A Piece of the Action

Leibowitz, a dead cop named Strauss, more than five hundred rounds of police fire and fifty reports to be filed by fifty patrolmen, Moodrow, the only detective on the scene, hadn’t left the 7th Precinct until well after midnight.

What he’d assumed was that Kate had decided to spend the night in Bayside. The only question was whether she’d somehow fallen back under her father’s spell. But that hadn’t seemed possible. Not even to a thoroughly shell-shocked Stanley Moodrow. No, most likely Kate had called a half-dozen times and gotten no answer. Maybe she’d even called Greta. There’d been no way of knowing, because it was nearly one o’clock and he couldn’t make it into an emergency no matter how many scenarios he concocted.

He’d awakened the next morning to find Pat Cohan on the radio, on television, on the front page of every newspaper in New York City. The murder-suicide had transformed Jake Leibowitz and the rooftop shootout from a banner headline to an item on page fifteen.

The first phone call had come at ten o’clock in the morning: “John Hughes, from the Journal- American. You were Kate Cohan’s fiance. Could you …?”

Could you? Would you? Do you? It’d gone on for days. Despite his muttered, “No comment.” Despite hanging up again and again and again. It was still going on, though the volume of calls had slowed now that the funeral was over.

The sad part was that he’d answered every call, each time hoping to hear Kate’s voice. His own calls out to Bayside had been fielded by any number of unidentified friends and relatives. Most had been firm, but polite. A few had called him a bastard. One, a woman, had fairly hissed at him.

“Haven’t you done enoughhhhhhhhhh?”

Desperate, he’d driven out to St. John’s Cemetery in Flushing and watched the funeral procession pass through the cemetery gates. He’d seen Kate in the back of the limousine following the casket, a small veiled figure encircled by men in black overcoats. Were they relatives or cops? And where were the women? The helpful aunts? The trusted friends?

The questions were making him crazy. He’d sought Greta’s advice, then Allen Epstein’s. Both had delivered the same message: give her time to sort it out. Time was the only cure.

He should, he knew later, have taken their advice, because when he’d finally driven out to Bayside, the trip had made him even crazier. Kate’s Uncle Bill, her mother’s brother, had answered the door. An elderly man, he’d looked embarrassed at first. Then he’d invited Moodrow inside.

“She’s not here, lad,” he’d said. “You can look if you want.”

Moodrow, a cop to his bones, had taken the old man up on the offer, wandering from room to room. He’d found a lot of empty space and a single locked door. It led, he knew, to Rose Cohan’s bedroom.

“It hasn’t been cleaned,” Bill Brannigan had said apologetically. “It’ll have to be cleaned soon, I suppose. If we’re to put the house on the market.”

Moodrow had responded by kicking the door off the hinges. Only to find that Bill Brannigan hadn’t been lying. The room was covered with dried blood. The furniture, the floors, the walls, the ceiling. Brannigan, staring helplessly at the carnage, had begun to cry.

“Take as long as you have to, Bill. I’m not leaving until you tell me where she is.”

“She’s on retreat.” Brannigan had peered at him through bewildered eyes. “Holy Mother Church has taken Kate to her sacred bosom.”

“Stanley, you want lox on your bagel?” Moodrow looked up quickly. Telling himself to stop drifting off. Willing himself to remain in the present. Reminding himself that his career was on the line, that he had to be in Deputy Chief Milton Morton’s office in less than two hours and that he’d better be ready.

“Yeah, fine.” He sipped at his coffee and ran his fingers over his newly shaven face. “What was I saying?”

“About chickening out. Which only a meshugganer could believe you’d do.”

“Yeah, right.” Moodrow watched Greta set the plate down in front of him. “I guess ‘chickening out’ is a kid’s way of putting it, but I had choices and I made them. I didn’t have to call in the troops, but I did. And I didn’t have to obey the captain, either. When he so much as told me that he wasn’t gonna give Jake a chance, I didn’t have to help him create a diversion. I could have taken the gold shield and rammed it up his ass. Why not, Greta? If my mother could use a hatpin, why couldn’t I use a badge?”

