generally ignored everything for years, including his unpaid property tax bill. By which time we could afford to buy him out at a distress sale.
Then Mimi put up the apartment house as collateral on a loan to acquire a few likewise distressed commercial spaces surrounding the courthouse, which we rented out to lawyers and bail bondsmen in order to pay our mortgage notes.
Plus, we had plenty left over for Wendy’s education, a proper storefront for Mimi’s real estate business, and a nice house on a few acres in the Catskills for summer weekends. Mimi loved the country place because of her grandfather’s stories about his farm in the old country. I thought about maybe buying a cream-colored horse but I never got around to it.
Also, we had money from not being scared so that I could switch teams and hang out a shingle as defense counsel. This was in one of Mimi’s buildings near the courthouse, so I have never had to pay rent. God bless America, as she used to say.
When you have somebody like Mimi Smart behind you, you don’t need to be too smart yourself. Or as she used to say,
Mimi taught me to pick my clients right so I wouldn’t have to worry about revenues and so I could have a little fun besides—such as when I represented a guy with carnal knowledge of chickens, which is another story. Mimi taught me something every day, until she got sick.
One Sunday morning after a long bad night, I was holding hands with Mimi again. This was in our bedroom in the country. She’d been resting up there for months, lying mostly on her side in order to see her flower garden through the window, and the pond. She was so thin. She said to me, for the last time she said anything, “We did all right, Stanley, you and me.”
Now every morning, no matter what I have going, I think about Mimi while I’m walking to the office. In my line of work, it’s good to have a pleasant thought to begin the day—as opposed to what I had to think about next.
It should impress the hell out of my Rosary Maldonado, my secretary, that Blake Lewis, big-time television producer, is supposed to drop by. Rosary watches television like most people breathe.
“Don’t say a word,” Lewis said to me last night, before he’d take an answer on his proposition. “Sleep on it. We’ll talk in the morning. I’ll be around.”
I didn’t sleep so good.
Just thinking about this guy in my office, I get itchy like I’m coming down with hives on my back. Never do I have such a feeling before talking to some wiseguy who I know from previous experience is hinky as Halloween, and if I displease him he could jump across my desk and bust my face; or some mook with one eyebrow who goes off his nut and picks up a tire iron when he finds out Sweetie-pie’s been playing hide-the-salami with his best friend.
Which is not to mention the celebrity trade of pea-brained rappers and politicians who think with their little heads.
But now here with Lewis, the territory is unfamiliar to me. The pols and the rappers are forever paying the stupid tax. The mook and the wiseguy do what they do for honor, even if their sense of what’s honorable is a little cracked. But Hollywood’s about money, so you never know what’s coming at you.
Speaking of which, half a block away my secretary is flying out the door of Katz & Katz and running up the street at me like a Puerto Rican banshee, waving her hands and hollering n Spanish. Lucky for her she gets to me, because she breaks a heel and almost goes ass-over-teakettle, but I break the fall.
“What’s—?”
“Mr. Katz,” Rosary interrupts, using the name she reserves for important occasions. Otherwise she calls me Poppy. “J’you know who come to see you?”
I take a wild guess. “Blake Lewis?”
Rosary has newfound admiration for me. She says, “J’you know hing?”
I lay a steadying arm around her shoulder and she hobbles back to the office with me.
It’s not just Lewis who’s there. It’s the steak-eaters and a contingent of polyester suits. Also Slattery.
“Consigliere!” Lewis says as I walk in. Slattery writes this down in his notebook.
I cock my head and say, “Let’s go,” and the steak-eaters and Slattery follow me into my private office. Rosary, who is flush in the face, stays outside with the polyester.
“What the—?”
Nutsy Nunzio cuts me off from dropping the f-bomb. “Jeez, Stanley,” he says. Clear from the other side of my desk I smell the breath. Like a doggy bag you bring home in a taxi. “You think it’s okay we do this TV job?”
Nutsy is wide-eyed like an innocent kid. Though knowing of his problems with anger management, it is hard for me to imagine Nutsy ever being a squirt. The Orphan Annie expression also goes for Pete the Pipe and Charlie the Pencil Man.
Lewis is sitting there like the cat that ate the canary. Today he’s in one of those outfits like the TV hair helmets wear in war zones: blue denim shirt, safari jacket, starched dungarees.
I ask him, “What did you tell my clients?”
He shrugs. “I hung around the Palomino after you left. I met some people. I gave them the elevator pitch.” He turns to Slattery and explains, “That’s when you have to put across your big idea to a studio exec before the elevator gets to where he’s going.”
Nutsy and Charlie nod as the Pipe passes judgment: “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Pete does not get his moniker from smoking a meerschaum. It’s from rumors when he started off his career and was seen around leaky gas valves that caused industrial accidents around the city. Nowadays he considers himself a good citizen for being involved in the political life of his country. Meaning he takes bets on elections, sometimes doing things to improve the odds in his favor.
