless you open the door, Jake,” he said calmly. “Your mother was much more hospitable.”

“How’d ya talk her into rattin’ on me? She told me ya gave her the third degree.”

“You believe that?” Moodrow paused for a moment, then continued. “What I did was show her a picture of Luis Melenguez’s body. I told her that’s what you’re gonna look like if you don’t give yourself up.”

A second volley of shots roared through the door. Moodrow felt a sharp pain on the left side of his cheek. His first thought was that he’d somehow been shot, but that was clearly impossible. He looked at the pock-marked wall across the corridor as if it might hold the answer, then reached up and touched a thin steel splinter protruding from his face.

“Damn,” he whispered, pulling it out. Now that he knew it wasn’t serious, it hurt all the more.

“Stanley, you’re bleedin’.”