“Nu, because a captain is not a horse.”

Moodrow bit off a chunk of bagel and began to chew thoughtfully. “I loved the hunt,” he said after a moment. “You know, the investigation. Tracking Jake down. Boxing him into a corner. That’s the way I fought in the ring. The way I had to fight. I was too slow to catch anybody on the run.”

“Stanley, please. Life is difficult enough. Only a shlemiel goes through life making things more difficult. A man is killed; a killer is dead. Nu?”

“Yeah? Well, it wasn’t ‘nu’ for Al and Betty O’Neill. Maybe they were a couple of pimps, but they didn’t deserve the death penalty.”

“This was your fault?”

“And then there’s Rose Cohan. And Kate.”

It was Greta’s turn to fidget. She brushed a small pile of crumbs into the palm of her hand and dumped them on the edge of her plate. “She’ll come around, Stanley. It’s only been five days.”

“You do one thing and ten things happen. There’s no way to control it.” He shook his head. “It’s like throwing a punch at your opponent and hitting a spectator.”

“Stanley, could I tell you a story?”

Moodrow smiled for the first time in days. “Please,” he answered.

“This happened in nineteen thirty-three. A strike at Goldman Furs. At the time, I was pregnant with my second and I wasn’t even working. But Yussel Mittman, from the union, came to me and begged me to help out. ‘It’s a mitzvah, a mitzvah. Please, we need a woman and there’s nobody else.’ ”

Greta drew a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. She looked up at Moodrow and shrugged. “So, what could I do? I went and I made speeches and I walked with the pickets. The morale was good, the workers inspired, but the strike went on and on. Goldman wouldn’t budge. He was a rich man, Stanley, a millionaire, but also a skinflint. Instead of bargaining, he offered to lower the wages. Five months we stood out there, all through the winter. ‘He can’t hold out forever.’ That’s what we told ourselves and we were right. Spring came around and Goldman’s two sons took over the business. I remember the celebration when they settled with the union. This was in the middle of the Depression and there were no jobs to be had, so you can imagine how the workers felt. But for me, it wasn’t such fun. I was at the party when the pains started. The doctors called it a ‘spontaneous abortion,’ which was probably the truth, but I blamed myself. I still do. You know how it is, nu? The head says one thing and the heart says another. Eventually, you live with the past and keep on going.”

An hour and a half later, Moodrow found himself in the waiting room of Deputy Chief Milton Morton’s Centre Street office. Morton’s secretary, a very grizzled, very male sergeant named Goldfarb, hadn’t even bothered with the customary, “Chief Morton will be right with you.” He’d checked Moodrow’s i.d. carefully, then nodded him into a seat.

Moodrow picked at his nails for a moment, then grabbed the Daily News off a low table and glanced at the headline: CAMPY FIGHTS PARALYSIS.

“Jesus Christ.”

“What’s that?” Sergeant Goldfarb peered over his reading glasses to nail Moodrow with his hardest stare.

“Nothing.”

Moodrow edged closer to the light and examined the newspaper closely. There were two photos on the front page. The one on the right showed Roy Campanella’s wife holding a telephone to her ear. The one on the left showed a man lying face-down on a stretcher. Oddly, the man was still wearing his hat.

Moodrow turned the pages quickly, scanning the headline as he searched for the main story. Principal Dies In Leap, Faced HS Crime Quiz; 6 Wined-Up Teeners Knife Two Girls on Stairs of Subway; 200 Police Hunt Nebraska Teen Lovers Who Killed 7; Sketch Put Out in Hunt For Knifer of UN Sec’y; 2 Ganglings Seized In Murder of Youth; Crime Rises 25 % In State; Police Budget Up $13,519,136.

He got all the way to the classifieds before he realized that he’d passed over the Campanella story. Thumbing