Dead Street

there’d be nobody left who could tag him.

Cell phones are great for an area like this. The compartmentalized city of New York had a place for everything and everything was in its place. There was a cubicle where a cop kept track of every known street gang in the city, had IDs on their members, knew their codes and recognition signs and every record of arrests and convictions any of those punks had.

I called the department number and a voice said, “Officer Muncie here. How can I help you?”

“Captain Jack Stang, retired, from the old—”

“Hey, Captain! Good to speak to you. We were talking about you the other day. Somebody saw you down at your old precinct...”

“It’s torn down now.”

“The new place is pretty nice, I hear.”

“Maybe, but not my bailiwick. I got to learn to be a civilian again, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“There was an old Bronx gang, the Blue Uptowners. What happened to them?”

“Hell, Jack, they’re still active. A few of the originals are still around, but they’re out of the loop. The new kids aren’t too bad. Very little trouble.”

“Who can I see about something that happened twenty-some years ago?”

“Just a second.” I heard him pull some folders out and rustle the papers in them. He wasn’t a computer guy either. When he was satisfied, he said, “There’s one guy, Paddy The Bull, they called him. His real name was Patrick Mahoney...”

“I recall him,” I said.

“He’s square now. Has a painting business. Want his address and phone number?”

I said yes, wrote them down in my note pad and thanked Officer Muncie for his time.

Patrick Mahoney was a far cry from Paddy The Bull. He was respectable now, a burly, bald, hard-working guy who had his own business, owned a pickup truck and had a wife and two kids and a big smile when he saw me.

“Damn,” he said with a laugh, outside the house in Queens he and a crew were painting, “did I do something wrong?”

“Nope,” I said. “You did something right. You grew up.”

“It’s been a long time, Captain Jack. I coulda been wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, not these painter’s whites, wasn’t for you. Now, I know that you’re retired and that this isn’t a social call, so what’s happening?”

“Remember Bucky Mohler?”

He made a face and spit out a dirty word. “He was a lowlife scumbag. Bad news. I tried to tell Wally Chips who ran our club to stay away from him but he wouldn’t listen to me. Or a couple of the other guys, either.”

“So?”

He paused. His eyes locked onto me, hard. “Look, Captain. You did me a favor once.”

“Yeah?”

“You probably don’t even remember. You coulda hauled my ass in and I’da done a stretch, a real one — I was over eighteen. You gave me a one-time pass.”

I had no memory of it, but if he thought he owed me, fine. “Know something, Paddy?”

He swallowed, then jumped in. “We had a bad apple in our bunch. A squealer. Turned the cops on to us four different times. The guys wanted to bump him, but that would only pull more law down on us, so the rough guys in the club figured out a cute dodge. Bucky, he wanted out from his family and he suddenly had a load of dough to lay out, so if the Uptowners could fake a kill on him and get somebody else in his place, and like really mutilate him up bad, Bucky would put his ID on the body and two birds would be killed with one beer bottle.”

“How did Bucky know about your squealer?”

“Man, word gets around, you should remember that.”

I bobbed my head in agreement. “What happened?”

“This a clean game you’re playing, Captain?”

I squinted at him.

“That was a long way back,” he said. “But there’s no time limit on murder, is there?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t in on this play. I came in right after the hit and got details from another member. I don’t remember who, either.” Something tightened his face. “Captain, there’s such a thing as accomplice after the fact, and—”

“Consider this a civilian inquiry.”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

“Okay,” he said and took a deep breath. “I don’t know who drove the car, but the deal was when Bucky came up the street the Uptowners would send a member out to identify him and bring him back to us. Our guy would walk on Bucky’s left so when the car made the move, Bucky would jump clear and the squealer would get mashed. Well, it worked. The driver went over the body four times and when he finished you couldn’t even tell it was human. Bucky took the guy’s ID, put his own in its place dropped his jacket or something down and took off.”

“No accident investigation?”

“Come on, Captain. Who cared a hoot about a street gang in those days? Just one more punk out of the way. Remember?”

“I remember, but you guys asked for that attitude.”

His eyes were steady, unblinking. “And that’s why and when I got out of that life, Captain.”

“What happened to Bucky?”

“Who knows? He was a downtowner anyway.”

Suddenly Paddy The Bull’s eyes squinted at me and I asked, “What?”

The old Blue Uptowner said very seriously, “Has he surfaced somewhere?”

“Why, he owe you money?”

“Oh, he paid his tab. He laid a grand on the club with an extra bill thrown in for five hundred. It was a crazy bill, the money itself I mean.”

“Crazy how?”

“Crazy weird, crazy odd. Looked real for sure, but was a lot bigger in size than a regular note. It was pinned to the wall in the club until some old guy offered us six hundred bucks for it and everybody had a great beer party.”

I grunted. “The government stopped printing those large bills back in the twenties, Patrick me boy.”

“No kidding!” Then he asked, “I wonder where he got it from.”

I said, “Beats me,” but a germ of an idea was infecting my brain. I told him so long and went down to the corner to flag down a cab.

When one came along I sat back and dropped another piece into the puzzle. Old Bessie was right. Bucky Mohler was alive. He had something going for him now that could make him the biggest frog in the pond.

And it all had started on the Street that was dying.

It’s nice being a retired cop.

It’s great to have a finely honed reputation too, so that when the desk boys see you go past they think, “He was a tough apple, that one.” They’re glad to let you in on their knowhow because even if it was a little off the base line, they were doing their duty to protect the citizenry like the men in blue did on the hard pavements.

Nothing much that was exciting ever happened in the development office. They okayed repairs and new building, the papers and inquiries handled between bored clerks. Then an old hotshot comes in, gets instant access to the head man’s office and the buzz starts going around.

John Peter Boyle, a grizzled character in an executive’s suit, shook hands with a toothy smile and waved me to a chair. “My phone started to ring the minute you came in, Captain.”

“Just call me Jack. I’m in civvies now.”

He gave me a grin that said he hadn’t always been behind a desk. “Come on, Captain — my pop was in World